The Last Tram To Park Circus

The crows wake me at first light; I stand in a puddle of water in the toilet cubicle and flip the switch for the hot-water geyser, the frayed wiring fizzing and arcing alarmingly. After a warm bucket-shower I walk over to an open-fronted cafe called Zurich and order coffee, scrambled eggs and toast. I find an internet cafe hidden in a small courtyard behind Sudder Street. There is a little dhaba in the courtyard; the men are outside peeling onions and slaughtering chickens - neatly folding their wings back before hacking off their heads. I watch as a headless bird is thrown neck-down into a plastic bucket to drain, its claws clicking spastically around the rim. Entrails and legs are thrown onto a stinking mound of waste next to the dhaba's side wall where crows, cats and voles vie with each other for the remains: they are suddenly panicked as one of the pariah kites that circle in the air currents above the city swoops through the yard - a huge, dark brown predator, the back draught in its wake ruffling my shirt. A cat slinks back from its hiding place and laps at a crimson slash that bristles with white feathers. I sit on a low wall, unlace my boots, place them outside the door and pad barefoot into the dark interior. It is already hot and the air inside is fetid with the smell of onions and fresh blood. I work for an hour then take a rickshaw to Shakespeare Sarani and the Thomas Cook building. The barefoot wallah tows me along at a brisk trot; he holds a small brass handbell between his right forefinger and thumb to tinkling a melodic warning to other road-users. I pay him the 10 Rupee fare, and the same as baksheesh.

I walk back to the metro station at Maidan with more than 20,000 Rupees in my travel wallet - more than enough to cost me my life should I meet a Dacoit (an Indian term for a bandit, or thief).

I buy a ticket to Esplanade and wait on the empty platform. Television screens are mounted in the ceiling above me, their flickering light throwing ghostly shadows across the tunnel walls, the soundtrack of a Bollywood film echoing around the deserted cavern: it is a surreal, hallucinatory wait. I put my ticket into the turnstile at Esplanade; it disappears but the barrier steadfastly refuses to open. I consider climbing over it, but decide this would be difficult to explain if I am seen; instead, I wait for 15 minutes until a guard appears and then another 10 minutes while he consults his superior. I walk out of the suffocating heat of the station into dazzling sunshine, turn right, cross the Bagh and buy a ferry ticket to Howrah at Chandpal Ghat. The square, flat-bottomed boat pushes upstream through the brown, churning River Hooghly towards the massive structure of Howrah Bridge. Built in 1943 to speed the Allied advance to the Second World War Burmese front, the engineers pioneered the use of rivet-construction for what is the longest cantilever bridge in the world, and its busiest river crossing. I try to take some discreet pictures of a WDS diesel at Howrah (a smaller version of the WDM, used as a shunter and station pilot) but security is too tight. While I watch the ferry struggling over from the east bank of the river, the back of a huge, pink scaled fish arcs out of the murky water; I am amazed by its sheer size, and see it twice more. I count exactly eight life-rings lashed to the ferry's railings, and estimate 200 passengers onboard; as we approach Armenian Ghat, people mass at the shore-side exits and the vessel lists to the point of capsize. I walk to the Eastern Railway's booking office at Fairlie Place and buy a ticket for the morning's Howrah-Bhubaneswar Dhauli Express, then make my way back to Esplanade. Then I take a tram around town - something I haven't done since leaving central Europe.

The tram is indefinably ancient; it is battered and dented, the trolley-bus pole that connects with the overhead wire roped to the end buffer. The windows are glassless and shuttered, the floor bare steel plates, the seating hard wooden benches lining the walls. I sit in the cupola - the rounded end - of the rear car and look down at the tracks; they are jagged and uneven, completely worn out, sinking into the dusty ground. Tram number 22 drags itself slowly along Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Road, plunging across collapsed crossovers and junctions, grinding through ragged bends formed of short lengths of straight rail. It is a slow, bone-shaking, painful journey. I'm jolted out of my seat when the tram hits a dip in the rails and slam back into the hard wooden seat, jarring my spine. The streets are narrow and choked with traffic, the tram unwelcome; every few metres we stop abruptly when a Tata truck or an auto-rickshaw cuts across our route. I pay the conductor 3 Rupees for a thin paper ticket to Park Circus and watch the ruined tracks unwind behind us, lost and indiscernible in the cracked and pot-holed roads. How Kolkata's trams have survived since the 1880s - when they were drawn by a stable of 1000 horses - is a mystery; where the trams of Kosice or Plzen are an essential part of the transport system, those of Kolkata are little more than an historic oddity. While it has some charm, the moribund network is really a vignette of the problems that beset modern urban India - the lack of funding, the neglect; impoverished and defeated.

I walk back to Sudder Street and the Fairlawn Hotel for a drink; I sit in the garden with a Kingfisher, shaded by a tall Banyan tree and surrounded by potted bamboos and palms. Flocks of crows call from the branches above me; the walled courtyard is a quiet retreat from the constant street noise outside and I can hear the shrill cry of the kites that soar in the thermals hundreds of feet overhead. I order a meal of Bhetki - a freshwater fish from the Hooghly that is marinated in garlic, oil and spices, baked in the Tandoor, then mixed into a thick, hot masala and served with rice, roti and onion chutney. I spend the rest of the evening reading in the Fairlawn's garden then go back to my room for an early night and the 6am train from Howrah to Orissa. As I lie in bed with the faint smell of wood-smoke drifting in from the cooking fires in the darkness outside, beyond the chattering of the crows, I hear the gentle chime of a rickshaw wallah's handbell - the sound an instant memory of Kolkata.