Oh Calcutta

As I came out the lift on the top floor of the building that was to be my new home, I turned to the right and saw a mezzuzah on the door. My heart settled in recognition and I registered no little amazement. Could I have found the only such home in the whole of Calcutta?

Inviting me in for a cup of chai, my landlord shows me around the apartment he on-and-off occupies in the space beneath mine – the specially built room on the rooftop terrace, the likes of which are not to be found anywhere else in this sprawling city.

In his large airy apartment, artwork by an Israeli artist adorns the walls and a rusty stained mirror with Hebrew stencils advertising the somebody’s spice shop awaits hanging. “Oh something I picked up in Jaffa years ago,” he tells me. I finger the edges lovingly, delicately combing the fading lettering.

Jonathan.  My new landlord and friend. The half English, half Burmese, Hindi-speaking Jew born in Calcutta, now lives in LA and about six other cities around the world. He seems about as lost as I am. He once told me that during his early adulthood he used to travel the world with a white passport – nationless. Now that’s a man after my own heart.

His father worked for British intelligence in Calcutta (or Kolkata as they call it now, but without the same nostalgic strain, I feel), his mother a Burmese Jew. Grew up running the streets round Newmarket, taunting the rickshaw pullers and drinking pure sugarcane juice. He went to school in England, somewhere progressive and liberal and encouraging that he loved, before the whole family moved again to Israel, where he says the raw struggle of those early state years meant little food on the table and stress that eventually killed his father.

Then the U.S., more study and through a bizarre twist of fate and an open creative mind, he ends up “making jeans.”

“Jeans?” I asked.

“Yes, jeans,” he replies.

“To be honest it was quite funny as I really had no idea what I was doing – and was pretty sure one day I’d get found out, but that day never came.”

A fortune made from a random idea – taking scrap denim from warehouses, patching it all together and making a new pair of jeans. It took off. Big time. Who can predict fashion?

By his early 20s, major U.S. retailers were carrying the brand, factories were running, people were employed, things were moving. Then some personal stuff, a betrayal perhaps (his face goes sombre, so I don’t push) and it was time to move on. So he bought his first building.

At the age of 24.

“And that’s how I sort of fell into property,” he says.

I look at my own paltry collection of belongings at the door. One suitcase with pretty much everything I own in it. I have never owned a property in my life, and little else for that matter.

At the age of 38.

We walk up to the terrace where I will be living. It’s his pad really. His refuge when he comes to Calcutta that he never rents out. Only when I came and saw it and sat sharing a Kingfisher beer and breathing in a gradual feeling that everything was going to be ok, I asked him if he would rent it out to me.

“Well I never rent it out,” he reiterates, “but something tells me it will be good for you here.”

And so it was agreed and cheersed under a night sky lit up with the neon lights of a nearby hotel sign, a glowing advertisement for spine and brain MRIs and the odd star desperately pushing a feeble sparkle through the polluted air.

Oh Calcutta.

When I first arrived in Calcutta, my employers had arranged a two-bedroomed flat for me on the other side of town – near Maddox Square – the most happening square in Calcutta, they told me, especially at Durga Puja celebrations. Well Durga Puja came and went and if unbearably loud and bad renditions of Michael Jackson’s Black or White and a surge of young people letting off firecrackers, horns and any loud thing till 4am is happening, then I guess that’s just what it was.

Nothing wrong with my apartment, only I couldn’t stand it. The thin metal chairs scraped on the tile floor like fingers on a blackboard, the shower dribbled water down the wall rather than on me and the balcony from my room was a slither of space surrounded by bars, where I would sit knees hunched up most evenings like a bird in a cage.

And now in my room. A large terrace with plants around the edge, window sills and doorframes painted in a faded blue that whispered Mediterranean. Inside, bamboo blinds spread a shady coolness, fans whirr. And the biggest shower I have seen to date....