Raka Banerjee
If there was one thing I loved about Kolkata, it was its tramline. Tram means to me leisure. It is an urban luxury: affordable and much loved. And above all, the tram affords pace. It’s slow. Foot traffic or a stray unruly bike is enough to halt it on its literal tracks. There are no guardrails or lanes keeping it from the bodies of city-dwellers jostling for space on the same narrow streets. Though you will reach only marginally faster on the tram compared to by foot, the tram continues to invite you to sit and watch the city move to a secret rhythm. Only perceptible to the slow. My hunch is that is why the beloved streetcar has vanished from our Indian city streets. Can one really imagine Mumbai had trams once upon a time? But ask anyone in Kolkata and they would readily recall a fond memory attached to its streetcars.
My frequented route was this: hopping on-board the Gariahat to Esplanade tram from Mullick Bazaar and then another from Esplanade to Bidhannagar. I discovered it many years back as a college student while waiting for the city’s infamous blue tin box private buses. On days when classes broke early, tram journeys allowed the stretching of time necessary for reflection. Without breaking off from the city. Getting the first tram from near college was easier. After it terminated its journey at Dharmatala, it usually took longer to find one that would take me all the way to Salt Lake. Sometimes fifteen minutes, sometimes over half an hour later the more elusive tram for Bidhannagar would arrive.
Even in the city’s notorious sweltering summer I have sat through that long journey—close to two hours in all—covering several quintessential Kolkata landmarks and eras of the city’s making. I remember reading a beautiful poetry collection, one of the first borrowed from the British Council Library, on-board the Kolkata tram. Nina Cassian’s Temptation is still one of my favourite poems.
Tram embodies for me the pleasure of getting to know a city. It crossed Tipu Sultan Masjid and suddenly the street squeezed itself producing first one, then two, then in pairs on both sides, several, a series of brightly lit stalls lining Lenin Sarani. Passively inhaling the enticing smell of chicken rolls, the tram and I would cross the Thoburn Methodist Memorial Church, opposite which Baba had introduced me to the city’s second-hand vinyl record sellers. Nevermind the makeshift stores and the trees offering them shade are no more—I can still see them. Taking that window seat meant watching a live performance by the city in all its sensory, material, and chaotic glory. What is now a mnemonic map of a city inhabited, set aside, reclaimed, and finally abandoned.
Obscure moments of joy associated with these journeys stick out in memory with the glow of autumn afternoons. On many occasions us friends would board the tram together, be continually reminded by the ticket man to not stand on the footboard, and merrily rattle atop the city’s streets. Stray photos must have stayed with me longer than most of those friendships; that is, until the laptop hard drive decided to give out. Now it comes back to me with a warm sense of gratitude.
Taking the tram not for convenience but for a deliberate pause was one of the first publicly-situated solitary acts I had attempted on my own. Really then what it meant and what made it special—and the feeling that reaches out to me from the past all these years later—is the possibility of claiming a space for oneself (a female body, at that) in a cityscape as chaotic as any other, to just be. This confounds me. How can a city change so much? In the following years, especially in the last few years, I have felt more and more unease in the city’s streets. Did it always feel so hostile? Did I always have to appear so combative? Several recent and recently-past events both personal and societal attest to this change. As the tram disappears from Kolkata’s streets, the city will also change further.
My last ride was sometime before the pandemic. I left the maritime archive and took a long walk. I decided it would be nice to take a slow tram ride home from Dharamtala. Said route is no longer operational now. And later while waiting for the bus I saw a tram, single compartment, air conditioned and just one commuter inside. I think my longish and complicated relationship with this city is now truly over. I have the text message to my partner saved in my phone. Being the sentimental hoarder, I collect little everyday souvenirs no matter how mundane the event or unevent: like this text. I didn’t think to keep the ticket.
Raka Banerjee is a researcher and writer. Her personal essays and creative non-fiction have appeared in The Tiger Moth Review, Kitaab, Borderless Journal and elsewhere. More recently, she is exploring cyanotype printmaking. She lives in Bengaluru.
Featured photo by Apoo (Wikimedia Commons)
