The Zeitgeist of Calcutta Has Changed

Calcutta has changed its smell.

Not only the real smell, though that too has conducted several successful experiments upon the human nose. Drain water after rain. Hot oil from a roll shop. Incense near a crossing. Petrol. Damp walls. Cheap perfume. Fish. Old books. New lies. I mean the moral smell, the thing you cannot photograph but can detect the way you detect milk beginning to turn.

When I was a boy, the city was not pure. Let us not apply sandalwood paste to history and call it memory. People cheated then also. People lied then also. The respectable man then also had two ledgers, one for accounts and one for conscience, and both were badly maintained. But there was embarrassment. That is the missing spice now. Earlier, wrongdoing at least wore a shawl over its head and hurried through the lane. Now it comes wearing sunglasses, makes a reel, and asks whether the lighting is good.

This is not an old man saying, “In our time everything was better.” In our time, load-shedding arrived like a government-sponsored ghost. Phones had wires. Buses had conductors with the manners of wounded rhinoceroses. The para auntie could scan your family situation faster than a police file. Childhood was not Eden. It was more like Eden after the municipality forgot garbage collection.

But something has shifted.

The city I knew had hypocrisy, yes, but it still understood hypocrisy as a weakness. Today hypocrisy has been promoted. It has an office, staff, branding, and probably a laminated identity card.

Morning arrives. The same man folds his hands before a deity, speaks about values, posts a devotional message, and then bargains with a worker as if kindness will bankrupt the family. By afternoon he is discussing ethics in public. By evening he is forwarding poison in the name of culture. By night he is in a bar, or near a bar, or pretending not to know where the bar is, while his phone glows like a small guilty planet in his palm.

I am an atheist, so I do not tremble before gods. I tremble before men who use gods as perfume.

Religion in private may be sincere. I have no quarrel with that. A person may pray because life is hard, the doctor is expensive, the son is unemployed, the daughter is anxious, the future is chewing at the door like a rat. Fine. We all need some arrangement with the dark. Some pray. Some read. Some drink tea till the stomach files a complaint. Some stare at the ceiling fan at 3 a.m. and negotiate with invisible creditors of the mind.

But visible religiosity has become a performance industry. Microphones. Banners. Lights. Committees. Loudspeakers with the delicacy of a falling cupboard. One lane competes with another lane in devotion as if salvation is awarded by decibel. The same city that cannot fix a broken footpath can build an entrance gate taller than the local school.

This is where the song I composed comes in, not as background decoration, but as witness. It catches the city after dark, when the lights come on and the face powder begins to crack. Park Street sells laughter. Shobhabazar keeps its sorrow folded in old cupboards. The tea stall moon drowns in a clay cup. Somebody says everything is illusion. Somebody else says, “Come, let’s go.” The footpath sleeper also, apparently, belongs to some party, some camp, some category, some use.

Nobody is merely human anymore. Everyone is data for somebody’s scheme, vote for somebody’s arithmetic, audience for somebody’s performance, prey for somebody’s appetite.

And appetite is the word.

Not pleasure. Pleasure is innocent until it starts wearing boots. Bengalis have always loved pleasure. Fish with mustard. Rain on tin. Old songs. New gossip. A second cup of tea. A pointless argument about whether a film from 1974 was superior to civilization itself. A city without pleasure becomes a dry government notice stuck to a damp wall.

The trouble is appetite without shame.

The nightlife is not new. Let us not pretend Calcutta discovered bars last Tuesday. The city always had secret rooms, old clubs, paid companionship, cabaret shadows, and men who spoke of morality in public while behaving like escaped goats in private. The difference now is that secrecy has mixed with display. Desire has learned marketing. Sin has discovered packaging. Loneliness has a cover charge.

There is paid laughter. Paid affection. Paid touching. Paid forgetting. Paid importance. At one table a man speaks of culture. At another, someone bargains over a woman’s time as if buying fish before the morning crowd gathers. Outside, an app cab waits. Inside, a small tragedy applies lipstick.

Then morning comes, and everyone becomes respectable again.

That is the comedy. Also the wound.

I live far from the polished postcard version of the city. My Calcutta is not only Park Street lights and puja awards. It is also damp rooms, unpaid bills, cracked plastic buckets, medicine strips, suspicious landlords, tea with too much sugar, and the daily mathematics of a lower-middle-class single man trying to keep life from sliding off the plate. Some mornings the news arrives before the tea boils: another scandal, another outrage, another video, another leader speaking as if language itself has resigned. You look at the phone and think, “Should I read this now, or should I preserve one spoonful of sanity for breakfast?”

Then the pressure cooker whistles next door.

Life continues. Shamelessly. Bravely. Absurdly.

This is the part the rich moral lectures miss. People are tired. Tired people become selfish faster. Not always because they are evil. Sometimes because the day has already eaten their better nature by 11 a.m. The bus is late. The price of vegetables has performed acrobatics. The job is uncertain. The son wants a phone. The mother needs tests. The rent has climbed. The neighbor has bought something new and is pretending not to show it. The world says, “Be decent,” and the pocket says, “With what money, poet?”

But poverty does not explain cruelty. Pressure does not excuse duplicity. Hardship does not require you to become a knife with a human face.

This is where the city has become sharper. Mouth sweet, mind sharp. Smile outside, calculation inside. Everyone is networking. Everyone is arranging. Everyone is “managing.” Friendship sometimes feels like a business card wearing a shawl. The old para was suffocating, yes, but it had memory. If someone fell ill, ten people knew, five interfered, three brought food, and two spread wrong information. It was irritating. It was also human.

Now we have privacy.

We also have abandonment with better wallpaper.

Social media has added another layer of circus. Earlier, if someone died, people came, sat, cried, murmured, misremembered the dead, drank tea, and went home carrying a little ash inside the chest. Now grief must pass through the camera. A funeral can become content before the fire has properly learned its work. Somebody posts a sad react. Somebody writes “gone too soon” for a person they avoided in life. Somebody makes a reel with music. Even sorrow now looks for engagement.

The dog at the corner watches all this and probably thinks, “These creatures have no training.”

Politics has made the air even thicker. Before elections, folded hands multiply like mushrooms after rain. After elections, doors close. The poor become useful in speeches and inconvenient in person. The middle class complains loudly about corruption and quietly asks whether anyone knows someone who can “get the thing done.” We want honest systems, but with a side entrance for our own emergency. We want law, but not when our balcony is illegal. We want fairness, but not if fairness delays our nephew.

This is not morality. This is buffet.

Pick what suits the plate.

The old bhadralok had many faults. He was often pompous, class-conscious, lazy in elegant ways, and capable of confusing English pronunciation with civilization. But the old ideal at least pretended that education should refine conduct. Today education often only improves the vocabulary of selfishness. The knife now speaks better English. That is not progress. That is cutlery upgrade.

Still, I cannot honestly say the city is finished. That would be too theatrical, like declaring the fish dead while it is still slapping you in the market bag.

Calcutta still has small decencies. They do not trend. They do not hire photographers. A tea seller lets someone pay tomorrow. A neighbor sends food without announcing it to the Republic. A stranger helps an old man cross a road where traffic behaves like a herd of metal buffalo. A nurse speaks gently to a frightened patient. A bookshop owner remembers what you bought twenty years ago, which is both touching and financially dangerous.

Goodness remains.

It is just quieter than vulgarity.

That may be the real change. Not that bad people have appeared. Bad people were always here, polishing their shoes. The change is that loudness has defeated restraint. Display has defeated depth. Cleverness has defeated character. Public virtue has defeated private decency. The city has not become immoral in one dramatic thunderclap. It has become morally tired by installment.

One small lie.

One unpaid kindness.

One worker underpaid.

One friend used.

One poor man ignored.

One public prayer used to cover one private rot.

One more laugh sold under colored light.

And yet morning comes. It always does, irritatingly hopeful, like a tea seller who refuses to accept philosophy before payment. The kettle boils. The smoke rises. Someone argues about football. Someone complains about the price of fish. Someone’s mother says, “মানুষ হবি,” and the child, already too clever, wonders what profit there is in that line of work.

There is the question.

Why be human when the market rewards the opposite?

I do not have a grand answer. Grand answers usually arrive in large halls with bad microphones. I have only a small one, the size of a tea cup.

Be human because otherwise the city wins in the worst possible way. Not by killing you. By recruiting you.

The song says people have become inhuman and Calcutta is drunk. Maybe. But drunkenness passes if the body survives the night. The harder question is what remains in the morning. A headache? A memory? A bill? A little shame? A little chance?

The tea will boil again.

The city will say, “চুপ.”

And some of us, stubborn fools with cracked cups and unpaid bills, will say, “No, I saw what happened.”