Kolkata, West Bengal 14^th December 2016

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Had a day exploring the remains of British India in Calcutta.

In the morning smog I pushed my way on foot through tight streets of food vendors to get to the first item on my list of stuff to see. While I would have loved to have sampled this Bengali street food, bitter experience has taught me to be a bit scared of it. Maybe later in the trip.

My first stop was St. John’s Church, built in 1787 and modelled after St. Martin–in-the-Fields in London, apparently.

The memorials inside the church are very descriptive, if sometimes a bit overblown, and give a vivid impression of what it was like to live and die, usually young, in the service of the East India Company and the British Raj.

Outside the church is the mausoleum for Job Charnock. It was he who in 1690 first set up shop here for the East India Company. Also in the grounds is the re-located memorial to the victims of the Black Hole of Calcutta incident of 1756.

Moving on to my next item, I walked across the very large open space next to Fort William called the Maidan. Parts of this area are now given over to sports clubs and several cricket matches were in full swing. The prairie-like grassland that is not cricket-ground was covered in litter. A great deal of it. How this can happen, in a country where the cost of labour to keep it tidy would be so little, baffles me.

I walked on to the Victoria Memorial. A splendid cathedral-like building which was completed in 1921. It had some good exhibitions about important Brits and the history of Calcutta. All this walking was only possible as it’s winter here and it’s a very nice temperature of pollution. Other times of the year, it’s either heavy monsoon rain or blast-furnace heat. Even so, I got a big yellow taxi back to the hotel. Most cheap taxis here are battered yellow Ambassadors which makes the place look, at first glance, like 1940’s New York. There’s no AC in yellow taxis so those with deeper pockets, who prefer to be cool and not travel in a pile of rattling junk, get white taxis.

I watched the sun go down from my room. Clumps of vegetation and rubbish were moving quickly down river on the outgoing tide and bats were out feeding over the water.

M