A tale of two cities

A photo story

A Tale Of Two Cities

Some cities have a distinct aura. Something special and secret. I call this a deep sadness. One that hovers over her like a lingering mist. There are only three cities in the world I have experienced this sadness: Genoa, New York and Calcutta.

After seventeen years away, I’ve done something most Indians of my generation don’t do— return back home. When people ask me where I’m from, I always stumble. I say, I was born in Calcutta but I grew up in New York.

They say you can be attached to a place but not the people . When I think of New York— I think of streets, the bathroom in a restaurant, the stoop I sat on one evening. I rarely think about people.

But I had no such memories in Calcutta. I remember scenes from my childhood like clips from a film. Sudden and brief.

I realize now, Calcutta is like an aging beauty—decayed and crumbling, standing over her balcony with melancholy. Orhan Pamuk writes about this melancholy in his book, Istanbul. He calls it Hüzün. “It is the failure to experience huzun,” Pamuk says, “that leads him to feel it.”. If New York is where my sadness is rooted, Calcutta is the place where it was born.

I am in New York what I could never be in the city of my childhood and I am in Calcutta what I have always been.

Trauma and sadness, both, live in the body as well as is imbedded in the nooks and crannies of walls and windows of streets.

To find your home is to find yourself and this journey, this tale of two cities is a process of tracing memories and making memories: Like magic.

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