The mosquitoes had stopped divebombing and the frogs had stopped doing their prince act, so there were, obviously, clear portents of rain. My in-laws-to-be asked me to take along an umbrella, but since a Bengali domiciled in Delhi for more that three decades knows more about Calcutta than Calcuttans do, I, obviously, smartly didn't.
The cab drive to College Street was nighmarish - or daymarish, what you will - Baja-style roads packed with buses well past their retirement and running, inch by bloody inch, on diesel engines spiked with kerosene, the only Ambassador taxis in the country (since only those iron Vauxhall ripoffs can survive Calcutta traffic), a few foolhardy motorbikes - and, oh yes, people, so many people that one tends to forget they're there at all.
College Street is no different a proposition, except that it is home to some of the most illustrious colleges in the country. (I, as a Delhi Stephanian, have a dispute with that, but more of that in a later blog.) College Street is a f***ing hellhole, with one of the only surviving tramlines rolling in the city on girders so old that they've eaten a pit down the middle of the asphalt, like an ancient river doing its eternal erosion thing. Both sides of the road are lined with tiny shops - lean-tos, with asbestos and tarp roofs that I found, to my consternation when the rains came punching down, surprisingly waterproof.
The street, Calcutta's pride, which three decades of doctrinaire communism has deprived most of the city's Bengalis of, houses many of the city's colleges. The University of Calcutta, India's second oldest modern university, was established in 1857. On one side of CU (as it chooses to be called) is Presidency College, irrefutably one of India's best, founded in 1874. On the other is Asia's oldest medical school - the Calcutta Medical College - founded in 1835. Facing Presidency College is the famous - or infamous, depending on how you look at history - Coffee House, where God created the universe and left it to the Coffee House's insolvent intellectuals to discover the beauty of it.
But, the shops being waterproofed didn't help - I got soaked anyway. The tarp is there to protect not the pedestrians, it's there to protect the books.
And, ah, the books! Even though most of the shops have converted currency to IIT kunjis and CAT simplifiers and suchlike, if you stick your nose in deep enough, you'll smell the dust of old vellum, sometimes hear the distressing crackle of yellowed 100 gsm matt paper irredeemably cracking when the piles shift because of the temblor of the trams clanging by.
Even with my butt soaked and my head dry - creating a thermostatic difference that would have lit up the whole street - I found what I wasn't looking for but then discovered that I had been, all my life. Auslander that I was, I spent an hour at the first three shops that had various ripoffs of the Da Vinci Code and a single book on Verrier Elvin. After better sense overcame the balking and embarrassment of having to shame these shysters by not paying out a paisa, three shops down the line - of about 200 shops on either side of the road - I found a whole pile of pre-Independence published, 6" X 3", leatherbound volumes of classics that some impecunious Bengali had sold, in undoubted grief, to this particular barker. He asked Rs 60 for each, I haggled desultorily and brought him down to Rs 32 each. I'm now the proud possessor of 12 volumes - if their diminutive size will permit them that noun - from The British India Publishing Company, Calcutta, printed in Great Britain, of Lorna Doone, Adam Bede, The Innocents Abroad, The Scarlet Letter, Wuthering Heights, Ben Hur, Silas Marner, G K Chesterton-Selected Essays , Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,The Hunchback of Notredame, Edgar Allan Poe's Tales Grotesque, and Mill on the Floss. Beat that. Money's not the point here, but if it were, they'd fetch me a fortune on E-Bay.
But I was also snuffling around for other books - on fascism, Chinese communism, hard science fiction...anything that would slake a thirst for knowledge except on roaches and arachnids. The word went down the line that a sucker was looking for a punch- in that body-bruising rain, I don't know how or who did the running: cellphones certainly weren't in view and nobody was doing any yelling.
Now for an aside: India's postal system goes back three and a half millennia, when kings had an established communication system between Egyptian Pharaohs and Chinese monarchs. They used all manner of transportation - horses, elephants, men, pigeons - and inducements, primarily smidgens of gold and Medusa's heads of whips and, failing all, threats of familial decapitation.
But the latter-day - centuries later actually, 150 years ago when the Indian Postal Service came into existence - mail, or dak, "runner" was actually the world's strongest baton carrier, or extreme athlete, pelting from station to station where he passed on his satchel of letters to the next runner, who went further, and so on, braving raging rivers - often drowning - tigers, bandits, every homo sapien-hater you could name. Jim Corbett himself once"impersonated" a runner, lugging along a lantern, an utterly inadequate spear, and a wrapping of letters, trying to track the spoor of a man-eater that had scarfed many runners.