After seventeen years and almost half my life away in New York, I've done something most Indians of my generation don't do--return back home. When people ask me where I'm from, I always stumble. I say, I was born in Calcutta but I grew up in New York. When you are young, your awareness of the larger city is limited. I have to admit, I know New York much more intimately than I feel I know Calcutta.
Calcutta is like an aging beauty--decaying and crumbling. It saddens me to return to a city which was once one of the most important in the country. Now, she would not even place in the top ten.
But she has a soul, Calcutta does. In a way that many other cities don't. There is a melancholy that hangs over the her. An indescribable sadness, not unlike the sadness Orhan Pamuk writes of in 'Istanbul'. The sadness of a forgotten city. An
