We almost feel like old hands. Days have turned into weeks, and we’ve covered two or three thousand miles by train. It’s slow going—maybe ten or twenty miles an hour on average—and by choice, mostly during the day. Partly to watch rural villages drift by, catch glimpses of strange and exotic flora, and nudge our way through small towns. Nondescript homes dotting paddy fields give way to near-slums crowding the edges of temporary stops that pass for railway stations. Sellers rush to the windows, offering sweet, milky tea in sun-dried clay cups that slowly disintegrate if you linger too long while drinking. Peanuts, bananas, and doughnut balls float by at window height, carried on trays and deftly balanced by hands young, old, female and male. Poverty is the great equalizer. We choose carefully—something cooked or a banana that can be peeled feels like a safer bet.
Vegetation, fields and scattered palms finally give way to coastal views of the Bay of Bengal. The wind blowing west and toward us carries a salty and humid aroma. The sea is turbulent and its waves push up on the beach, dissipate, retreat and try again. It’s all quite welcome and a change from weeks of interior India.
The destination seems inevitable, the train drawn north almost like a compass needle seeking home.
I stand in awe as a tide of humanity surges across Howrah Bridge. It’s almost intimidating. I imagine that joining that flow might lock us into some unknown journey, pressed like sardines toward God knows where.
We’ve taken the plunge and emerge in the center of Calcutta.
It’s rained earlier, the streets glisten and the air hangs thick with humidity. Metal tracks make no difference, surrounded, the tram is stuck. Rickshaws pivot and search for gaps that never seem to lead anywhere, becoming stuck and adding to the tram’s misery. Ambassador cars occupied by the ne’er-do-well have no more luck and all seem to be waiting patiently for something to give.
There’s a sense of inevitability and fatality in all of this. Everyone seems to have a purpose and each in their own way contributes to the collective, positive energy. Nothing is threatening about this place and this moment. I’m fascinated and my eye searches the street back and forth looking for a snap that captures this functioning pandemonium.
There’s guilt in riding a rickshaw and maybe it’s better I can’t see his face. We’re making progress, the sense of motion, our human engine and Calcutta beg to be captured and I fumble for my camera. My sense of guilt rises as I realize the main subject is my faceless puller, snapped I rapidly dump my camera in my lap in an effort to pretend I haven’t used this moment for my own vanity.
Weeks later in my borrowed dark room, I’m disappointed in my momentary inability to manage the camera. My faceless puller is rendered as a blurred apparition, a grimy white t-shirt, short cropped hair of a man under thirty.
Nearly fifty years on, that small failure has become the very thing that sets the image apart in my mind. It’s imperfect, spontaneous and authentic.
That was the Calcutta I enjoyed—and the one I still remember.