I’ve been wandering around unfamiliar bits of Kolkata lately. To attend a friend’s wedding, to buy a couple of knicknacks, to meet old relatives. There are really long, seemingly unending, tedious periods when I barely leave my house in Delhi— on occasions when I do it’s mostly after more than 4-5 days and I almost always have an out of body experience as soon as I step into the ether of the outdoors — then it’s almost as if the camera zooms out, pans and I find myself in another city in a separate geography altogether. Suddenly navigating a dense network of lanes in Kolkata’s Garia, I am sucked down into these narrow, dazzling, vibrant by-lanes and pop up at this house or that shop. It certainly feels like some kind of a magician’s trick.

I arrive in Cal, settle in at my in-law’s place and wake up in the morning bewildered, a strange unease as the Eastern sun hits hot and sizzling on my half-open eyes. I pull open the window curtains, step out of the room and into the tiny balcony — oh right, I remind myself, I arrived here last night — I’m in Garia, the sky is a different more natural shade here a blue that we’ve forgotten to know in Delhi. Immediately my mind rushes back to this time yesterday I was cosseted in my sofa at home in Delhi’s CR Park, trawling aimlessly through either LinkedIn or Twitter. Here I am now, in the city where M grew up, became an amalgam of his past and future, and where I’ve come to find a family of my own over these years.

One of the things I love about Cal is how perennially roaring it is here — the way the city is so boisterous, screeching from its insides, the horns blaring, the cars trundling, the buses gurgling, the dogs and cats taking turns to bark and cry, the cycle rickshaw pullers yelling, the city seems to have embraced it’s own giddiness and cacophony. Kolkata draping around it the smell of rohu-fry, the deep deliciousness of kosha mangsho, the metallurgy of the Howrah Bridge always hanging in the air like a ghost from an ancient time. The foulness of the bidi smoke catches you at the turn of the corner, almost every corner. Men gathered in little huddles in roadside shops, engaged in aimless but intense chatter at any time of the day or night in Addas, accentuate the languor the city is famed for.