We left Kolkata yesterday, and it seemed like a good idea to reflect on some things we saw with the great benefit of, maybe, 24 hours to mull it over. So some random items, in a completely random order, about a somewhat random city, told largely in the pictures below.

First, there is this sense of a shambolic state of things. Billboards are not fixed to solid backings but instead are huge vinyl sheets on metal scaffolding. Which is probably a hugely efficient approach until the first big storm rips them to shreds which then flap madly about for as long as it takes to replace them which appears to be approximately never. It is an apocalyptic version of Gatsby’s billboard. But the yellow and blue scooter makes a happy pop tune contrast, so maybe things are good? The colours in the laundry hung from an otherwise dreary apartment block help, but maybe not enough…

Religion is found in Kolkata, but not as much as other parts of India we have visited. Mother Teresa, the Albanian born in the Ottoman Empire and nunnified in Ireland, worked here, and there is a small memorial to her in the HQ of her organization which provides an opportunity to exercise the expression “sacred and profane” by observing the commerce that awaits as you step outside the compound. Mother Teresa tote bags?? More interesting was a visit to the potters area where they make all of the hugely disposable Hindu gods and goddesses for festivals and the like – made from bamboo and straw forms covered with mud from the river and then painted. Spooky to be faced with an army of them, half formed, like some sort of zombie video game.

Street commerce, always good. In the college area there are two universities started just before 1820 and countless other schools and a whole street of secondhand textbook sellers. A student coffee house where early student revolutionaries plotted still operates and the waiters still wear their traditional hats. And as dusk came we saw a flood of Muslims out to celebrate the end of that day’s fast.

There is a huge amount of individual human effort involved in keeping the wheels of the city moving. Baskets are nothing to do with that – we just like pictures with baskets in them. But getting goods to trucks, and from trucks, all seems to ultimately involve a person carrying an enormous load the first or last distance.

Flowers. Flowers are everywhere. They are central to worship and celebration as well as decoration. We went to the wholesale flower market, which turned out to be a labyrinth of dirt and mud lanes and alleys accessed down a one lane track near the river that carried two way traffic (not unusual) but also parking down one side. You do the math. Different coloured tarps covered the open spaces, applying a series of coloured filters to what was already a paroxysm of colour. Everywhere noise, negotiating, narrowness. The sheer overwhelming power of all that fresh colour is intoxicating. And happy – we went to a ghat by the river where engaged couples go for pre-nuptial photos and there were rose petals scattered everywhere for good luck and good looks. A good way to end an increasingly unravelling ramble that began with decrepitude.

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