Park Street performs itself.
It begins, if it begins anywhere,
At the Asiatic Society,
The building that has been
Quietly holding Bengali intellectual life
Since 1784,
Asking for nothing in particular
Except that you notice it
Before the restaurants begin.
Most people do not notice.
The restaurants begin quickly.
But before the performance had a stage,
This was Badamtala,
A quiet aisle of almond trees
That thickened into jungle,
Sinking into the marsh.
They called it Burial Ground Road then,
A path meant only for the dead
Until a judge brought a fence,
And kept a park of deer.
The almonds fell, the deer vanished,
But the name stayed behind
To give the pavement an alibi.
The restaurants on Park Street
Are their own occasion.
At Mocambo, the waiters
Have perfected a manner
That is not quite colonial
And not quite post-colonial,
But occupies the narrow corridor
Between formal without subservience,
Attentive, without warmth.
The prawn cocktail arriving
The same way since 1956,
On the same kind of plate
At the same angle,
Carrying the same implication,
That you have made
An acceptable choice.
Peter Cat next,
The Chelo Kebab,
The low lights,
The particular conversations,
This room has absorbed,
Since the seventies —
Proposals accepted,
Proposals declined,
Arguments that have ended careers,
Or marriages,
Or both.
The table in the corner
That every regular believes
Is specifically theirs.
The room holds it all,
Without comment.
Then there is Olypub —
Olympia once, until ’81
Reenamed it something plainer.
No menu you need to study.
No manner to negotiate.
Beer arrives because you sat down.
Old men have been finishing
The same few arguments here
Here for longer than anyone still standing
Can accurately say.
New men arrive and start new arguments
That are secretly the same old ones.
The ceiling has heard it all.
The ceiling remains unamused.
Trincas was there
When Park Street had a sound,
Usha Uthup sang here,
In a voice that did not need
The room’s permission.
It simply took the room,
And the room was grateful.
The music has changed since,
The room has changed since,
But something in acoustics
Still holds an imprint
Of what was played here,
The way the hall holds applause
After the audience has gone.
Step across the asphalt,
And the lineage folds into itself.
In 1927, there was no choice to make;
Flury and Trinca sat under one ceiling,
Pouring tea from the same pot.
But partnerships, like cities, fracture.
A line was drawn down the middle of the street in ’39,
One Swiss kept the pastry,
The other took the song across the road,
And split the afternoon in two.
And Flurys
Which is not a patisserie
So much as the idea of a patisserie
That became, over time, more real than a patisserie.
The half-Anglo-Indian grandmother
At the corner table until five years ago
Ordered what she ordered,
Since 1979.
The city had changed around her
The way traffic changes around a statue,
In every direction,
Without consultation.
She was not a symbol
She was a woman having her tea.
But Park Street makes symbols
Of some who stay long enough.
Look up at the grand facades,
At Park Mansions holding the corner.
It carries its history like a heavy coat.
Deep inside its spine,
Sweeping flights of Burma teak
Once climbed toward the high ceilings,
Rich, dark, and smelling of old empires.
But fire has a way of erasing architecture.
The wood burned hot and fast,
Leaving only the stone to remember
The weight of the steps it used to carry.
The cemetery at the end
Is the only thing on Park Street
That is not performing.
William Jones is here,
Who learned eight languages thoroughly,
And founded The Asiatic Society
A few hundred metres away,
Now separated from his life’s work
By a leisurely walk
And 232 years.
Derozio is here,
Who died at twenty-two
Having already unsettled much
With his poetry.
Rose Aylmer is here,
Who died of cholera at twenty,
And was given a poem1
By a man who loved her.
It’s the kind of immortality
Nobody asks for.
Outside the cemetery
The city renegotiates daily
Its relationship with the past.
The graves are not part of this.
The graves have taken a position,
And are holding it.
And outside Queens Mansion,
A single cast-iron gas lamp stands,
Unlit, stripped of its flame,
A prop from an earlier act
That nobody bothered to take down.
The modern halogen glare cuts through it,
But it holds its ground on the pavement,
Like an old actor who forgot his cue
But refuses to leave the stage.
Come December, and the street
Puts on its annual costume.
The lights go up.
The cold arrives, such as it is
Kolkata’s cold,
Which is less cold,
Than the idea of cold.
Everyone comes to Park Street in December
To feel like someone
Who goes to Park Street in December.
The street obliges,
It has always been good at this –
Reflecting back
Whatever you came here
Hoping to find.
At midnight on December 31
The street is pure theatre,
And knows it,
And does not mind.
The crowd is the show.
The show is the crowd.
Someone is always there
In a jacket that’s slightly too thin for the night,
Not admitting to being cold,
Talking to someone
Who is listening
The way people listen on Park Street,
Present,
Bright-eyed,
Already composing mentally
What they’ll say about this later.