Three weeks ago I visited Kolkatta (a business trip) for the first time. I had an evening all to myself and Saurabh, a colleague from the Kolkatta office of my company offered to give me a whirlwind tour of the city. So off we set out in his Maruti car.

Kolkatta, Calcutta renamed – the city that saw the rise to sainthood of Mother Teresa, the city that has become the citadel of the democratically elected Left Government, a city that was once the capital of undivided India and the jewel of the East, a city immortalized in Dominic Lapierre’s “The City of Joy”.

Today Kolkatta is a gray city - a city that could do with a splash of color. The houses sport a resigned gray, industries sport a sooty gray; vehicles, roadside dwellers and urchins sport a grimy gray and the air - a smoky gray. Trams trudge along gray with the weight of tradition, buses speed along gray from dirt and the Howrah Bridge (Rabindra Setu for the Kolkattans) swings suspended – gray from neglect. The metro zooms on under the ground from Tollygunge to Dum Dum, gray with the weight of thousands of commuters while the Hooghly meanders slowly along gray from pollution.

In the dingy gray rooms of the brothel district of Sonagatchi, men achieve paid-for gray orgasms as a gray sky seeps in through rusted and dust enveloped gray windows. Outside, more working class men and well-off men jostle shoulder-to-shoulder waiting for the whores to come out and accept them in. The long night shift continues. On the roads beautiful young women -white skinned, wide-eyed and garishly made-up- stand provocatively, a glimpse of the midriff or a peek of the navel showing, their dark gray eyes hiding stories untold. Vehicles slow down and pulse rates go up as a multitude of traveling men instinctively hit the brakes and indulge in a minute or two of unrestrained and unpaid for voyeurism. The demo works on some and brakes are applied while others accelerate on.

I travel past the city’s monuments – the Salt Lake Stadium, the Victoria Memorial (gray from switched-off night lights), the Eden Gardens Stadium (men work on into the gray night renovating the cricket stadium), the General Post Office (resplendent and white even on a gray night), the Writer’s Building (not many security personnel around), the Governor’s Residence, the Howrah Bridge, the Howrah Railway Station and the boat jetties.

On my way back to the city, we stop over the Howrah Bridge as the heavy traffic jams. As the Maruti slows down to a halt, I can feel a gentle, rocking, up-and-down motion as the bridge suspended between 2 giant pylons and stretched like a tight spring coils under the weight of thousands of passing vehicles with their cargo – human and otherwise. I see majestic warehouses from the days of the British gray (decaying plaster) and grand red (exposed bricks) – cast iron name boards still standing.

We park our car near outside the Girish Park Metro station and take the local Metro train to Esplanade – the heart of Kolkatta. The betki pathoori (betki fish steam cooked in banana leaves with green mustard sauce) and the traditional Bengali "maha bhoj" we have at Aheli - a Bengali restaurant, are pure manna from the heavens. We take the Metro back from Esplanade to Girish Park to retrieve our car. We retrieve our car and travel homewards.

I soon reach the residential districts of Salt Lake City. The night air cuts my face from a small crack in the rolled up windows of the car. I snuggle deeper into the warmth of my jacket.

Kolkatta moves on. Graying into history. Women bargain for luscious looking oranges on grimy gray pavements. A group of folk artists perform a mythological on the roadside to an audience a dozen strong as passing vehicles spew smoke on the scene to give it a Bollywoodian fantasy effect. Vehicles pass into the hazy cold night disappearing from view into the smog.

Kolkatta moves on…graying into history…