Back where I once belonged...

Nostalgia tastes rather sweet on a trip back to my old home town

Nearly three years ago now, I wrote a column on how folks like me who can't go back home -- because that home is now long since gone -- are destined to re-create it in their imagination, populate it with their memories and make it the stuff of their dreams. I had confessed my dread of revisiting past haunts for fear that they would have changed beyond recognition; my terror of subjecting my memories to the harsh test of an ever-changing reality.

Which explains why I have stayed away from the stomping grounds of my childhood and youth, choosing to remember them they way they were, rather than come to terms with how they are now. Until last month, that is...

That's when I went back to Calcutta, or Cal as it is always affectionately abbreviated by those who love the city (sorry, but I am only going to call it Kolkata when I speak Bangla), after nearly a decade of staying resolutely away.

But the moment I landed at Netaji Subhas Chandra Airport, it felt as if I had never been away. There was the same air of nonchalant chaos, the same good-natured jostling, and the noise of a hundred-odd people bellowing into their phones to call their drivers ("Kothai achho? Ato deri lagche kano?").

Our own driver, sent by the literary festival that was hosting us, took his time coming. When he finally pulled up, he gave our luggage a disgusted look and muttered, "Baba, koto bhari bag!"  The two young people who were there to receive us went a bit red in the face, and helped with the luggage, while he continued to grumble discontentedly. Oh, the joys of being back in Cal!

Only it wasn't the Cal I knew and loved that whizzed past my rolled-up window. Instead of the sleepy road bordered by little huts and corner shops, there was a busy, bustling highway, flanked on both sides by glittering high rises that housed everything from malls to cinemas to hotels to up-market residences. If I didn't know better, I could have sworn I was in Gurgaon; there was even signage for DLF, for crying out loud.

Talking about loud, our extremely disagreeable driver was venting his frustration about being stuck at a red light by honking incessantly. "What is the point of using the horn?" I wondered aloud, "It won't make the lights change, will it?" His response was immediate and pithy. He rolled down his window and spat vigorously through it. Ah, that famous Bengali temper. How I had missed it!

It was sheer serendipity that our hotel was just a quick stroll away from my old college. So, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to walk down to revisit it between sessions. A million memories ran through my head as I made my way down Middleton Row and saw the familiar green gate of Loreto College before me.

I made my way down the curved driveway, entered through the side gate and went up to the first floor library that had been my sanctuary for three years. It looked a bit smaller than I remembered it, and my favourite desk which I had stockpiled with books, now had an ugly computer sitting on it, but the smell of books was just as intoxicating.

A few deep breaths later, I walked down the staircase and got the biggest surprise ever. There on a big black board were the names of all the gold medal winners over the years. And half-way down the list was mine: glittering in gold letters. My husband, who was even more excited than I was, insisting on taking many pictures, even as groups of bemused college students walked past us.

By then, I was quite sold on this nostalgia thing. So, we walked across the lawn and through the back gate to get to Jyoti Vihar, the venue of many a cheap and tasty lunch during my college days. The idlis, vadas and dosas were just as excellent as I remembered and even passed the test of the foodie husband.

All went swimmingly until we asked for paper napkins. No, said our smiling waiter, they did not provide any. We pointed to the next table, which had paper napkins. Ah, he said, they had brought in their own. Then, clearly taking pity on us, he walked across to the cashier's desk, tore off a bit of newspaper and presented it to us with a flourish. The gesture just about summed up the spirit of Cal for me.

The next day was devoted to revisiting familiar ground. The Bata store on Chowringhee where I had bought my school shoes at the beginning of every new academic year was still stationed to do duty by the next generation of students. The National Museum looked better than ever with a fresh lick of whitewash. And then there was the timeless beauty of Victoria Memorial, soaring majestically at the fringes of the Maidan.

Post-dinner, we decided that a spot of live music was in order. So, off we went to Someplace Else, to sit and wait for the band to show up. Finally a group of middle-aged hipster-types turned up and began playing blues standards from the 50s (circa Muddy Waters). A couple of youngsters in the front asked for a Beatles number. "Sorry," said the band leader, sounding anything but repentant. "We are stuck in a time warp here."

Which is, in the nicest possible way, also a good way to describe Calcutta itself. And long may it stay that way.

That Madeleine moment

We all have food memories that take us effortlessly back to the past

I don’t know about you, but I rather relish the prospect of room service breakfast at a posh hotel. There is something so glamorous about being served on a starched, white table-cloth with a red rose standing stiffly to attention on the side, while a gloved waiter pours you a nice cup of coffee. And what could be more decadent than having someone squeeze a glass of fresh orange juice and cook a nice French toast for you (note to self: must get out more!) first thing in the morning?

Though I usually go for the more sinful options when it comes to hotel breakfasts – bring on the pancakes, the waffles and the parathas – last Sunday I decided to go for the (relatively) healthy option and ordered akuri. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, this is basically Indian-style scrambled eggs seasoned with lots of onion, ginger, tomato, and green chillies, and liberally garnished with coriander. It is usually served with toast but on this occasion the chef sent it with a Bombay-style pau (the kind that makes up one half of pao bhaji).

I stuffed a generous dollop of the eggs between two halves of the pao and popped a generous mouthful in. As the buttery eggs coated my tongue and the ginger and chilli hit the back of my throat, I was instantly transported back in time. With just one bite, I was taken back to my days as a callow, young sub-editor on her first job, who kept herself fortified for the long nights of page-making with a double-roti and omelette sandwich in the ABP canteen in Calcutta.  

And even though the akuri was perfect – just on the right side of runny, creamy and unctuous, at that moment I would have killed for the sandwich of my misbegotten youth, oily junk food though it might have been.

Now, I don’t want to get all Proust – remember his Madeleine? He certainly did – on you on a Sunday morning, but it is strange isn’t it, how some kinds of food suddenly evoke a memory so strong that you find yourself going back in time? Which bring on such a craving that you can’t think of anything other than their taste, their smell, and how you can best replicate them?

Like most people, my food memories are rooted in my childhood. I still remember the taste of those tiny, pink berries that I would tear off the tree in the back garden, having slipped away to investigate the vegetation as my mother undertook her afternoon siesta. If I close my eyes and think back, I can still taste the shingara (that’s samosa to all you non-Calcuttans) and jalebi that used to be my holiday breakfast as a child. The coconut-jaggery prasad that used to be served on Janmashtami has assumed near mythic status in my mind. And nothing tasted quite as good as the churmur chaat that we used to eat during the break in school, with the chaatwallah slipping it under the school-gate like the contraband it was (having been outlawed by the nuns, like everything else that made life worth living).

As you can tell, most of my food nostalgia is Calcutta-related: the puchchkas in front of New Market; the jhaal-muri outside Loreto College; the dosas of Jyoti Vihar; the junk Chinese served up in Chung-Wah, the official canteen of all ABP employees back in the day; the biryani of Shiraz; the rolls of Nizam.  

As they say, you can take the girl out of Calcutta; but you can’t take the taste of Calcutta out of the girl. (And please don’t send me irate letters about how it is now Kolkata; it will always be Cal to me.)

But even if you discount my food memories of Calcutta, there is still a vast swathe of things that I feel nostalgic about.  The home-made idlis that a former colleague would bring to work (paired with the most divine gunpowder and green chutney); the chilli con carne I once had in a Washington restaurant;  the pad Thai served up at a roadside stall in Bangkok.

There is certain pattern to food nostalgia. Britons living abroad often long for a taste of Marmite as a reminder of home. Americans express a craving for steak or the barbeque sauce of their childhood. Italians long for sun-dried tomatoes and a good olive oil. And the French turn up their noses at any cheese that doesn’t stink like the ones they grew up on.

Ask any random sampling of Indians living abroad what they are most nostalgic about and the phrase ‘dal-chawal’ will drip off most tongues. And I can totally relate because when I come back to India after a vacation abroad, the first thing I want to eat is dal-chawl with a nice spicy pickle and lots of roasted papad and lashings of raw onion.

Within India, food nostalgia can be rather region-centric. Rare is the Punjabi who isn’t nostalgic about the kadhi-chawal or rajma-chawal or aloo-vadi that his mother or grandmother made. Bengalis tend to wax eloquent about their fish curries or shukto. Gujaratis bang on about the fluffy dhoklas and the perfect theplas that their Maharajs turned out in their ancestral homes.

As for me, I still fantasize about the double-roti omelette, the shingara-jalebi, and the puchchkas of my youth. And I often wonder if they would taste just as great in real life as they do in my dreams. Or whether remembrance has given them a flavour that they never possessed in reality.

The Dress Code

It really doesn’t matter what you wear; you can be a feminist in both a sari and a skirt

Women and clothes. It really doesn’t get more complicated than that. There’s conflicting advice coming from every corner. Everyone has an opinion on what you should or should not wear (and where you should or should not wear it). There are people who seem to believe that your choice of outfit has a direct connection with your personal safety. But no matter how much care you take to dress every morning – or evening – you can rest assured that there will always be someone out there who believes that in those clothes, you are simply asking for it.

As for me, all through my life, I have tended to take the path of least resistance when it came to clothes. Growing up in Calcutta, where I went to a school and college run by nuns, there was a certain assumption that ‘good girls’ always dressed conservatively. And quite frankly, I never had a problem with that. I wore salwar kameezes and churidar kurtas routinely and felt incredibly grown-up whenever I wore a sari on special occasions.

Looking back, I often wonder why more of us Loreto girls didn’t rebel against the unspoken dress code that even outlawed something as tame as pedal-pushers (if you have no idea what these are, consider yourself lucky). My guess is that it was mostly because we never really paid that much attention to what we wore. We didn’t see clothes as a means to making some sort of political statement. And I most certainly didn’t think that they defined who I was in any manner.

Clothes definitely did not make this woman, I would have said if I had given any thought to the matter. But quite honestly, I never did. I had more important things to think about (like when I would finally get through the interminable James Joyce opus; and why I could never keep all the characters in War and Peace straight in my head).

After college, I began working at the ABP group, which – in those days at least – was a bastion of orthodoxy. All the women wore saris to work (only one lady with a particularly racy reputation would wear tight kurtas with trousers, which was regarded as the height of daring) and I duly took my cue from them before relaxing into the odd salwar-kameez and finally graduating to that old journo standby, blue jeans.

However I may have dressed on my time off, at work I always veered towards the line of sartorial safety. I would no more have worn jeans and a T-shirt to cover an election rally in a rural area than I would have worn a bikini to an official banquet at Rashtrapati Bhavan. The idea was always to blend in, to seem non-threatening. If I was going to be the proverbial fly on the wall, then I had to be a cipher, nondescript enough to disappear into the background. I couldn’t be that girl in a Bermuda shorts, who thought she was striking a blow against patriarchy by showing off her legs.

But then, these are choices that most women of my generation made, because we wanted to be taken seriously – and we had bigger battles to fight. So, we wanted attention to be focussed on our brains rather than our bodies. And we wanted the conversation to be about our talent and professional abilities rather than our clothes.

I guess we’ve come a long way from that (er, baby, as the sexist Sixties line would have it). And in a way it is comforting that we now take enough of our freedoms for granted to finally be able to have that conversation about clothes. At some level, I suppose it must be seen as a sign of progress that women are all charged up to fight for their right to wear a mini-skirt and not be leered at.

But speaking for myself, I still find the idea of a Slut Walk risible in the Indian context, when women in rural areas who are wrapped up in six yards of fabric get sexually molested, assaulted and raped every day. And call me sexist if you will, but I find it hard to sympathise when women complain of being leered at after putting their breasts out on display in their latest push-up bras. Hell, there are times when even I gawp in horrified fascination at those acres of cleavage on display, so I’m not one to point fingers.

When it comes to clothes, though, I think the common-sense argument is the most compelling one. Of course, you can wear what you like. Of course, you can go where you like while you’re wearing it. And of course, nobody has the right to molest or rape you because of the way you’re dressed. But there is such a thing as ‘appropriate dressing’, and we would be fools to deny it just to sound politically correct. For instance, I still wouldn’t wear a short skirt to a political press conference. And I certainly wouldn’t wear a skimpy top while reporting from a rural area.

At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that clothes are really not that important. Because what you wear is not who you are. So, let’s not make the mistake of believing that our identity is wrapped up in our clothes. It is possible to be a feminist in a sari as well as a skirt – and we should never forget that.