‘Then I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar. I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket.’
-- Araby (Dubliners [1914], James Joyce)
Standing in the middle of the hoi polloi at one of Kolkata’s most talked-about venues for the annual autumnal carnival called Durga Pujo, earlier this month, I felt no less crest-fallen than that adolescent boy in James Joyce’s timeless short story Araby, whose visit to the bazaar in his quest to procure a suitable keeps-sake for ‘Mangan’s sister’ – the girl he was infatuated with – ended in a complete washout of sorts as the fabled market neither lived up to the boy’s imagination of a never-land nor did it help fire-up his passion any further for a girl who had long ceased to be an object of desire and transformed into something ethereal.
As I was about to hop on to a late-night flight from Dubai to Kolkata – the place of my birth and where I spent the best days of my adolescence and early adulthood – I was all too excited to be at THE place for the Pujo. ‘Kolkata, here I come’ was the caption for the photo I tweeted just minutes before the Boeing 777’s seatbelt sign went on. Days later, standing right in the heart of Maddox Square in the southern part of the city, I was left wondering: ‘Whither Kolkata?’
From ‘Kolkata here I come’, to ‘Whither Kolkata’ was one Joyce-ish plunge into an Araby-like prolegomena: Adolescent love’s labour lost or so I thought.
Talking of adolescence, infatuation, unrequited love or a simple style-quotient, yours truly was fortunate enough to have grown up in a city in the 1980s and 1990s when it had something unmistakably iconic about its cacophony, despondence, squalor and chaos …:
There was no dearth of lived experiences, there was no fear of failure, there was no need to see life necessarily in terms of all its cut-and-dried vital parameters, there was no urge to measure ‘success’ and ‘happiness’ in terms of material possessions … and there was no need for IPL either, to successfully ‘marry’ India’s favourite sport with the entertainment super highway called ‘Bollywood’.
Aspirational
Those open terraces at the Maidan’s three fabled clubs – East Bengal, Mohun Bagan and Mohammedan Sporting – were cultural and iconoclastic hotspots that could beat any of today’s chic coffee shops and shopping malls hands down in terms of their sheer spirit to soak up the rain and sun and have little to regret about the many unfulfilled desires of life.
True, the Hindi film industry had always had something extremely aspirational about it.
But scarcely ever did a big-banner Bengali Pujo-release have to jostle for screen space with a Bollywood hit, as Gumnaami – a film based on the mysterious disappearance of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose – had to this time around with Bollywood flick War.
The irony is certainly not lost on the fact that for a city that would once swear by the embroidered artwork on the milk-white, pure-cotton finery graced by matinee idols Uttam Kumar or Soumitra Chatterjee, to have now made a beeline for the ‘latest-latest’ from the ‘brand’ houses is perhaps one of the surest signs of a globalised urge to be in tune with the rest swallowing Kolkata.
Ok, let’s be a little less politically correct here and say that it’s a globalised urge for ‘sameness’ that has gripped Dominique Lapierre’s City of Joy.
Brands thrive, icons perish.
We all love to ‘order’ our favourite pizza or biryani from that app on the phone – the corner guy selling simple tidbits is so ‘yesterday’. We all prefer an app cab to commute in a city where the tramcar would be one of the best ways to ensure a ‘green’ travel long before global warming emerged as a threat to civilisation. And we all love to have an address in one of those many gated communities in and around the city with its ‘own’ gymnasium, club and swimming pool.
Convenience
It’s a matter of convenience, you see, so cut this sentimental obsession with all things past and old, I tell myself, trying to play the devil’s advocate.
Point granted. But the net result? Here we go.
I ask a group of young men just outside one of the gates to Maddox Square: “Bro, any idea where Caffe Coffe Day is?” Pat comes the reply: “Not too sure, but let me Google it for you.” Out comes a chunk of black plastic from the pocket … “No thanks, I can Google it myself,” I tell him politely and keep walking. Barely 50 metres ahead I see the glowing lights of CCD on my left!
Coming back to ‘adolescence’, ‘infatuation’, ‘unrequited love’ … and Maddox Square.
Back in the 1980s and until the late 1990s, Maddox Square used to be one Pujo venue that would bring the city’s ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ under one carnivalesque umbrella like no other.
Pujo venue
You ‘aspired’ to be in the shoes of that gentleman in his early 20s who would come to the Pujo pandal lockstep with his female companion whose first-time wearer’s tryst with nine yards of silk or chiffon was all too palpable, though not her trust in a homegrown style statement.
For those young females who had just managed to earn a gate-pass of sorts from home for a Pujo late-night, that Boudi (common Bangla parlance for elder brother’s wife) in a Kanjeevaram or Dhakai Jaamdani would be the markup for the coming wedding season and beyond.
Conjugal bliss
It’s another story that the same Boudi to the younger men-folk would be the embodiment of conjugal bliss and pure passion all rolled into one – something of a benchmark for shortlisting those matrimony ads in the Sunday editions! They say the legend of Durga is pure imagination. If that is true, then Maddox Square will surely rank as the earthy equivalent of a dream-merchant’s paint booth.
But ‘Whither Maddox Square?’ I ask myself as my wife and I wade our way through a charming, colourful crowd of millennials whose attention to the pandal’s artwork and the idol are in short supply, though not their attention to their own facial details as they try to get that ‘selfie’ right for the umpteenth time.
I still don’t lose hope of coming across that proverbial ‘Maddox Square Boudi’ at some point. But the spoiler comes from my friend Rukmini, now a Mumbai resident who too, like me, had come to the city to soak up the Pujo fun.
“Here, neither are the Boudis anywhere to be seen nor does anyone seem to be really interested in spotting one,” said Rukmini with a grin.
Like the ‘boy’ in Joyce’s Araby, I could feel the ‘two pennies fall against the six pence in my pocket’ – standing right in the middle of Maddox Square. Worse still, I didn’t have a ‘Mangan’s sister’ to infatuate about.
Sanjib Kumar Das on Twitter: @moumiayush; Instagram: @sanjibshares
