Calcutta Quotes

“Secrets,’ she replied, casting my trousers aside, ‘are difficult things. Not precise. Not always the same for the one who tells as for the one who receives. They make demands. They may cause you to ask yourself, “Am I worthy?”’ At which, as if to illustrate the point, she removed her bra and watched me follow the lines of her magnificent form with my eyes.”
― Michael Tobert, Karna's Wheel

“The coolies pull them across Howrah bridge, which they share with cars, trucks, bullock carts, a party of young women in saris strolling in no hurry wearing bangles on their ankles, an elephant also in no hurry, and a cow that is lying down in the middle of the road chewing lazily a booklet entitled Dr W C Roy’s SPECIFIC FOR INSANITY. The camera pauses on a portion of the half-eaten text: “Dr Roy’s insanity medicine acted a charm. I am completely cured,” says Srinath Ghosh of Bundelkund. 5 rupees per phial.”
― Michael Tobert, Karna's Wheel

“Ranjana finds Stephen lying on an old string bed staring up at the ceiling and seeing in its myriad cracks the soothing drift of clouds. She puts what she’s brought to his lips, brushes them with her fingertips, and watches as he works the sweet onto his teeth. She feels a light touch on her arm encouraging her to lie next to him. She rests on her back, the pair of them laid out like two corpses waiting for the first shower of moist earth. After a while, she rolls over, nuzzles into his shoulder, and lets her hand fall limp and sweet across his chest. She drifts off to sleep, sweating in the arms of her lover.”
― Michael Tobert, Karna's Wheel

“When the bell of my flat rings at four o’clock in the afternoon, I don’t expect a policeman to be standing outside. “Sorry to disturb you sir,” he says. “Detective sergeant McCorquodale. It’s about your mother.” Detective sergeant McCorquodale is an enormous lighthouse of a man with the untroubled skin of a baby and not a trace of facial hair; a sort of man-boy who’s overdosed on growth hormones.”
― Michael Tobert, Karna's Wheel

“Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, relalise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Midnight Palace

“Calcutta's the only city I know where you are actively encouraged to stop strangers at random for a quick chat.”
― Tahir Shah, Sorcerer's Apprentice

“As they were walking, a beggar came up, holding his hand out and crying, "Baksheesh! Baksheesh!"
Mike kept on going but Mitchell stopped. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out twenty paise and placed it in the beggar's dirty hand.
Mike said, "I used to give to beggars when I first came here. But then I realized, it's hopeless. It never stops."
"Jesus said you should give to whoever asks you," Mitchell said.
"Yeah, well," Mike said, "obviously Jesus was never in Calcutta.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Where does one go in a tremendous city like Calcutta to find insider information? I recalled India's golden rule: do the opposite of what would be normal anywhere else.”
― Tahir Shah, Sorcerer's Apprentice

“He has told us that He is the hungry one. He is the naked one. He is the thirsty one. He is the one without a home. He is the one who is suffering. These are our treasures, she said, looking at the rows of pallets in the caravanserai. They are Jesus.”
― Mother Teresa

“Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, A Strange and Sublime Address

“There is nothing quite as unpleasant as wearing a pair of briefs which have been trailed through a Calcutta courtyard. Nothing, that is, except having one's elbows and knees lacerated by unseen slivers of glass and discarded razor blades.”
― Tahir Shah, Sorcerer's Apprentice

“The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it.”
― Tahir Shah, Sorcerer's Apprentice

“Rebellion sounded like a lot of fun, but in Calcutta there was nothing to rebel against. Where would it get you?”
― Bharati Mukherjee, Desirable Daughters

“For years and years, even during the time of my first visit in 1962, it has been said that Calcutta was dying, that its port was silting up, its antiquated industry declining, but Calcutta hadn't died. It hadn't done much, but it had gone on; and it had begun to appear that the prophecy has been excessive. Now it occurred to me that perhaps this was what happened when cities died. They don't die with a bang; they didn't die only when they were abandoned. Perhaps, they died like this: when everybody was suffering, when transport was so hard that working people gave up jobs they needed because the fear the suffering of the travel; When no one had clean water or air; No one could go walking. Perhaps city died when they lost amenities that cities provided, the visual excitement, the heightened sense of human possibility, and became simply places where there were too many people, and people suffered.”
― Naipaul V.S.

“the world’s cheapest small car, Tata’s Nano, worth only $1500. This toy-like ill-fated vehicle, whose destiny it was to look as if it had been prematurely brought into the world, more foetus than car, and whose birth was near abortive and then indefinitely delayed, this car, when it finally took to the road, turned out to have an engine that at times exploded mysteriously. Until 2009, it was seen to be Bengal’s quirky but irreplaceable mascot for development.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City

“Calcutta has still not recovered from history: people mourn the past, and abhor it deeply.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City

“Its (the Left’s) intensity derives from the fact that it’s a family largely composed of, in a manner of speaking, orphans of bhadralok history (for we hardly hear of the mothers and fathers of party members), brought together not by accident but by idealism and its cousin, ideology. Bonds of orphanhood and kinship are particularly charged (as Kipling showed us in The Jungle Book) when they are self-created, and each party member is probably a bit of everything – mother, father, sibling, friend – to every other member.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City

“এইখানে

এইখানে সমুদ্র ঢুকে যায় নদীতে নক্ষত্র মেশে রৌদ্রে
এইখানে ট্রামের ঘন্টীতে বাজে চলা ও থামার নির্দেশ
এইখানে দাঁড়িয়ে চার্মিনার ঠোঁটে আমি রক্তের হিম ও ঊষ্ণতা
ছুঁয়ে উঠে আসা কবিতার রহস্যময় পদধ্বনি শুনি-শুনি
কবিতার পাশে আত্মার খিস্তি ও চীৎকার এইখানে
অস্পষ্ট কু-আশার চাঁদ এইখানে ঝরে পড়ে গনিকার ঋতুস্রাবে

এইখানে ৩২৩ খ্রীষ্টপূর্বাব্দের কোন গ্রীকবীর রমন বা ধর্ষণের
সাধ ভুলে ইতিহাসে গেঁথে দ্যায় শৌর্য ও বীর্য এইখানে
বিষ্ণুপ্রিয়ার শরীরের নরম স্বাদ ভুলে একটি মানবী থেকে মানবজাতির দিকে
চলে যায় চৈতন্যের উর্ধ্ববাহু প্রেম-সর্বোপরি
ইতিহাস ধর্মচেতনার ওপর জেগে থাকে মানুষের উত্থিত পুরুষাঙ্গ এইখানে

এইখানে কবর থেকে উঠে আসা অতৃপ্ত প্রেমিকের কামদগ্ধ
কয়েকলক্ষ উপহাসের মুখোমুখি বেড়ে ওঠে আমার উচ্চাশা এইখানে
প্রকৃত প্রশ্নিল চোখে চোখ পড়লে কুঁকড়ে যায় আমার হৃদপিণ্ড এইখানে
এইখানে সশ্রদ্ধ দৃষ্টির আড়ালে যাবার জন্য পা বাড়াতে হয়

আমি নারী মুখ দ্যাখার ইচ্ছায় মাইলের পর মাইল হেঁটে দেখি
শুধু মাগীদের ভিড়
সাতাশ বছর-একা একা সাতাশ বছর বেক্তিগত বিছানায় শুয়ে দেখি
মেধাহীন ভবিষ্যৎ জরাগ্রস্ত স্নায়ুমণ্ডলীর পাশে কবিদের কবির কবিতা
চারিধারে ঢিবি দেওয়ালের নীরেট নিঃশক্ত অন্ধকার।”
― ফালগুনী রায় ( Falguni Roy ), নষ্ট আত্মার টেলিভিসন

“Personal Neon - Poem by Falguni Ray


I am devoid of genius
that is why I can touch my nose with my tongue
and prove that I am really a genius
Sometimes while walking in front of
Manik Bandyopadhyay's house I brood
about the street on which he once walked
I am also on the same road, but worthless, Falguni Ray
walking, sometimes I travel
in second class in trams and I
imagine this was the tram that overran and crushed
the body of Jibanananda Das
This is the way I travel--
earth sun stars accompany me.”
― Falguni Ray, ফালগুনী রায় সমগ্র

“nonchalant charminar

ma, i can’t smile well-scrubbed twisted-smirks in your noble society anymore
in the godly dense ocean of kindness with krishna’s duffed up white teeth with studious eyes of the devil i can’t
anymore in a ramakrishnian posture use my wife according to the matriarchal customs
substitute sugar for saccharine and dread diabetes no more i can’t no more with my unhappy
organ do a devdas again in khalashitola on the registry day of a former fling.
my liver is getting rancid by the day my grandfather had cirrhosis don’t understand
heredity i drink alcohol read poetry my father for the sake of puja etc used to fast venerable dadas in our para
swearing by dharma gently press ripe breasts of sisters-born-of-the-locality on holi
on the day ma left for trips abroad many in your noble society had vodka i will
nonchalantly from your funeral pyre light up a charminar thinking of your death my eyes tear
up then i don’t think of earthquakes by the banks or of floodwater didn’t put my hand on the string of the petticoat of an unmarried lover and didn’t think of baishnab padavali ma, even i’ll die one day.
at belur mandir on seeing foreign woman pray with her international python-bum veiled in a skirt
my limitless libido rose up ma because your libido will be tied up to father’s memories even beyond death i this fucked up drunk am
envying you carrying dirt of the humblest kind looking at my organ
i feel as if i’m an organism from another planet now the rays of the setting sun is touching my face on a tangent
and after mixing the colour of the setting sun on their wings a flock of non-family-planning birds is going back towards bonolata sen’s
eyes peaceful as a nest – it’s time for them to warm the eggs –”
― Falguni Ray, ফালগুনী রায় সমগ্র

“Without much ado, Ginsberg, along with Orlovsky and Fakir, arrived one Sunday at the Coffee House looking for Bengali poets. The cafe was abuzz with writers, editors and journalists. Each group had a different table—some had joined two or more tables and brought together different conversations on one plate. But somehow, everyone seemed to have an inchoate understanding of the business of war and what it spelled out for them in the end.”
― Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury, The Hungryalists

“Now as the train moved towards Calcutta, Malay felt as if his life was coming full circle. It had been a strange decision to visit the city at a time when post-Partition vomit and excreta was splattered on Calcutta streets. Marked by communal violence, anger and unemployment, the streets smelled of hunger and disillusionment. Riots were still going on. The wound of a land divided lingered, refugees from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) continued to arrive in droves. And since they did not know where to go, they occupied the pavements, laced the streets with their questions, frustrations and a deep need to be recognised as more than an inconvenient presence on tree-lined avenues.

The feeling of being uprooted was everywhere. Political leaders decided that the second phase of the five-year planning needed to see the growth of heavy industries. The land required for such industries necessitated the evacuation of farmers. Devoid of their ancestral land and in the absence of a proper rehabilitation plan, those evicted wandered aimlessly around the cities—refugees by another name.

Calcutta had assumed different dimensions in Malay’s mind. The smell of the Hooghly wafted across Victoria Memorial and settled like an unwanted cow on its lawns. Unsung symphonies spilled out of St Paul’s Cathedral on lonely nights; white gulls swooped in on grey afternoons and looked startling against the backdrop of the rain-swept edifice. In a few years, Naxalbari would become a reality, but not yet. Like an infant Kali with bohemian fantasies, Calcutta and its literature sprouted a new tongue – that of the Hungry Generation. Malay, like Samir and many others, found himself at the helm of this madness, and poetry seemed to lick his body and soul in strange colours. As a reassurance of such a huge leap of faith, Shakti had written to Samir:

Bondhu Samir,

We had begun by speaking of an undying love for literature, when we suddenly found ourselves in a dream. A dream that is bigger than us, and one that will exist in its capacity of right and wrong and beyond that of our small worlds.

Bhalobasha juriye

Shakti”
― Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury, The Hungryalists

“As I left Calcutta, it occurred to me that I was returning to a land of lepers, a land of people who had forgotten how to feel, to laugh, to cry, a land haunted by numbness. Could we learn to feel again?”
― Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“শঙ্খদা কোনো আপত্তি করেন নি। শঙ্খদার আপত্তি ছিল অন্য জায়গায়। সেটা হচ্ছে শঙ্খদার সেই টাই-পরা ছবি আমি প্রথম ছাপি প্রচ্ছদে।”
― Sandipan Chattopadhyay

“I could see no stars through the crude hot haze of the truculent night. It always to me, at night in Calcutta, that the day has suffered a humiliating defeat. The light has surrendered and publicly admitted its impotence.”
― Lee A. Siegel, Net of Magic: Wonders and Deceptions in India