Tintin in Kolkata

I’ve always harbored this perverse itch—call it a congenital anomaly—to sketch Tintin, that Belgian boy-scout busybody, into something altogether less Belgian and considerably more Bengali. Imagine, if you have the gall and grotesquerie, our intrepid ginger-haired lad freshly transmogrified into a quintessential Bengali babu. Belly distended—courtesy of a ferocious bout of rice, hilsa fish swimming luxuriously in mustard gravy, and enough afternoon carbs to tranquilize a baby elephant. He’s lounging in the stuporous afterglow of gluttony, only half-equipped, at best, to stumble into whatever hellish misadventure Kolkata coughs up next. Snowy, that canine opportunist—decidedly less finicky and more Bengali than you’d guess—is already proving a prodigious student of local custom, trotting along smugly with some poor fish clamped between his jaws, a little snack to sustain his colonial doggy resolve through the urban wilderness.

Ah, Kolkata—city of joy, city of garbage. City of putrid heaps that bloom brighter and vaster than seasonal bougainvilleas. The rotting mounds—this fecund tapestry of trash—aren’t mere waste; they are the metric of our urban prosperity. The higher the mound, the more assured you can be of the locals’ magnificent descent into moral turpitude. Fat-ass rats, creatures of superior adaptability and lower social conscience, now rule our rubbish republic, outnumbering even the tea stalls, their beady little eyes flashing contempt at your bourgeois squeamishness.

And what’s that, right at our Bengali Tintin’s feet? A corpse—because, come now, no self-respecting portrait of Kolkata can possibly omit our beloved local staple: a freshly deceased bloke, sprawled inelegantly, tongue theatrically dangling, in unconscious mimicry of Goddess Kali herself, the Divine Mother—equally loving and homicidal. How poetic—how perfectly calcuttan—to meet your maker in the posture of the very deity charged with overseeing your reincarnation.

Right beside him lies another proud local tradition, our homemade specialty—an IED, or Improvised Electoral Device, if you’re feeling politely euphemistic. These little beauties bloom, with clockwork regularity, around election season. After all, we are a robust, if slightly explosive, democracy, and any healthy democratic discourse naturally involves blasting dissenters—those brave, brainless bastards stupid enough not to vote correctly—to tiny, voter-sized fragments. Democracy, in Bengal, is indeed loud, fierce, and momentarily airborne.

Will our boy Tintin survive this steaming stew of Kolkata? Or will he find his famed Belgian pluck utterly inadequate amid Bengali bedlam, the maddening mesh of life and death, hilsa and homicide, bombs and bhadralok? Perhaps he’ll stroll on through, characteristically oblivious, courageously European—because, after all, ignorance is strength and optimism is the armor of idiots. Or maybe, just maybe, he’ll succumb to the city, absorbed into the endless recycling of organic waste, becoming another fatty deposit, indistinguishable from the heaps he so thoughtlessly trod upon.

The suspense might kill you before Kolkata does.