October 2023

I watched a priest lead a family to the edge of the Hoogley River. He turned to face them as two of his young attendants continued down the ghat, carrying silver buckets into the water. In his hand, he held a dried ball of clay with small depression on top. He poured oil from a plastic water bottle into the depression, then held it out to a third attendant, who struck match and set it on fire. The priest raised the now flaming ball, about the size of a grapefruit, high above his head, and spoke in a loud voice to the family. After a few short words, he thew it straight downward, shattering it on the stone steps. He immediately marched forward. The woman and her children turned to follow him, even as broken pieces of the clay ball scattered across the ghat. He was leading them into their new life. The smashed pottery symbolized their ties with the past being severed. The young attendants carried their cargo of holy water back up the stairs. In the river, a hallowed distributary of the Ganges and ceaselessly moving metaphor for the impermanence of life, a dozen heads covered in white shampoo continued to lather their armpits.

I stood on the top stair of the ghat, watching this scene where train tracks separate the oldest part of the city from the gritty low rise river frontage. I’d come to look for the Malik Ghat Flower Market I’d read about beneath the Howrah Bridge. Flower markets grow in the shadiest parts of Indian cities. To avoid the wilting heat, they hide in windowless basements, tunnels, and, in this case, beneath the overpass of the city’s largest bridge. I felt comfortable poking my head into shadows because there’s very little in India that isn’t public access if no one is paid to keep people out. I felt comfortable staying because Indians are generous with the rituals that surround the end of life. Earlier that week, I’d watched a man and woman dance in front of a golden hearse as it paraded the dead body by my hotel.

I searched for the flower market at the next ghat, but only found river mud set out to dry in more freshly rolled balls. I followed a Hansel and Gretel path of potholes filled with dusty petals to a row of shacks a short distance away. A group of dhoti clad men unloaded large canvas bales from a truck. They rolled them over to grass mats piled waist high orange and yellow carnations. Flower brokers, ankle deep in plastic bags and stray dogs, crowded around the trucks and placed bids as each bale was opened.

Looking past them, I could see faces coming and going from a short flight of stairs closer to the river. I followed them down and knew I’d reached the market. The color palette swallowed me. Wafer thin porters lifted impossibly large linen bundles above their heads and floated them through the crowd. They disappeared into the maze of tin shelters. On the margins, women sat cross-legged beneath a kaleidoscope of light filtered by plastic tarps in yellows, blues, and greens roped between the tin roofs. Honeybees feasted like flies. Men twisted wire around bouquets and women passed needles through the center of blossoms to make wreaths. The string of flowers called “walas” are ubiquitous in India. They’re used to decorate doorways, vehicles, and shrines. Thought to bring good luck, they’re a kind of national lottery ticket to win the favor of Hindu gods.

It was 10AM on the other side of the flower market. A group of men gathered around a garden hose and scrubbed the vintage hoods of their shapely, bright yellow taxis. Ambassador taxis from the 1970s give Calcutta an anachronistic, Cuba-like vibe. The communist party ruled West Bengal for three decades until the early 2000s. Built out of cast iron, they’re better to photograph than to ride in. The soot spewing hulks barrel through the streets and rust in the alleys. They have hot, uncomfortable interiors lined with asbestos and horsehair. I asked a cab driver to take me to the bazaar. He had stained wife-beater tank top and a towel around his neck. His round head and unshaven face made him look like Sebulba, the winged scrap-dealer from Phantom Menace, the first Star Wars movie. He grinned his single tooth and stepped on the accelerator.

My health collapsed from overwork and jet lag in a different Indian city the previous week. After sleeping for two days straight to beat a fever, my lungs still gurgled with a cough. On the other side of the market, I was determined to make the most of my first and only day in Calcutta. It was a little after dawn and the air was as clean as it would get before traffic spread the afternoon haze. I got dropped off on the other side of the railroad tracks near the big stone warehouses of old market. Their arched windows had ferns growing from the eves. Pastel colored window shutters hung off their hinges. I bought some gaudy gold jewelry for my sock drawer, slowly becoming a costume box, and dipped into a side-street. A bell rang behind me. A father and three boys, all in white with matching white taqiyah hats, rode a single scooter from their morning prayers. I found them stopped for sweets on the next block. I’d entered a Muslim neighborhood where butchers in small, brightly painted stalls carved freshly slaughtered sheep. They reminded me of deer carcasses dripping blood in the carports of hunters my small hometown. A wholesale meat vendor rode his bicycle past with dead chickens tied to his handlebars like a feathery snowplow.

As I made my way towards the back-alley guesthouse I was staying in a newer part of town. A rickshaw puller offered me a ride, I was conflicted. Calcutta has a complicated history of humans carrying humans. The bazaar is near where the city was founded and fortified in the 1600s by the East India Company (EIC). I’d just finished reading about the history of the EIC in “The Anarchy”, a book about first two centuries of Calcutta by William Darlrymple. The world was thirsty for spices, tea, and indigo dye. The rice surplus of the Gangetic plain fed a large class of artisans and craftsmen in West Bengal. In the late 1700s, when invading Afghans sacked the imperial capital at Delhi, it threw Indian politics into chaos. The British, who already controlled Calcutta, inserted themselves to stabilize the “business climate”. The British general who George Washington defeated in the American Revolutionary War, Charles Cornwallis, led the EIC’s corporate army. The corporation made piles of money by moving goods from India’s plantations to British ports, as well as the treasuries of recently subjugated Indian princely states. Calcutta was the high water mark for the wealth that flowed out of India down the Hoogely River.

The British pulled out a century and a half later as soon as steam power, the Suez Canal, and modern chemistry replaced what made India lucrative. Natural rubber faded as a final source of revenue after WWII. They left their decaying estates and grand administrative buildings behind them. The contrast of the classical architecture with gritty, vibrant India is what I enjoyed most about the city. The early British traveled by palanquins carried by teams of men. Better roads made three wheeled bicycles cabs more practical. But two wheeled carts are still common in Calcutta. I decided the legacy of the British was for Indians to judge. I took the ride.

Dhiraj, the rickshaw puller, took off at a run. The slap of his sandals was loud in the narrow space. We entered traffic and waited at the light for a right turn. He rested for a few steps, then ran again. We reached a wall of bodies in new market. It was thronged with people shoulder to shoulder. He asked for a baksheesh (tip) and I paid him a week’s wages. The relationship between white Europeans and Indians was mutually exploitative at best. The city was winding up for Durga Pooja, a festival to celebrate the triumph of good over evil, to erect a lot of commercial billboards and a few temporary shrines. Calcutta made the commercial influence of the British its own. It would take a lot more burning balls of clay for Calcutta to sever its ties with the past.