Lucknow Notes (May, 2004)

Having traveled to the cosmopolitan Bangalore and the youthful Pune only recently, an official trip to Lucknow, signaled a change in expectations. My previous visit to the city had left a collage of historical markers and seedy hotel walls on my memory toposheet. Subsequent improvements in my professional capacity ruled out the latter, but the former remained post trip; notably the sudden Mediaval gateways bang on main thoroughfare near Kesar Bagh.Lucknow is a close approximation of home. Home as in the bounds of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation.

The reasons are not far to seek- to start with, the dazzling play of white and light orange in the Handi. Good biriyani is not a matter of rarity, as much to my delight most areas have a congregation of eateries. Satyajit Ray’s Lucknavi refrain in Feluda adventures and his inimitable characterization of the city in the masterpiece ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ has personally speaking, had an indelible effect. But what has also been remarkable is his use of historicity in establishing the cuisine connection between the courts of Awadh and Lucknow and the streetside biriyani centers of Kolkata. Britishers like Thomas Godwin, one of the central characters of a Feluda whodunit, were aplenty in the post 1857 period. In a disparate exodus, they brought and institutionalized Awadhi cuisine in British Calcutta. Thus the after-dinner burps in Lucknow have been always Kolkatan with a vengeance for me.

On a large scale too, history brings forth obvious analogies. Both are replete with fragments of the Raj, and as extension of the legacy, bureaucracy and its baggage of inertia. As we moved about Gov. offices, nobody seem to be moving in any other direction than the big black hole of Election Duty. It was as if some tribal festival, where all able bodied authorized personnel are happily waiting to be sacrificed at the altar of the Deity. Even without Election Duty, whether it is the paan tainted polite Hindi or the yawn-riddled, rounded Bengali words, the tempo of the words, give-and–take a few, the same. Files move at half a table per hour and work, at a comparable speed. Not exactly our official need of the hour, but personally very reminiscent of known grounds.In general, as I scoured the dirty and crowded underbelly of the city on cycle-rickshaws, I found the essence of Kolkata mingling into my senses with the exquisite Galawat Kabab. It is not that you don’t get sweaty faces peeping out of buses in Delhi or Bangalore, but they have a purpose. These faces, in Lucknow or Kolkata, flow with the general current of life. Complaining, but at a level, enjoying the lack of ambition, the fatalism, the ebb and the high tide.