A Beautiful Devastation
Some cities have a distinct aura. Something special and secret. I call this a deep sadness. One that hovers over her like a lingering mist. There are only three cities in the world I have experienced this sadness: Genoa, New York and Calcutta.
After seventeen years away, I’ve done something most Indians of my generation don’t do—return back home. When people ask me where I’m from, I always stumble. I say, I was born in Calcutta but I grew up in New York. They say you can be attached to a place but not the people . When I think of New York— I think of streets, the bathroom in a restaurant, the stoop I sat on one evening. I rarely think about people. But I had no such memories in Calcutta. I remember scenes from my childhood like clips from a film. Sudden and fleeting
I realize now, Calcutta is like an aging beauty—decayed and crumbling, standing over her balcony with melancholy, watching the world go by. There is Turkish word for it. Hüzün. “It is the failure to experience huzun,” Orhan Pamuk says, “that leads him to feel it.”.
Hüzün is everywhere in Calcutta. In her old houses falling brick by brick, in the chaiwalla’s bland tea, in the deserted winding lanes lit by a single street lamp that leads me back to my parents’ home, in The Girls’ text messages, asking me what I ate for lunch, on the television sets mounted on the walls of every house in the Basti— blaring Hindi films and beauty advertisements— in the closed eyes of the afternoons, in every window at nightfall, where a different drama takes place within each lit square— in every window, a new story. All the stories we’ll never know.
I alway say, that New York is where my sadness is rooted. Then Calcutta is the place where it was born.
I am in New York what I could never be in the city of my childhood and I am in Calcutta what I have always been. Trauma and sadness, both, live in the body as well as is imbedded in the nooks and crannies of walls and windows of streets. To find your home is to find yourself and this journey, this tale of a city, is a process of tracing memories and making memories: a construction and a deconstruction. Overlapping yet separate.
