The year my aunt came visiting from London, I realised there was no Santa Claus. I already suspected as much. Homes in Calcutta did not come with a chimney for Santa Claus to shimmy down and I did not think he came swinging in via the neem tree outside our bedroom window. But when my aunt visited my doubts were confirmed.
Those gifts piled at the foot of my bed that Christmas morning were just too different from their humbler predecessors from years past. It could have been a devastating revelation for a naïve boy who devoured fanciful tales of Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer and Santa’s elves. But Christmas, for us in middle-class Bengali homes in Calcutta, always required some level of wilful suspension of disbelief.
We knew that underneath the askew white beards and postbox red outfits, the Santa Clauses were cheap pink plastic dolls that we would not deign to buy any other time of the year. We sang Christmas carols in our missionary school with gusto, though few had seen a ‘winter wonderland’ or had any hope of ever building Frosty the snowman. In our heart of hearts we knew that our celebration of Christmas was as make-believe as the snow made out of torn cotton-wool from my mother’s first-aid box.
But we still went to old New Market to pick out a spindly artificial bottle-brush of a Christmas tree, decorated it with little silver bells that left a trail of silver crumbs all over our sweaters, and topped it all off with a shiny star. It was not our festival in any religious sense but it was tradition and there was comfort in its ritual. Christmas was once peak nostalgia time for the English in Calcutta, dreaming of a white Christmas back home. But with the sahibs and memsahibs largely gone, perhaps we were just nostalgic for the nostalgia. The chrysanthemums and dahlias were blooming at the Horticultural Society. Our mothers sat in the verandahs in the hazy December sun, knitting chequered vests. It was a perfect time to bask in nostalgia, as mellow as the amber notun gur in the Bengali sweetshops.
The nostalgia, in part, was for another far more glamorous city. That rich cosmopolitan past had faded. Only the rich plum cake remained and we dutifully queued up for it at Flurys on Park Street or Nahoum’s Jewish bakery in New Market. If there was irony in the city’s only kosher Jewish bakery making most of its business from selling Christmas cakes and Easter eggs, it was lost on us. Years later when I was nostalgic for Calcutta fruitcake while spending Christmas in balmy California, my American friends were dumbfounded. A Christmas fruitcake was the punch line of a joke there, the indestructible offering re-gifted from home to home, something that no one wanted to be saddled with. In Calcutta, however, it remains a gourmet delight, worth standing in line for.
Last year I wandered into a dingy Dickensian building in a little lane in central Calcutta where Montoo baked his famous Christmas cakes. Customers from all over the city, of all religious persuasions, still came with their family recipes, flour, eggs, slabs of Amul butter, candied fruit and bottles of Old Monk and brandy. Bakers worked round the clock, churning out batch after batch of fruitcake, sleeping in shifts on bunk beds. The ovens are rented not by the hour, but by the kilo of sugar. A neighbourhood tough staggered in, drunk and belligerent, and raised a ruckus, until he was mollified with cake. At hole-in-the-wall Kanchan bakery in the twisting bylanes of Taltala, a banner strung across the lane promised “Traditional process is still following. Booking will start from 1 December. Cake baking will start from 15th December.” A woman came to buy biscuits and was told to come back in the New Year. The ovens were booked solid, all baking fruitcake. “What?” the woman grumbled. “Shall I eat only cake now?”
Why not? There was a lot we did not have in Calcutta when I was growing up — industry, jobs, malls, multiplexes, opportunity, electricity. But if we could not have bread, let us eat (plum) cake. A Calcutta Christmas cake baked perhaps by Muslim bakers, in a Jewish bakery, for Hindu customers, peace and goodwill in every chewy mouthful.
It seems pretentiously colonial but Christmas was our season, even more than Durga Puja. Durga Puja was the time to leave Calcutta in droves. People like us, upper middle-class and cosmopolitan, shuddered at the prospect of being stuck in the city for Durga Puja with its sweaty crowds, deafening noise and tacky excess. “Oh, I am never in town for Durga Puja. Haven’t been for the last 11 years,” we would say with almost a touch of pride. With many offices shut for 10 days and schools closed, it was the perfect time for a Puja vacation.
Christmas, on the other hand, was the season for homecoming. That’s when the NRI migratory birds came flocking home, as also the children who had fled to Bengaluru and Mumbai and New Delhi. It was like yesterday once more — Christmas lunch at Calcutta Club with the same geriatric waiters, a swim at Tolly and devilled crab and whisky sours at Mocambo. There was a nip in the air, parties every other night, boozy alumni reunions and Christmas carnivals for the children, with stockings and crackers. Flurys was open all night, with lines stretching round the block clamouring for plum cake and mince pies and Dundee cakes. Christmas was how Calcutta got its groove back.
But now we worry, that like everything else, Christmas too is losing its charm. For the malls it’s just another excuse to have sales like Puja sales and Bengali New Year sales. The only difference is Jingle Bells on endless loop. The doormen look uncomfortable in ill-fitting Santa suits with cardboard box bellies. My cell phone spams me with offers for Santa text messages at ₹3 each. We splurge on overpriced banquets at five-star hotels with dry roast turkey and chestnut stuffing, indifferent mulled wine and carol muzak and then pop some Pudin Hara pills for digestion.
During Christmas week, Park Street becomes impassable, as crowds jostle and shove to look at the lights, at the rather garish manger display in the park. The government-sanctioned Christmas fair sells mincemeat pies, Yule logs and that evergreen Christmas favourite — chicken biryani. Newspapers do yet another story of the quaintness of Anglo-Indians celebrating an “authentic” Christmas in Bow Barracks, but what used to be a homespun community affair is now a tourist scrum with television vans. “No, I don’t want to tell you about my favourite Christmas cake recipe,” an elderly aunty in a flowered dress scolds me. “Every year you all come and ask the same thing at this time.” I am suitably chagrined, firmly put in my place. Later she relents. It’s Christmas, after all. Try the pure chhena cake from JN Barua’s, she advises me. It’s special.
It is, but it is also bitter-sweet, for the Anglo-Indians are fading away from Calcutta. The Christmas that remains is propped up as a tourist attraction. A part of me resents this new blingy Christmas. I stare in dismay at the jam-packed streets outside New Market, a claustrophobic crush of people, and wonder why so many of them are wearing idiotic Santa hats and taking selfies. It feels like a Christmas of wide-eyed gaping tourists, yokels even, wrapped up in neon-coloured fluffy woollens as if they are in Darjeeling. This new Christmas feels, I think snootily, just too crass, too common, too commercial. The local middle-class bakery chains, with outlets all over the city, have come up with their own “rich Xmas cakes” and even set up special cake counters on the street to meet the holiday rush. The festival has become a fad and everyone is cashing in. Next year, I tell myself, I will steer clear of Park Street during Christmas.
Yet that is uncharitable. Christmas could have remained pickled in sepia-tinted Calcutta Club Christmas lunch nostalgia, haunted by the ghosts of Christmases past. But instead it has repackaged itself for a different city, shed its exclusivity, and drawn in a new crowd. It is an eat-drink-make-merry festival now unlike any other Bengali festival. That perhaps is the last miracle of Christmas. The plum cakes might not always come from Nahoum’s anymore but Christmas keeps marching on, more fruitcake than midnight mass.
Right outside New Market a man shows up every year to sell turkeys. The ungainly black-and-white birds waddle and shuffle, clamber onto trash cans and try to open the lid. At ₹400 a kilo they are not cheap. Few of us have ovens big enough to roast the birds. But we gather around, gawk at them and take videos on mobile phones. “Is it a foreign chicken?” asks one man. “No, it’s an Australian ostrich,” says his friend with the complete certainty only Calcuttans can muster when clueless. The fat man in bright pink pants, sitting on a folding chair, selling the birds shares cooking advice. “You can grill it. Roast it.”
He had it last night, he says. How did you cook it? I ask.
“Curried,” he says with a paan-stained smile. “I only like curry.”
Calcutta Christmas might feel more like Kolkata Christmas these days, but what’s in a name? The snow is just cotton-wool either way. But it’s still Christmas.
Sandip Roy is the author of Don’t Let Him Know . He lives in Kolkata