A Tale of Two Cities

I learnt that it didn’t matter if you were female, too young, too inexperienced — as long as you worked. And so I returned to Calcutta to shoot.

The difference between the two cities began coming home to me from the minute I stepped out onto a Calcutta road. Suddenly I realized that I was being touched — this crowd didn’t sidestep. Locked into a rush hour crowd at Churchgate, you still have your own little inviolate two inch space that encircles you. The Calcutta crowd does the encircling after you slap some too avid toucher across the face.

The cabbies look at you uncomprehending. No one has had the temerity to demand a fare card in living memory.

The power no longer goes off, but the phones still don’t work.

The cop smiles understandingly – Bombay theke aisho?’ You admit you’ve come from Bombay — and sadly tell yourself that Calcutta isn’t what you remembered it to be.

The Calcuttan crew arrives an hour late for the shift and the first thing they want to know is — what’s for lunch? When fish doesn’t appear on the menu there are dark rumblings. I found that none of the crew would look me in the eye while taking directions — neither would they take the directions. I couldn’t figure it out until the cameraman coughed politely and pointed out that I was a woman.

For the sake of getting things moving I routed all my directions through my cameraman who relayed them in masculine Bengali. At lunchtime the crew disappeared. After much hunting in dark corners of the crumbling studio, I found a solitary light boy curled up on some satin cloth. He opened one eye in response to my pleading to inform me that siesta was part of the union rules. Nashta break lasted an hour and a half. I called ‘Pack up!’ in a weak voice. That direction they took with alacrity from a woman.

An aspiring actor took me aside to tell me that he was only doing this to survive. He was working on a thesis on Communism in Bengal and hoped one day to call himself Doctor’. I didn’t dare tell him that in Bombay the doctors are hoping one day to be actors.

Only in Calcutta is there all the time in the world for tea and singharas and discussion at the addas. Only in Bombay does the cabbie pour over the share prices in the paper.

Only in Calcutta does the Metro station play Rabindrasangeet and display art. Only in Bombay is there ninety two percent attendance in offices the day after the Bomb Blasts.

Only in Calcutta does the salesman at the Cottage Industry Emporium quote poetry to you while he wraps your purchases. Only here do people have time enough to ask about your life, your friends, your relatives, and their cousin seven times removed who left for Bombay seven years ago.

The two cities dream different dreams. Calcutta is lost in a misty haze that weaves itself around Nobel laureates, Satyajit Ray, and the belief that one day the world will acknowledge it as the ultimate intellectual capital.

Bombay dreams in 70mm, of stars and rags-to-riches stories. Of acknowledgement that is not lost in the misty hereafter but is real and now — and expressed in cash.

And somewhere between the two lie my dreams. If Bombay was the best birthday present I ever had, then Calcutta was the best childhood that I could have ever had. If one part of me is mover and shaker, then the other part is dreamer. The teller of the tale belongs to two cities.

For my millenium birthday I’m wishing for a new city. How do you think New York will look through Bombay eyes?

Venita Coelho is a television scriptwriter