Hind Motor to Howrah [Prelude]
[This is the prelude to a three-part series about my journey to Balichak, Bengal to document the stories of seventh-generation Pattachitra artists.]
First, a cycle rickshaw through narrow streets, lined with muddy marigolds for sale. A wiry old man pedals, nothing but his sinews pulling us forward. We reach a railway ticket counter — a tin-roofed wooden shack. There are tidy heaps of wilting sabzi in the stalls nearby. It’s a mystery how the vegetables are so clean, laying on filthy burlap sacks barely a step above the half-formed road; as if they were placed there and sprinkled with dew drops to remind the world that some things really can exist unsullied. The scent of mustard oil lingers in the air.
This neighbourhood was once home to the factory and the workers that built the famous yellow cabs of Calcutta, Hindustan Motors. Now Hind Motor is a station on the local train, inhabited by immigrants whose families are from UP, Bihar, and Bangladesh. Seven rupees for a ticket to Howrah, the busiest station in the country. Five o’clock in the winter evening, sunlight fading into a rose-colored glow as I climb into the ladies’ compartment. Bengali women watch me, their eyes thickly lined with kajal — a hundred painted idols sitting in the train. Polyester shawls thrown about their shoulders, they turn towards one another and resume conversations. A cold wind enters the train through open doors, and men leap on and off selling chai, biscuits, back scratchers, and obscure powders made of pomegranate seeds and bitter amla.
We pull in to Howrah station at rush hour. It’s almost impossible to exit the train because of all the people swarming into it suddenly, though it’s barely come to a stop. I push through with my belongings, using my duffel bag to create a space in the crowd, just wide enough to jump into. There’s no time to look for the exit as I am swept into the amorphous mass of human beings; coolies balancing heavy trunks on their heads, farmers heaving burlap sacks, women carrying babies, men dragging suitcases and wives.
Someone’s backpack presses into my stomach, an arm pushes against mine, a boot shifts my own foot forward into a step; a sudden tango. It’s difficult to even inhale because of the constant pressure of other bodies from every angle, and it seems like any breath I take is simply because of an object or person pressing my lungs open or closed, like a bellows. I’m a puppet of the crowd, it’s impossible to turn around or even see where I am — we are — going. Identity dissolves and I’m the bead of sweat behind the coolie’s ear as his emaciated frame, all tendons, balances steel containers on the crown of his head.
There’s a certain kind of walk someone has when they’ve carried a heavy load all their life, a subtle way of holding weight in the hips and bowing the legs. No longer a tango, but a ballet. Such balance, as the crowd jostles him indiscriminately; yet if that great load upon his head would tip over, it could split someone’s eyebrow open. We flow together towards a place of less density, more like molecules than people. At last, an exit in the underpass. The crowd dissipates enough for each of us to decide when to take a step, then how fast to walk, each returning to our individual rhythm. I can see the coolies gain momentum, never rushing but always moving forward, and in a few moments they’re far ahead of me and I’m heaving my bag along, grateful that it’s infinitely lighter than the loads they carry.
There’s a horizon now that wasn’t there before, a vanishing point beyond the well-oiled braids of the people immediately in front of us, or the brief glimpse of a bag strap cutting into the pleats of a floral pallu. We climb the steps upwards, towards the light, and emerge into a labyrinthine bus stand. Howrah bridge stands in the distance, bathed in an orange sunset. It is lined with the silhouettes of coolies pulling themselves ever forward, with all the strength of arthropods carrying sustenance exponentially heavier than their own bodies — without which the city would cease to exist.
Howrah Station, Kolkata / 27.12.2019
