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Kolkata on its own already possesses an overwhelming mixture
of smells, experiences: its air clings onto your skin, weighing
you down with its unknown contents. A Kolkata night market
offers you the city at its saturation point, in even greater
concentrations than you thought yourself prepared. As the
untrained visitor becomes exposed to it, a concentration of
kinetic energy abounds - appearing to him as a
rapid motion flitting around his head, through his ears, out
of his nose.
As with the famed warrior mosquitoes of India, one never
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hopes to detect or kill them, even
knowing their rough coordinates. Much in the same way the
constant buzz, activity, jarring sounds, Bengali music, tactile
sensations, charge forth simultaneously and leave one incapacitated
against their assault.
Banners spell out in clear letters:
SALE. Pots, pans and kitchenware can be yours cheap. Trinkets
and other ornaments, ornately designed salwar-kameez, intricate
shawls. Entire corners are devoted to posters of movie and
cricket stars. Pushcarts are doling out delicious chaat, served
with potato, tamarind, and a mind-boggling array of sauces
we’re too ignorant to identify. The rides are crudely
placed with barricades and booths, with little regard for
the pedestrian’s navigational safety.
Some teenagers gather around my camera just as I take it out,
posing for me before I take off its cover.
A killer ferris wheel flings its contents – its Singaporean
visitors and their hosts – with a vengeance, dipping,
rising, at astonishing speed. I’m up there, keeping the
generators in sight, and in mind. Lee’s seat breaks in
mid-air, but he coolly grips its edges, continuing to take
photographs of ussuspended in fear.
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Like the rest of us, he’s learned to lose his capacity
to panic, in order to survive, and make sense of this deliciously
maddening city.
I stand in awe of the spectacle, not quite clear why. Every
moment is a sight, a smell, and a sense to behold. Kolkata has
never been this brightly lit, needing so much in terms of street
lightning (among other basic amenities), but the night market
seems to feed off its own fuel, emit its own heat; we could
only be there to feel its pulse but fail miserably at even that.
The tents look capable only of collapse, of smothering the life
it sustains beneath it. Yet as with most dilapidated things
(which is to say, everything) here, it lives on propped up by
the life which sustains and churns underneath it, with some
luck and gutsy fighting spirit from those who live off it, surviving
much better than is expected.
Much like this city, whose pulse dips and rises on its own pace,
on its own inexplicable logic. Though it threatens to crumble
into the dust at any moment – the city just manages to
survive on its own terms, feeding the mouths it sustains as
it weans off them, sustaining them while suckling the sustenance
from its plucky inhabitants. |
