Addictive Summer Reads
Lovin’ my “exotic” summer
This year my summer plans are to do the same thing I’ve done nearly every summer for the past 21 years—spend time in Kolkata, India. Kolkata (previously known as Calcutta) is where my husband grew up and where a good number of his family, including his mother, still live.
Family, as regular readers of my blog already know, is very important to me. Likewise, so is culture—knowing and experiencing one’s own culture. For my children to truly know their Indian half, we’ve always come to Kolkata in the summer (weather-wise it’s the worst time to go because of the heat (currently it’s about 100 degrees) and monsoon rain, but for school schedules has been the only time when we could visit). As a result, they’ve, in essence, grown up in Kolkata, even if they only lived there for 4-6 weeks at a time.
The city is an enormous, overwhelming place. It’s an ever-changing, growing city of millions of people (overcrowding is a serious problem) who live in every situation from near palace-like homes to literally on the sidewalk (sometimes you’re forced to walk in the street so that you don’t walk through someone’s “home”). There are so many shops, many of them are no wider than five feet and along some of the busier streets, they line either side of the sidewalk with one side being physical brick and mortar shops and the other being either tables covered with a tarp (remember those monsoon rains) and an electrical wire reaching across the sidewalk to allow for a bare light bulb to light the wares offered or just a tarp spread along the ground and the wares for sale arranged on the ground. From these shops you can buy everything from kitchen wares to underwear.
The bazaar where one buys food hasn’t changed much in the past three hundred years. Still vegetables are sold again either displayed on a table, or more likely in baskets on the ground by sellers sitting cross-legged in the center of whatever they’re selling, balance at hand to weigh what you choose. Vegetable sellers are grouped together, potato/onion/garlic/ginger sold by another person, fruit by another; rice (at least 5 or 6 types are on offer) in another. If you want fish, you need to go to the fish market; meat to the butcher (only goat and chicken are for sale, very little pork and no beef). Cages of live chickens are situated near the chicken seller who will grab a chicken (you can specify which one you want), cut off it’s head on one or two swipes of his enormous knife, pluck it and cut it into as many pieces as you want. Happily, now there are also shops where you can buy pre-cut chicken so you don’t have to stand and watch this gruesome procedure.
More and more supermarkets are appearing in the city, most of which are just for dry and frozen goods. And constantly old single-family houses are being torn down to be replaced by new apartment buildings—my mother-in-law gets called every week by the real estate developers offering to buy her house.
It’s an amazing place, Kolkata. With old and new existing side by side. Things that haven’t changed in hundreds of years mixing with the modern (the vegetable seller who doesn’t own a scale, but still weighs his goods with a balance and weights and who will have a cell phone tucked under his leg).
Some people hate the city because it is dirty and overcrowded. Venturing out of your house is taking your life into your own hands as driving laws are treated as merely suggestions, lanes are constantly ignored, and those pretty red and green lights that hang in intersections only sometimes adhered to. But I love it. It’s vibrant and proudly intellectual having given birth to some of the greatest artists and writers of India. Behind the grime of modern pollution you can see what once were amazing palace-like homes with distinctive, beautiful architecture.
This is where I’ll be spending my summer enduring the heat and basking in the love of my family.
If you’d like a little taste of Calcutta (as it was called during the Raj: the occupation of India by the British) you can find it in my Regency romance, An Exotic Heir, where the hero, Julian Ritchie took full advantage of the beauty of the city in order to woo the lovely English Cassandra Renwick. It’s one of my favorite novels because I was able to describe the city and show Cassandra falling in love with it as much as she was falling in love with Julian.
To one lucky commenter, I have this pretty bag which I bought here in Kolkata. 
Here are a few more pictures I took just today (Friday, the 27th) of the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata (known to the locals as the “Toria Moria”)
The English in Calcutta during the time of An Exotic Heir.
