Homecoming, or, Searching for a Love Actually moment

As many of you (but not my parents) already knew, back in July I booked flights to come home for Christmas. Since then, I have been looking forward to it like a small child looks forward to Christmas: the thought of Christmas in Blighty has got me through many a tough spot since July.

However, when the time finally came, it was slightly more bogged down in anxiety and self-doubt than I had anticipated. The bureaucratic challenges were many – I spent a sleepless week plotting my options if the Indian embassy refused to give me a visa – but I think the main cause of my disquiet was the idea that I might go home and find things irreversibly changed. As luck would have it, I came home to find that absolutely nothing has changed. Not one thing. Friends, relationships, habits, old haunts – all are pretty much the same as I left them. In some ways, I could find this depressing, but it is actually deeply comforting.

Landing at Heathrow at 7am was something of a shock. When the pilot announced during our descent that the temperature outside was minus three, I think I actually laughed. Having only my flip flops and a cardigan for warmth, I think I was attempting to block out the fact that such a temperature was going to be physically painful. Needless to say, the moment I stepped off the plane, before the air-conditioned blandness of the airport enclosed me, was a tough one.

Of course I was extremely excited to be in London after so many months of fantasizing about it, but I was nevertheless a little disappointed not to find everything a bit more momentous. The man on immigration didn’t say welcome home, for example, and there were no cheering crowds awaiting me in the arrivals hall. There was, devastatingly, no Love Actually moment. Instead, there was me with my stupidly heavy backpack (eighteen kilos, for god’s sake!), my stupid flip flops and my stupid little cardigan.

My first encounter with the rush hour underground brought me many a strange look, which I’m hoping were due to my bare feet and copious scarves than the fact that I hadn’t showered in 12 hours. However, I did note the lack of staring – or eye contact at all - between my fellow passengers – with some sadness.

Arriving at Victoria to meet Emily, I did get to have a bit of a Love Actually moment. She’d got up at 4.30am to get the train from Leeds, she’d brought me socks and a coat, and just as we headed outside to catch the train home, it began to snow. Cue much gleeful shrieking on my part, which did manage to earn one or two stares from passers by.

Later, I had the pleasure of a series of faintly Love Actually moments as I was reunited with friends and family at various stages. The highlight, however, has to be leaping out of a box to greet my unsuspecting parents as they arrived home from work. Bizarrely, I was unaccountably nervous about seeing them – as if they might not be pleased to see me (ridiculous, I know). Although I was momentarily concerned that my mother was going to pass out, it was a priceless moment. Both my mum and dad had fully swallowed the counter story Emily and I had been feeding them since July, that I was going to Vietnam for Christmas. Initially constructed to explain the airline’s debit from my bank account (which my parents consider is there duty to monitor), this bluff had evolved into a fully formed narrative involving the names of travelling companions, hotels and even itineraries, helpfully supplemented by several long conversations with my dad about which were the best places to visit in Vietnam.

Kolkata

Back in July, when I was booking my flights home, a minor stroke of genius led me to book flights from Kolkata to Heathrow, rather than Dhaka to Heathrow. This was mainly because I was feeling cheap (flights from Kolkata are more than £150 cheaper), but also because I’m actually genuinely interested in seeing this famous city, the one-time capital of the British empire.

It was with some trepidation and much battling with bureaucracy that I ventured across the border, due on the one hand to a previous trip to India in which I found the hustle altogether too much to bear, and, on the other, to the glories of sub-continental bureaucratic systems. This time, however, things were different. I don’t know if it was being able to speak Bangla, or just knowing that home was only a few hours away, but I had a wonderful few hours there. Actually, scrap all that – it was most likely because I spent the majority of my time in this majestic city taking hot showers (three in less than 24 hours – my personal best) and watching Star Movies in a gloriously comfortable bed in the Fairlawn Hotel. This is a very nice hotel (although I speak as someone who has spent her life either camping or staying in the very cheapest hostels, so I don’t think my standards are very high…), and I would highly recommend a stay there to anyone visiting Kolkata. It’s not exactly fitted to a back-packer’s budget at $50 for a single room, but it has amazing character – think last bastion of empire, with wonderfully incongruous paintings, ornaments and newspaper cuttings – and the tariff includes a lovely, scrupulously clean room, a more than ample breakfast (watermelon, cornflakes, and a fry up, anyone?), and afternoon tea at 4pm (glorious, simply glorious!).

I can’t really write much about Kolkata yet, as aside from a very interesting Discovery channel programme about the formation of the Sahara desert, I only saw two sights of much interest: the Victoria Memorial, and the Indian Museum. Although I was stalked by a slightly strange guy around the natural history section of the Indian Museum – I even (vainly) resorted to hiding in the invertebrates room (yawn) in the hope that he’d get bored and go away – I would thoroughly recommend both places for a visit. The Victoria Memorial is a wonderfully overblown testament to the folly of empire (Kolkata ceased to be the capital of the empire ten years before this monument to the Empress of India was finished), and well worth a visit (especially at only 150 rupees for entrance). It’s architecturally extremely impressive, and the museum contains a really interesting exhibition about the development of Kolkata and the various different socio-political movements that originated there. The Indian Museum is not quite so impressive, and although it is reportedly India’s best museum I didn’t find it as riveting (although admittedly, this may have been because my attention was somewhat diverted). However, it does have some natural history and art exhibitions that are worth a look. There’s also a central courtyard with a fountain and some handily placed benches – good for plotting stalker-avoidance strategies, but probably also for respite from the summer heat.

Despite my failure to really ‘do’ Kolkata – which some might hope would bring this post to an abrupt end – my twelve hour bus journey from Dhaka gave me ample time to reflect on the differences between West Bengal and Bangladesh. Once we passed the border, reportedly a nightmare of hassle and extortion but really quite straightforward, the bus bounced and rattled its way through mile after mile of villages that could almost have been in Bangladesh, before we reached gridlock in the Kolkatan suburbs. One of the most immediately striking differences between West Bengal and Bangladesh is that nature in West Bengal seems to be altogether more verdant. The trees that line the sides of the roads, just as they do in Bangladesh, are much bigger and older than those on the other side of the border. In Bangladesh, nature feels very much like it’s been shoved aside to make room for all the people. While there are trees and plants everywhere you look, they seem to be much newer, or more temporary. It does make you wonder what has happened to Bangladesh’s trees – perhaps they too were casualties of the liberation war? Or perhaps it’s simply the result of unsustainable population growth and too many poorly thought through development interventions?

Another obvious difference, from my elevated vantage point on the bus, was the omnipresence of flashes of vermilion in partings. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, given that India is a majority-Hindu state, but Hinduism is definitely much more visible in West Bengal.

My favourite sight was the number of sari’ed women riding bicycles. In Bangladesh, I’ve never seen such a sight in all my days. I find myself staring with much curiosity whenever I see a woman on a bike in Bangladesh, and they are almost always wearing headscarves, but in India I’d got bored of the spectacle by the time darkness fell.

A slightly more disheartening difference (purely from the standpoint of my personal vanity) was that the moment I stepped across the border, I immediately became less of a celebrity. At immigration, I got stared at a little – but I suspect this was mainly because I was pig-headedly refusing to allow anyone to carry my 18 kilogram backpack, and explaining my reasons for this in broken bangla. On arriving in Kolkata, I was terribly overwhelmed by the number of foreigners: I was no longer unique, I was no longer special simply because I was the only foreigner in view, and I have to say, I found the experience extremely upsetting. Needless to say, I lost no time in explaining to anyone who would listen that no, I was not travelling or on holiday, but that I actually worked in Bangladesh, and actually I’d been there for over a year and yes, I could speak bangla. I even proudly explained all this in bangla to a guy I got chatting to at an egg-roll stall, only to discover that he was in Kolkata on holiday from Bangalore and did not, in fact, speak any bangla.

Although I did very little of note whilst in Kolkata, I’m very glad I went. I had an instinct that I was going to like the city, and I do, very much. But it also served, with its bright lights and slightly saner traffic and buildings that have been around for longer than thirty years, as a kind of decompression chamber. I think flying from Dhaka to London would have been too much of a culture shock, whereas spending even a few hours in Kolkata reminded me that there was a world outside Bangladesh, before I was catapulted too harshly into it.