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 cottonwool snow, the Santa Clauses with crookedly pasted beards, the spindly Christmas trees.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
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.
CAKE SELLERS
The Anglo-Indians were dwindling by the day. But the al fresco Christmas in Bow Barracks, their old neighbourhood, has become a jam-packed carnival for partiers in Santa hats, very few of whom are actually Christian.
One year I saw a man selling turkeys on the street around Christmas.
TURKEY GOBBLING
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.” A poultry farmer who raised turkeys in his backyard told me he had first encountered turkey meat in a deli in America.
TURKEY GUY1: In departmental store I saw turkey like duck and breast of chicken
He didn’t really know how to cook them. He’d never roasted a turkey. Sometimes his wife made a curry but he didn’t particularly care for it.
TURKEY GUY2: I don’t know what recipe is proper and very tasty I don’t know.
But he raised them because they were hardy birds, easy to raise and made for good business at this time of the year. “People like you want to have turkey for Christmas,” he told me.
The turkeys and suckling pigs now served as Christmas lunch in fancy restaurants in Kolkata are not really from an Indian Christmas. They are from Indian entrepreneurs selling some kind of winter wonderland western Christmas fantasy to Indians. Madhulika Liddle who co-edited the book Indian Christmas with Jerry Pinto, says as a Christian family in Uttar Pradesh, their big Christmas lunch was more well Indian.
ML1:and then for the Christmas lunch there would be chicken curry and mutton Pulao and Shami kabobs and stuff like that
Her mother would bake a Christmas cake but she had to make the candied peel at home because there wasn’t any to be found at the stores. Even the cake would change as it made its way across India.
ML2: I believe the commercial cake known as the Allahabad cake, they put ghee instead of butter and they put orange marmalade, which actually makes sense.14:16 I mean, it's like peel, like peel, you know,
Before baking powder became common people used fermented cashews and apples to make the cake rise. But the Kolkata Christmas with its rich plum cakes and tipsy puddings felt like tacky tinsel, a kind of make-believe Christmas Puja, devoid of real substance.
When I went to the United States as a student I thought I would finally encounter a real Christmas.
The lead-up was promising. San Francisco was bedecked in twinkling lights. A giant Christmas tree came up in Union Square. The department store windows had elaborate manger scenes and wreaths and poinsettia. I could smell the pine leaves and gingerbread. An ice skating rink sprang up in the middle of the Union Square shopping district. Even the pet dogs were parading around in cute red and green Christmasy jackets. The pre Christmas sales, the lights, the carols conjured up a sense of anticipation and excitement.
And then came Christmas Day and I realised everything was shut and I had nothing to do and nowhere to go. The lights were bright but the streets were deserted. My neighbourhood restaurant was only open for lunch. The supermarket close by was shutting early. One year I went to a little resort in the Russian River woods near San Francisco for Christmas. There was a log fire in the room and egg nog in the lobby. But I didn’t realise the dining room was shutting early on Christmas night. My Christmas dinner came out of a vending machine that year. I realised that if you didn’t have family around, Christmas was actually the loneliest time of the year.
It made me utterly homesick for a Kolkata Christmas and appreciate it a little more.
In Bethlehem there was no room at the inn for baby Jesus. But in Kolkata there’s always room for you at the Christmas party. And a slice of rich plum cake.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW