Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

'There go the Biharis, off to throw their bananas in the Hooghly,' said Mr Chatterjee, from the chair car. A Bengali, Mr Chatterjee wasn't sure of the purpose of the Chhat festival, but thought it might have something to do with the harvest. I said I didn't think the Calcutta harvest would be very large. He agreed, but said the Biharis enjoyed their annual chance to snarl Bengali traffic. At the head of every procession a black grinning

boy, dressed as a girl, made the jerky movements of a dancer with his wrists and leaped in the air, his genitals whipping about in his crimson sari. From time to time, the young girls (who might have been boys) behind him dropped to the ground and prostrated themselves in the garbage-strewn streets.

The holy mob, the stink of sanctity, the legitimate noise: everything in Indian life seemed to sanction excess, and even politics had the puja flavour. While these religious festivals were going their bellowing way, the Socialist Unity Centre was organizing a bundh – a total work stoppage – and their preliminary rallies on the maidan with their flags and posters, processions and speeches, were practically indistinguishable from the displays of mass piety on Chowringhee's sidewalks and at the sloshing ghats. This aspect of Calcutta is the first that meets the traveller's eye, but the one that stays longest in the mind; it is an atmosphere of organized disturbance, everyone occupied in carrying out some programme or other, so much so that those stricken thousands one sees uniformly – uniformly, because space is scarce – lying or sitting on the sidewalk have the look of nonviolent protesters having a long afternoon of dedicated satyagraha ('clinging to truth'). I imagined another group in an ambiguous posture when I read, in a Calcutta newspaper, 'The leftist leaders also decided to resort to mass squatting…'

From the outside, Howrah Station looks like a secretariat, with its not quite square towers and many clocks – each showing a different time – and its impenetrable brickwork. The British buildings in India look as if they have been designed to withstand a siege – there are hornworks and cannon emplacements and watchtowers on the unlikeliest structures. So Howrah Station looked like a fortified version of a mammoth circumlocution office, an impression that buying a ticket there only confirms. But inside it is high and smoky from the fires of the people who occupy it; the ceiling is black, the floor is wet and filthy, and it is dark – the long shafts of sun streaming from the topmost windows lose their light in dust on the way down.

'It's much better than it was,' said Mr Chatterjee, seeing me craning my neck. 'You should have seen it before they cleaned it up.'

His remark was unanswerable. Yet at every pillar squatters huddled amid the rubbish they had created: broken glass, bits of wood and paper, straw, and tin cans. Some infants slept against their parents; others were curled up like changelings in dusty corners. Families sought refuge beside pillars, under counters and luggage carts: the hugeness of the station intimidated them with space and drove them to the walls. Their children prowled in the open spaces, combining their scavenging with play. They are the tiny children of tiny parents, and it's amazing how, in India, it is possible to see two kinds of people in the process of evolution, side by side, one fairly tall, quick, and responsive, the other, whose evolution is reduction, small, stricken, and cringing. They are two races whose common ground is the railway station, and though they come quite close (an urchin lies on his back near the ticket window watching the legs of the people in line) they do not meet.

I walked outside, into the midday chaos at the western end of the Howrah Bridge. In Simla, rickshaws were retained for their quaintness: people posed in them. In Calcutta, rickshaws, pulled by skinny running men in tattered clothes, are a necessary form of transport, cheap, and easy to steer in narrow back lanes. They are a crude symbol of Indian society, but in India all symbols are crude: the homeless people sleeping in the doorway of the mansion, the commuter running to his train accidentally trampling a station sleeper, the thin rickshaw-wallah hauhng his plump passengers. Ponies harnessed to stagecoaches laboured over cobblestones; men pushed bicycles loaded with hay bales and firewood. I had never seen so many different forms of transport: wagons, scooters, old cars, carts and sledges, and odd, old-fashioned horse-drawn vehicles that might have been barouches. In one cart, their white flippers limp, dead sea turtles were stacked, on another cart was a dead buffalo, and in a third an entire family with their belongings – children, parrot cage, pots and pans. All these vehicles, and people surging among them. Then there was panic, and the people scattered as a tottering tram car marked tolly-gunge swayed down the bridge. Mr Chatterjee said, 'Too much of people!'

Mr Chatterjee walked across the bridge with me. He was a Bengali, and Bengalis were the most alert people I had met in India. But they were also irritable, talkative, dogmatic, arrogant, and humourless, holding forth with malicious skill on virtually every subject except the future of Calcutta. Any mention of that brought them up short. But Mr Chatterjee had views. He had been reading an article about Calcutta's prospects. Calcutta had been very unlucky: Chicago had had a great fire, San Francisco an earthquake, and London a plague as well as a fire. But nothing had happened to Calcutta to give planners a chance to redesign it. You had to admit, he said, it had vitality. The problem of pavement dwellers (he put the figure at a quarter of a million) had been 'somewhat over-dramatized', and when you considered that these pavement dwellers were almost exclusively engaged in ragpicking you could see how Calcutta's garbage was 'most intensively recycled'. It seemed an unusual choice of words, and it strayed close to claptrap: vitality in a place where people lay dead in the gutter ('But everyone dies eventually,' said Mr C), the overdramatized quarter of a million, the recycling ragpickers. We passed a man who leaned at us and put his hand out. He was a monster. Half his face was missing; it looked as if it had been clumsily guillotined – he had no nose, no lips, no chin, and clamped in his teeth, which were perpetually exposed, was the bruised plug of his tongue. Mr Chatter-jee saw my shock. 'Oh, him). He is always here!'

Before he left me at the Barabazar, Mr Chatterjee said, 'I love this city.' We exchanged addresses and we parted, I to a hotel, Mr Chatterjee to Strand Road, where the Hooghly was silting up so badly, soon all that would float on it would be the ashes of cremated Bengalis.

I stayed in Calcutta for four days, giving lectures, seeing the sights, and losing my lecture fees at the Royal Calcutta Turf Club on the Saturday I decided to leave. On the first day the city seemed like a corpse on which the Indians were feeding like flies; then I saw its features more clearly, the obelisks and pyramids in Park Street Cemetery, the decayed mansions with friezes and columns, and the fountains in the courtyards of these places: nymphs and sprites blowing on dry conches, who, like the people living under them in gunny sacks, are missing legs and arms; the gong of trams at night; and the flaring lamps lighting the wild cows pushing their snouts into rubbish piles, vying with the scrabbling Indians for something edible. The high mock-Moghul tenements

hustled it, and crushed it, and stuck brick-and-mortar elbows into it, and kept the air from it, and stood perpetually between it and the light…

You groped your way for an hour through lanes and bye-ways, and court-yards and passages; and you never once emerged upon anything that might be reasonably called a street. A kind of resigned distraction came over the stranger as he trod those devious mazes, and, giving himself up for lost, went in and out and round about and quietly turned back again when he came to a dead wall or was stopped by an iron railing, and felt that the means of escape might possibly present themselves in their own good time, but to anticipate them was hopeless…