I have been here in the City of Joy for quite some time and I cannot but fail to appreciate the cultural ethos that exists here. There is more to a quintessential Bengali than is visible to the naked eye and more of the sweetness flows into your heart as you devour one roshogulla after another. There is something about Calcutta that has endeared it to me.

The Bengali is a person with a large heart - very cordial and always ready to help. You ask him who Ram is and he will recite the whole Ramayana for you. He would go on to tell you a lot more things than you actually wanted to know. And believe me, it's never half-hearted!

My house-hunting endeavours have brought me into contact with people from various walks of life. At each house, I could not fail to appreciate the cordiality and warmth. I started with a list of houses provided by the company's administrative division. I used to get directed to somebody living in the area under scrutiny. One person led to another and soon we had a group of people asking us, "Did you get a house?" That everybody's intrusion led us to roam around half the city, increasing the chaos and my belief of 'Collective brains being useless,' is a different story.

When I asked the shopkeeper at the corner near Howrah station, he told me the buses and their routes and the places from where I could get them. Before he could tell me their timings and fares, I asked him, quite impolitely, "Will a taxi take me there?" Even a traffic policeman gave me three different routes to a place but he is an irritating relief from his counterpart in Mumbai who is characteristic of gruff one-liners.

While on policemen, I have to mention how the traffic policeman at Chowringhee junction is always on his toes - the junction being one of the most populated and the people being quite ready to fight - while his companions watch from the side. They take their turns in sharing centrestage on the road. During the period of transition, for some unfathomable reason, the replacement is found standing right in the middle of the street, 'one hand cupping his testicles, as if he is worried that they would fall off and be lost on the crowded streets', to quote Amit Chaudhari.

That the Bengalis are an intellectual race is an accepted fact. But little did I imagine that the watchman of our guesthouse would have his own views on the current political situation that gives Mr. Vajpayee his 'General Musharraf' dreams.

The Bengali is an avid reader and almost everybody enjoys discussions on intellectual pursuits. For a Mumbaikar, the books are sometimes status symbols - to be stacked in neat clean shelves for guests to appreciate. For a Bengali, a book is to be devoured. I remember a lady at the Strand bookstall in Mumbai, asking for V.S. Naipaul's Nobel Prize winning novel, not knowing what its title was, while here I find people at book fairs overlooking all the 'hyped' novels and going over to sections and authors unheard of. Even in office, I find people who are quite interested in reading books and just sometimes it does give me a complex.

That the Bengali loves his food is an understatement. He is passionate about it. The satisfaction upon finishing a sumptuous meal as seen on a Bengali's face can be compared only to the drastic change that comes over the Three Men in a Boat.

It is disastrous to oppose his food habits, as I discovered the hard way.

Being the diet-conscious person that I am, I asked the person serving food in the pantry to stop after one serving of rice - having already counted the number of calories I was consuming. He looked at me strangely, as if I had committed sacrilege and so angry was he that he thrust a couple of more helpings of rice into my plate making it look like a mountain of rice. Since then I have stopped asking him to stop, and see my ideals of not wasting food for the millions of under-fed people in the world go down the drain along with the rice.

For a Bengali, vegetarians are outcastes. All our paying guest accommodations sans one have refused us accommodation since we 'preferred' vegetarian food. "Oh! You are vegetarian," sounds almost like "Oh! You are an extra-terrestrial!" Even Narayan, our guesthouse keeper, would show his displeasure at being asked to cook vegetarian food, as he had to eat it along with us.

Fish is vegetarian! At a Bengali marriage that we went to, the groom's father asked us, "You are vegetarian?" We replied in the affirmative only to be baffled by his next question, "So you don't even eat fish?" In the same marriage, there were coloured bowls kept upturned in front of our plates marking us as outcastes - people who were not supposed to be served non-vegetarian food. "No, not even fish!" as the host told the people serving food.

Another thing is that no part of fish's body is thrown away. Even the head, which is generally thrown away by Mumbaikars, is relished with great zeal in a curry called macher-jholl rice. Imagine the plight of a Bengali in a Maharashtrian Brahmin family or a Tamil Brahmin family down South!

It might seem wrong on my part to comment on the eating habits of people, but the appetite of the Bengalis is phenomenal. At a picnic, I was quite ashamed of my helping as I watched them eating and, frankly, I am no meagre eater. Perhaps it has something to do with the climate since it is such as to make all people pleasantly plump. No obesity - unless of course you count my observation of a 'fat' Bengali youth on a bike looking like a baby elephant balancing on a stool in a circus. At that instant, my "Eureka!" seemed almost near to Archimedes'.

A common constituent in their cooking is the "aloo". There is aloo in almost each chicken and fish preparation. A 'Bengali' chicken biryani would have two large chunks in it - one of chicken and other of potato - in the same measure. 'Aloo' is like God - present everywhere - even in the Manchurian!

Once, I asked Narayan to cook something without aloo for a change. He provides food to my colleagues also and answered that if there was no aloo in the dish, they would ask him whether the price of aloo has gone up. It reminded me of Pu La's Antoo Barva - "Turtas Ratnangritlya samasta gayee gabhan ka re, jhampya?" (Jhampya, have all the cows in Ratnagiri stopped giving milk?)

My stomach's going to be all starched by the time I return what with the amount of potatoes that I am eating. That also brings to my mind the fact that in Telugu, the literal translation of potato means 'Bengal-root.'

Kolkata is a haven for sweet-toothed people (like me). The sheer variety of their Shondesh will make you think twice before uttering the word Pedha. And then there is roshogulla. I have seen at least three different varieties out here - the regular white ones, then those with an orange flavour called 'Komla Bhog' and then the best of them - the jaggery ones that just melt in your mouth. Roshogullas are to be eaten hot. We Mumbaikars carry an impression that the cold roshogullas of Brijwasi are the best, but trust me, we were never more wrong!

(To be contd..)