AFFLUENZA
When Kolkata calls
HINDOL SENGUPTA
|
If you want to revel in real luxury, head to Kolkata. No other city has its sense of leisure, or its idea of luxury…
|
If “Speed” had been shot in a Calcutta bus, they would have called it “Slow”. If time is the real luxury, Calcutta is Paris.
Photo: ARUNANGSU ROY CHOWDHURY
Unique: Inside 85, Landsdowne.
I live between Delhi and Bombay. Fortunate to have homes in both cities, I divide my time between lush Lutyens Delhi and the swirling sea off Carter Road. Actually, more like I divide my time between ugly, crowded Sector 16, NOIDA where my Delhi office is and ugly, crowded Dr. E. Moses Road which is my Bombay office. Such is the tyranny of industrial areas.
When I have had enough with both places, I have the luxury (and a home) to run away to in Calcutta.
In recent times though, desperate for a taste of Calcuttan luxury, I stay with my friend (fashion designer) Kiran Uttam Ghosh. She completes the City of Joy trinity of talented designers with Sabyasachi Mukherjee and Anamika Khanna. It helps that she is also one of the best hostesses in Calcutta.
I never go to live with Kiran for a day or two. I usually stay for weeks, especially to get a sense of the Calcutta idea of luxury. For instance, as Kiran’s Santa-like, tea-connoisseur husband once explained to me, you really cannot play golf anywhere else in India like you can in Calcutta.
No other city has that sense of leisure. Golf is a game of leisure, a real sporting sport where the game — not winning — is the purpose. In Delhi it’s too competitive; in Mumbai, it’s too fast, everyone has to be somewhere else, even during golf.
Relaxed luxury
I dare not lie and say I am any good at golf. My handicap is just that. Last time, I lied and claimed that shooting is my hobby, I immediately landed up dating a colonel’s daughter. But what I revel in is the Calcutta sense of relaxed luxury. As soon as I land in Calcutta, I feel calm. Suddenly the Bombay rush seeps out. That feeling that everything should have been done yesterday is replaced by an almost Zen sereneness that says everything, naturally, can be done day after tomorrow.
If “Speed” had been shot in a Calcutta bus, they would have called it “Slow”. If time is the real luxury, Calcutta is Paris.
But that’s not the only thing luxurious in Calcutta. Let me explain why I almost always stay with Kiran Uttam Ghosh in Calcutta. Coming from Minimum City Bombay, it is lovely to zoom into Kiran’s 10,000 sq. ft., three-tired bungalow in leafy Palm Avenue, at a rickshaw trot from the Chief Minister’s flat and within rooftop gossip distance from a clutch of tycoon homes who together are worth around 20 per cent of Calcutta’s GDP (I maybe wrong but certainly seems that way in moneyed, languorous Palm Avenue).
I love the Calcutta sense of money. In Delhi, if you have a 10,000 sq. ft. bungalow, you have what seems like scores of rooms inside and when guests come, you not so gently point out how many rooms you have — four for the maids, one for the driver, three for little temple within temples, one study room, one library (god forbid anyone in Delhi knows the difference), one playroom, one toy room, one kid’s party room, one store room, one garbage room, seven guest rooms… in Delhi, a 10,000 sq. ft. bungalow is not a 10,000 sq ft bungalow. It’s Noah’s Ark, with some sequins attached.
In Calcutta, Kiran’s home has only got four bedrooms. Most of the house is sweeping empty space. The first time I landed from poky Bombay, I blurted out: “Aren’t you wasting a lot of space?”
“Darling,” said Kiran. “I am glad you’ve got the idea.”
She said she always wanted a home with lots of air and sunlight and sense of openness. That’s why she chose to keep most of it open.
One day she felt that the space seemed rather empty. So Kiran picked up the most expensive and gold-heavy saris at her factory and draped them across a crisscross of ropes that hang from the roof. She could have sold the saris. For a lot of money. But this is Calcutta, not Delhi or Bombay.
The room that I always demand at Kiran’s home has eight (or is it 10?) types of tea bags. I learnt the term first flush at her home. And because of my undying affection for her, I am served Belgian dark chocolate after breakfast (right after the milk and Swiss cheese fluffed omelette and whole wheat toast and Viennese cold coffee) and dinner (Even Bombay cannot match the tiger prawns in coconut cream of Calcutta). I sometimes steal some more in the middle of the night from the gigantic fridge in her kitchen.
Silver cutlery and the silver napkin rings, I think, adds to the taste. In fact, I asked another rather wealthy friend of mine in Bombay why he does not use silvery cutlery. I said I like the weighty-gravitas and the sense of refinement and elegance. He said silvery cutlery is too heavy. In fact, he has even stopped using ceramic. Only plastic — quick, light and disposable.
That’s exactly what luxury in Calcutta, or for that matter anywhere else, is not. It is not supposed to be “quick”, never “light” and certainly not, blasphemy, “disposable”.
Calcutta has the only nightclub in the country which has a god for a mascot. Right outside Tantra, in a glass cabin glowing through the night is a kitschy idol of Kartik, one of the sons of the Goddess Durga who (how metro sexual is this!) has a peacock as carrier. It’s all very cool. Unfortunately there was no Tantra when I was growing up in Calcutta in the 1990s and there was still Someplace with a pitch dark dance floor where we all sighed and heaved and turned from boys to men.
Classy boutique
The one thing that I held against Calcutta as a fashion historian is that it never had a decent boutique. That has now been corrected. And how. Calcutta now has the classiest boutique in India. A century old, dark wood bungalow with creaky steps and ancient furniture turned into cloth racks has pipped fast favourites like Bombay’s Ensemble and then Bombay Electric to the sartorial post.
This boutique is so cool that it refuses to name itself and is just called, 85, Lansdowne.
I am tempted to say Oh! Calcutta but even that is a cliché now.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
