For Kolkata, football is fatafati – Condé Nast Traveller India

The World Cup, like Durga Puja, is now basically a part of the cultural calendar of a city that loves to festival-ize everything. And with each World Cup more players are getting into that game. In 2014, Nalin Chandra Das and Sons, an old sweetshop came up with World Cup mithai—Spanish tiki-taka, Brazilian samba, Argentine defense, mostly gooey marriages of convenience between Bengali sandesh and Cadbury’s milk chocolate with a sprinkling of cashew and butterscotch bits. In 2018, Kolkata saw Ronaldo and Messi sandesh alongside a life-size World Cup trophy made out of kheer.

Koshe Kosha, a local restaurant chain famous for its mutton dishes, had a special football menu. Nimble as Neymar was grilled chicken marinated in Gondhoraj lime and rolled into a ball. Rendezvous with Rooney took English fish and chips and spiced it up with jeera-dhania-pudina. Chiraag Paul who owns Koshe Kosha says this year will be no exception. “We will have dishes revolving around the teams or particular players. But with a Bengali flavour. So we will make croissants in house to represent the French national team. But we’ll stuff it with keema (minced meat) the way you make it in a Bengali home.”

Paul himself started out at the football academy for East Bengal and played in Brazil and England before a knee and ankle injury cut his sporting career short but he enjoys devising his football menu. “Like Neymar can do things with a ball that others can’t. So a dish representing Neymar has to reflect his flamboyance. So if you do a kosha mangsho (braised mutton) for Neymar, its colour has to be different, the spices have to be different. It can’t be a normal kosha mangsho.”

This is a city that loves its food and its football. In his book Nation At Play, Ronojoy Sen writes that nearly 100,000 people showed up for that famous 1911 IFA Shield final in Kolkata. Tickets that were originally Re1 and Rs2 were selling for Rs15. Most of the people could not enter the field itself. So volunteers flew kites with the club colours every time one team scored a goal. The Standard Cycle Company distributed halftone photographs of the team in the newspaper. But after the dust had settled the offers of jobs and money by companies like Martin Burn were mostly forgotten.

Nevertheless, the love for the game persists in the most unlikely places. And every World Cup means yet another quirky Kolkata football story. The evergreen winners are Pannalal Chatterjee, a Kolkata Port Trust employee and his wife Chaitali who saved up their money to go to every World Cup since Spain in 1982. Even Pele had come to recognise them. After 10 World Cups, Pannalal passed away in 2019 at the age of 86. His wife still talks about watching Maradona’s famous “Hand of God” goal live.