Sudder Street, Calcutta

My last cafe check-in was ACed in Bangkok and now I'm on Sudder Street, at the top of a narrow spiral staircase in what really doesn't qualify as a second floor . Wedged to my left is a mother daughter team scanning "Hindi matrimonials" (.com? .org?) a suitable boy - stand-off on PhD/income vs. Bollywood looks.

Arrived last night.

Another complete re-immersion in India, this time a little easier coming into a city I knew, even if that city is the unknowable, and sometimes unthinkable, Calcutta.

It's a hassle extricating from the airport: the inevitability of lining up twice - first for for rupees then the pre-paid taxi, to be brusquely done with customs (one Johnnie Walker Red over the 2 scotch limit) then bang into a group of Japanese boys exhibiting no group think at all - one by one changing yen to rupees. The arrival hall has one money changer and he prepares carbons for each hand writ receipt and recounts each rupee stack in the rupee counting machine. The Japanese are not anxious (nor do they decide to pool funds), so I reorganize my wallet and investigate my visa stamps and shake out into India time.

Outside the airport door and India begins: the clamor for my pre-paid taxi chit, and the clustering of men with opinions. Calcutta is tidier than I remembered - fewer carrion hawks and tempered sense of imminent collapse.

Almost too easy to check-in at the Fairlawn - I've foregone the arrival battle and the grim-settling in of a lower-budget hotel. That said, I am given an airless, windowless chamber behind a curtain off the main dining room. That it's soaring and large does not make it seem like a bargain at $60 a night. On either side are also single women . I think we're been assembled for easy observation - that we don't get up to unseemly, single-foreign-women behavior... Fairlawn requires full board so the dining room is active. It's hard to feel private, or watch the BBC at any audible level, when I can hear the rattle of tea cups.

The Fairlawn's website trumpeted modernizations. I haven't seen any but don't mind so much - there's comfort in the hotel's cluttered sameness, the royal portraits clipped and pasted onto board and framed, plastic plants and the entry garlanded by plastic vines hung with peaches, pears and grapes. The downstairs is a shimmering kelly green and the upstairs done in browns. The stairwell is layered in celebrity guest shots: Merchant and Ivory et al. The Fairlawn family appears to hold out hope that if they can just keep the Fairlawn as it is, serve meals on time and make friends of each guest, then history might just be stopped for a few decades more. Emerging from the polka-dotted stucco walls of the hotel, out from under the man made greenery, into the tumult of Sudder Street is a disconnect. Surely there was a time when you could step out and into a carriage, swing round to the Governor's House rather than - uninvited - hoofing it around the corner to wait in line for the museum.

Now must go for a nap.

C amidst an era past