At one time, I was always embarrassed about a Kolkata Christmas. It felt like a big fat slice of colonial nostalgia. The British had left but we had held onto their traditions. Everything about it was fake — the cotton wool snow, the Santa Clauses with crookedly pasted beards, the spindly Christmas trees.
In America, my friends regarded the rich fruit cake as a bit of a joke, the Christmas gift that’s promptly re-gifted. But Kolkatans took their fruit cakes with utmost seriousness, standing in serpentine queues for hours to get that one fruit cake from that one Jewish bakery tucked away in the bowels of the old New Market. The Anglo-Indian population was dwindling by the day. But the al fresco Christmas in Bow Barracks, their old neighbourhood, had become a jam-packed carnival for revellers in Santa hats, very few of whom were actually Christian.
One year, I saw a man selling turkeys on the street. The black-and-white birds pecked at the grain while everyone stood around taking pictures and offering expert commentary. “It is a foreign chicken?” asked someone. “No, no,” said his friend confidently. “It’s an Australian ostrich.”
