Notes from Hooghly: How Kolkata reveals itself through its people

Before the Mullick Ghat Flower Market, drivers and labourers lie about on tarpaulin sheets in postures mimicking the dead: mouth agape, flies holding congress at the edges of their cracked lips, white marbles visible through the parted eyelids. It is five in the morning, and I must walk through this glorious exhibition of rest and relaxation to reach my destination: the Siyaram Akhara Byayam Samity. A not-for-profit wrestling school at the Chote Lal ghat by the Hooghly.

I expect the usual: oiled men in loincloths, a grand display of hypermasculinity as they twist and turn. I wonder about the interiority of the lives of these men, who, without exception, wake up at four in the morning. What would their days look like after 8:30 AM, when the school shuts down? What dreams and thwarted desires do they pursue? One of the pehelwans, Ajay Singh, uses the more poetic word for early morning, bhor. Unlike the ordinary subah, bhor conveys a more reflective relationship with daybreak, signifying hope and renewal. He runs a shop that deals in crockery.

“A few years ago, I became diabetic, and I met guru ji, Suraj Kant Tiwari, who came to our shop,” Singh recalls. “He told me not to worry about it and invited me to the akhara to practice and exercise. Three months later, there was no blood pressure or diabetic problems.”

Tiwari, the guru ji, is not keeping well today. He is down with a terrible bout of fever. I imagine him to be an elderly man. After all, if Singh is 52, Tiwari must be an old hand, experienced enough to command the respect he does in the akhara. There are little boys too in their loincloths, still anticipating their guru ji as they go about warming themselves up. “Feel this sand,” Singh invites me inside the small, square-shaped wrestling field, grabbing a fistful of the clayey sand and letting it fall on my open palm. “Do you feel how soft it is? It’s because we’ve mixed it with milk, ghee, and honey.”

There is an almost religious reverence to wrestling. Before the practice, there is a pooja to Lord Hanuman, and another pehelwan covers the idols with a fresh coat of orange paint. Just then, Tiwari, the guru ji, arrives, and he’s nothing like the man I expected him to be. He is in his early 30s, well built, sporting baggy jeans, a loose t-shirt, and his sacred thread tucked into his ear. He tells me the history of the akhara in slow, measured breaths. The fever has drained him, but his eyes glow when he mentions his father, Jwala Tiwari, the original guru, his guru too, who founded the akhara more than six decades ago. He trained over a thousand boys in the akhara until his last breath.

“This is all for free,” he says. “Anyone from any faith and caste is welcome here. It’s our home, and it’s a sanctuary for our dreams, to see our boys go to the Olympics, to not let worldly distractions fool them.”

The chiselled Tiwari is a favourite with the photographers. He knows how to stand below the banyan tree so that the right sliver of sunlight falls on him; he’s conscious that the Howrah Bridge must be the background when he’s flexing his muscles for the cameras. After the wrestling wraps up, he sheds the saffron loincloth and slips back into his t-shirt and jeans, ready to work part-time as a car-parking-lot supervisor, issuing tokens. When he’s feeling low, he seeks comfort in Bhojpuri songs in all their autotuned glory.

The Siyaram Akhara, then, is the focal space for everything the men are left wanting for in other parts of their lives. It’s where Singh magically found the cure for his diabetes, where men confide in Tiwari about the sadness of their lives, how unemployment eats away at their self-confidence. “But what am I? I’m just a pehelwan,” Tiwari says, gazing dreamily at the fog-encased Howrah Bridge. “When we need each other, we pehelwans ensure the one thing that most adult relationships lack: to be physically present. Sometimes, that’s good enough.”

He won’t look at me. What he’s just said seems almost too alien to his own ears. In keeping up with the tradition of the heterosexual Indian man who can’t let a vulnerable moment linger too long, Tiwari eventually faces me and, with a beaming smile, says: “Khair, kushti karein (Anyway, let’s wrestle?)?”

“This is all for free. Anyone from any faith and caste is welcome here. It’s our home, and it’s a sanctuary for our dreams, to see our boys go to the Olympics, to not let worldly distractions fool them.” —Suraj Kant Tiwari, Siyaram Akhara Byayam Samity"

The island of little fears 

Less than eight kilometres from Tiwari’s empire of oiled men is Tangra, the Chinatown of Kolkata, where Mr Lan Fo’an, 92, is deeply worried about my persistent cough. “Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa is the only solution to your problems,” he is referring to the ancient Chinese cough syrup made from herbs, loquat leaf, fritillary bulb, and honey.

My last meeting with Fo’an was when I bumped into him at a sauce shop in Tangra. He’d invited me over for a steaming bowl of wonton soup later that evening, and we’d discussed his childhood in Hakka, China. When he moved to the city in 1942, his father was a tannery hand in Tangra, one of the Hakka men who did the work nobody else in the city would even touch: the soaking, scraping, and liming of hides. Before Tangra became home to chilli chicken and most of what we now know as Indo-Chinese cuisine, it was home to tanneries like those operated by Fo’an’s father.

"The Siyaram Akhara is the focal space for everything the men are left wanting for in other parts of their lives. It’s where Singh magically found the cure for his diabetes, where men confide in Tiwari about the sadness of their lives, how unemployment eats away at their self-confidence."

“Did you not wander around in Tangra before you met me? Padlocks everywhere,” he says. “Old Chinese restaurants shut. It’s only during the Chinese New Year that there is some illusion of life—drummers, paper dragons. But that’s about it.”

Fo’an still won’t leave Tangra. All his friends are dead, and his sons, now working in petrochemical factories in Canada, have given up on persuading him. He asks me if I’ve been reading news of some stupid old man who refuses to sell his ancestral house, and how the government is forced to construct the highway around it. “I’ve read versions of the same story in at least three different countries,” he says. “Well, I’m that man in Tangra. The only difference is that no government or landlord is after my house, it’s just me, like a cat foolishly trying to catch her own tail.”

Fo’an, for all his bravado, his overbearing appearance, his dragon-gilded walking stick and heavyset glasses, is a deeply afraid man. At night, he worries that his sons will perish in a forest fire. During lunch, he keeps looking at the ceiling because he’s convinced a lizard will fall into his soup. It’s this bouquet of little fears that has kept him locked in Tangra, the wonton soup being his only consolation prize for a life lived. He’s not sure if this anxiety, this constant fear that gnaws at him, has a medical name to it. “I’m too old to get medicated anyway,” he resigns. “But Calcutta is home to all my fears. When I look outside my window, I see people more scared than me, more scared than they have ever been, worried not about the horrors of the night but of the uncertain days. I think I’m doing okay in the grand scheme of things.”

Kolkata Unbeaten 

The May heat clings to every pore of the city and the body like summer insects burrowing deeper, in the pursuit of some cool, dark place. On  Strand Road, built nearly two centuries ago, after exiting the Siyaram Akhara, the heat is still brutal. A man, armed with a Cinthol soap, showers standing on the footpath next to an open government tap that seems like it’s been the source of many gurgling streams for decades. The heat radiates from the polyphonic buses, boxy, hand-painted in their unmistakable livery, with destinations lettered by hand in Bengali and English down the flank:

Kalighat, Bhowanipur, Exide, Burrabazar. Men rest their heads on the open window grilles. In front of Akashvani Bhavan, traffic cops defy the weather in their thigh-high gumboots and white uniforms. Inside the air-cooled Calcutta Cricket and Football Club, the oldest cricket club in the world outside Britain, patrons wipe their fingers on monogrammed tissues after eating their bhetki with its crumpled jacket and chicken kobiraji, where the cutlet is wrapped in a lacy net of fried egg.

Pradip Lama, my driver from Darjeeling, takes in all these sights with me over the course of four days. He too is an outsider—unfamiliar with the deeper rhythms of Kolkata, unfamiliar with some overarching logic that must govern the city once labelled as a “packed and pestilential town” by TIME magazine in its July 7, 1958, article covering the cholera outbreak.

“The new government is changing the colour of the city’s footpaths to saffron now, but Kolkata has always been the same, so the colours might change but the people will not,” he tells me, as we sit sipping tea on our haunches in the Maidan—the city’s widest green lung. It runs from Raj Bhavan at Esplanade in the north down to the National Library at Belvedere Road in Alipore, and from the Victoria Memorial in the east across to the Hooghly in the west.

“Any city can be like a cage,” he postulates. “Look at me: I arrived here 15 years ago with my family, and I cannot leave, because I am in the same field as that Chinese uncle.”

I ask him where he’d go if he could leave, and he says it’s not something he’s ever given any serious thought. His rationale is a mix of fable and reality. The city will not let you starve, is his reason number one. What about the immigrants, legal and illegal? Does he fear them? “People are cutthroat everywhere, and I hate it when we start blaming everyone but us. No god is waiting to hand us all on a platter. And is it so bad, after all, to strive for a better life?”

This article originally appeared in Harper's Bazaar India's June-July 2026 print issue.

Lead image: Morning practice at the Siyaram Akhara, the Howrah Bridge behind them; Pie Aerts

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