I live in two homes now. Both in Kolkata. One is by the river. And one is the house where I grew up. The latter is the permanent address that I pencilled into documents, while free spinning through other cities, hoping that someday, I would return.
Two years ago, when the lockdown began, trapped in my closet-sized apartment in Mumbai, I had wished for hope, open skies and love. I found them in measures big and small in Kolkata.
It is April 2022. I look out from the balcony of my riverside house and watch a barge passing by, sounding a desultory horn. Little motorized fishing boats bob wildly in its wake, reminding me of the paper boats my mother and I would float on our flooded driveway during the monsoon. They usually survived a minute or two before falling apart. These fishing boats seem more resilient. The kalboishakhi Nor’wester gathers over the city skyline—the cantilevered Howrah Bridge, the sleek Vidyasagar Setu, the stately dome of the Victoria Memorial, the dilapidated mansions, gleaming skyscrapers and the Hooghly river. The skies are pregnant with rain, but today it fails to come.
The pandemic passed as I watched this river’s ebb and flow, like all the men and women who once lived here.
I have left Kolkata several times. At 18, I couldn’t wait to get away. At 26, I hated to leave. At 38, I returned, a stranger. At 40, after the upheavals wrought by a global pandemic, I settled down here. This journey back home has taken four decades. Through it, Kolkata emerged from the pre-liberalization era of Charminar cigarettes, Satyajit Ray cinema and a frugal Soviet aesthetic to a new age of cable television, foreign investments and malls. In between my comings and goings, Kolkata became a place of both love and loss.
Source: https://www.cntraveller.in/story/kolkata-west-bengal-howrah-bridge-hooghly-love-and-travel/