New DelhiFeb 28, 2025 14:19 IST First published on: Feb 28, 2025 at 12:09 IST
If homecoming had a colour, mine would be the mellow gold of a retreating Delhi winter morning. It’s the sort of colour that my city isn’t quite privy to. Winter in Kolkata is the burnished gold of nolen gur, the orange-crimson of an early dusk, the shadow of a tremor in my mother’s hand, the slush grey of my father’s hair. It’s the shapeshifting colour of change in my neighbourhood, where every time I return, the faces keep changing. So much of returning to Kolkata is now laden with nostalgia. Familiar streets burst out in a melange of cafés and tea houses; old neighbours no longer call out from windows asking when you’d landed and would you come around for a chat. Their homes are now abuzz with the cacophony of workmen’s tools, making room for yet another high-rise. In front of the clean, angular frames of these forever-in-the-works apartments, our last remaining family homes seem to cower.
Once, the disorderly sprawl of the city had felt constraining for young ambitions. Now, Kolkata is a city plush with a wistfulness for lost selves. Everywhere you turn, there’s a reminder of who you used to be and where you began. The long walk home from school with friends now spread across the world; the rows and rows of book shops unchanged on College Street, even though the gates of your college remain resolutely shut on strangers; old haunts your feet can find their way to even in sleep.
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Every time I return to the city, I trawl its streets, trying to match the city of my past to this city spread out in front of me. The neighbourhood phhuchkawala who had come from Saran and never returned is now an old man. His customers though are a cosmopolitan bunch of young men and women, part of the influx of people servicing the city’s expanding tertiary sector; the cranky local chemist remains dour as ever but he slips in a Vicks, not in lieu of change but because he remembers you from the time you were in pigtails. Kolkata is a city with whom you have a history: It holds your childhood and teenage in its palm, loosens the knot you did not know you hold in your stomach.
Like a migratory bird that can sense changes in the air, the comfort of the absolutely familiar is broken by entire parts of the city that I no longer know, whose antiseptic glitter seems at ease anywhere in the world. Over time, the city has unfurled itself to the south and east. Where there were once wetlands, a jungle of skyscrapers now soars, sporting names as ill at ease with their surroundings as Trump Tower and Rare Earth, The V or Atmosphere.
But perhaps, it is not that city I seek out so much when I return. The Kolkata that is both home and not resides in my imagination, in the array of invisible networks, of geography, emotions and practicality, built up over generations, and only mine by inheritance. These networks require patience and nurturing, and in many ways, they represent the long-time resident’s most significant accomplishment: The deepening of roots, the creation of a personal sense of order from the messiness of urban life, the sense of a community that cuts across divides. It is through these networks that one gains access to the city’s hidden core, to its particular cadence of resourcefulness and empathy, politics and care. It is these lattices of intimacy that one relies upon — the bulwark of a sprawling extended family where aunts and uncles, cousins and neighbours, friends and acquaintances come together to celebrate and nurture, care and grieve — to stand in for oneself.
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It is what I miss the most when I move to Delhi. If Kolkata cossets you into an extended youth, Delhi makes an adult of you overnight. It refuses to coddle, its lessons dispensed in sharp strokes of reality. In those early days, I thrill in the headiness of its unspoken expectations, falter against its relentless pace, lose sleep over the fragility of its bonds. Delhi does not wait for me to catch up; it only moves faster, telling me to keep up if I am to stay in its orbit.
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And then, one day at a time, the seasons turn. Delhi draws me in, with the soft purple of its jacarandas, the fiery blaze of its gulmohars, the golden drizzle of its amaltas, and the green tendrils of nascent attachments. For better or worse, New Delhi becomes my reality.
Ask any migrant where they belong and chances are they will take a beat too long to respond. When you measure out your life in memories and practicalities, you are always in the liminal space of not quite knowing where your heart truly lies. I live between Kolkata and Delhi. I live in Delhi and Kolkata.
