Kolkata is not the first place you think of when planning a holiday. Its reputation for poverty, overcrowding, floods and dirt deter many from visiting but, nevertheless, it's a fascinating place. Charmian Smith explores a city that was once compared favourably with London.
In one of Kolkata's narrow lanes we encounter a traffic jam. A three-wheeled truck and a small car have become jammed between stalls and steps in an alleyway never intended to take more than pedestrians and perhaps a cart. There may be a cow involved as well.
Behind and in front of them traffic, mostly motorbikes and bikes stacked high with boxes, have clogged the street. Pedestrians, hoping to squeeze past, quickly fill any gaps and now no-one seems able to move.
''Welcome to India,'' says a cheerful guy on a motorbike, his pillion passenger almost invisible behind the huge box he is carrying.
The situation looks impossible but a peculiar type of self-organising chaos happens in India. You just need to be patient.
Centimetre by centimetre, the three-wheeled truck is eased forward by a bevy of helpful people. When it finally passes the car with a millimetre to spare, there's a cheer and the jam dissipates quickly, leaving the street crowded but passable.
We continue in search of the mosque, the disused synagogue and the nearby Portuguese church we were looking for.
Kolkata, formerly known as Calcutta, has always been a cosmopolitan city since it was established by the British East India Company in the 1690s. For a couple of centuries it was the capital of British India; now it is simply the capital of West Bengal.
The somewhat dilapidated mansions and civic buildings along Chowringhee (now J. L. Nehru Rd) and round Dalhousie Sq (now B.B.D. Bagh) give some idea of why this was once considered the equal of London or Paris. Its glory faded when the Raj moved the capital from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911.
The city's last great monument of the Raj is the shining white marble Victoria Memorial, started in 1904 and finished in 1921. It rivals the Taj Mahal in size and grandeur, but, perhaps because it is a memorial to a foreign empress rather than an Indian princess, does not have the romance associated with it.
However, there were many visitors, mostly Indian, and to them two Kiwi tourists appeared as much an attraction as the galleries of paintings, sculptures and the history of the city.
The elaborately domed palace is set in extensive grounds at the south end of the Maidan, a large, rough field that is the lungs of the city. Surprisingly for India this appears mostly empty except for a few people flying kites and boys playing cricket.
Anywhere in India it's hard to come to terms with the mass of people, and even more so in Kolkata. Sometimes only a foot sticking out of a large bag lying on the edge of the footpath indicated there was a person asleep in it.
Nooks and crannies everywhere are covered with plastic tarpaulins like tents beneath which families have made their homes. At various places along the street are taps so street dwellers and others can wash themselves and their clothes.
The street is also where modest business happens: whether it's someone with just a few items to sell, a more prosperous-looking salesman with a large stall of clothes or bags or electronics, or a kitchen where people prepare vegetables, make roti, cook dal or rice or slice fruit for sale.
Street food stalls may look dodgy, but we often saw well-dressed men in business suits with briefcases stopping to buy and eat snacks. Opposite the Victorian High Court building is a street of food stalls, patronised by lawyers in robes and bands as well as the hoi polloi.
Not everyone is poverty stricken.
North of the city is the Marble Palace, a mix of classic and Bengali architecture built in 1835 by a wealthy Indian merchant and stuffed with his family's collection of European art. The family still lives in part of the building, but marble statues, paintings, ceramics, furniture and bric-a-brac crowd the large reception and ballrooms.
Napoleon and Wellington glared down from the walls, marble nymphs frolic in the courtyard to the squawks and songs of numerous caged birds, and huge murky paintings - allegedly by Rubens and other European masters - crowded the stairwell walls. With no climate control, the Asiatic Society Library is another conservator's nightmare.
Founded in 1784 to study Asian culture and history along Western lines, the venerable society houses its collections of rare manuscripts, paintings of its distinguished members and many books and journals in an 18th-century mansion and newer adjoining building. Bengal has a rich literary heritage and the library is used to tourists visiting.
A helpful librarian showed us round and brought us copies of its journal and transactions from the late 18th century. Bookworms had tunnelled through the pages, but we were allowed to handle and read them.
Calcutta may have been a grand city in the days of the Raj, but it was not kind to Europeans, judging by the many gravestones in the European cemeteries. Around St John's Church, one of the city's earliest public buildings, are several 18th-century graves and a memorial to the notorious Black Hole of Calcutta in 1756, when the Nawab of Bengal held British prisoners overnight in such cramped quarters that many suffocated or were crushed to death.
But the most awe-inspiring memorials are in the British South Park St Cemetery, where imposing obelisks, pyramids, mausoleums and sarcophagi from around 1767-1790 crowd together among the trees. Many are for young women - ''beloved wife of ...''
- in their early 20s who died of tropical diseases or in childbirth, and many are for young children. Young soldiers killed in battle are well-represented, as well as older men in their 40s or 50s. Not all are government administrators: there are jail keepers, translators, teachers, surgeons and postmasters.
The city spreads along the east bank of the Hooghly River, a thriving port until the opening of the Suez Canal in the mid-19th century diverted sea traffic via the shorter route to Bombay on the west coast of the subcontinent.
It seems the best way to cross the river is by the busy ferries that go to and fro and up and down the river - except that getting the right ticket and finding the ferry you want is more difficult than it appears. But in India you have to be flexible. Discovering our tickets were for the riverside park instead of the ferry, we decided we'd sit and watch the river instead and cross it another time.
Through the misty white pollution, we could make out the castle-like form of the two giant red and white terminals of Howrah railway station, one of the biggest in the country, on the west bank. Near to it loomed the ghostly struts of the 1943 Howrah bridge.
The river, considered holy as it is part of the Ganges system, is both highway and bathroom, with people washing themselves and their clothes along the edges.
In fact, any body of water is used for washing, dumping rubbish and even swimming, like the large tank occupying the middle of B.B.D. Bagh surrounded by stately administration buildings from the Raj.
Once it held the city's drinking water, and is still home to a few water lilies surviving among the rubbish and people living under tarpaulins around the edge.
People wash themselves, float on their backs and even fish in it.
A fellow near the Calcutta Angler's Club hut demonstrated the large size of fish they would catch - it seems fishermen's stories are the same the world over!Two of the city's holiest temples, Kalighat and Kumatuli dedicated to the goddess Kali (after whom the city is said to be named), were originally close to the river, which has changed its course over the years.
Kumatuli to the north, is small and quiet in a district where larger-than-life-size statues of the goddess Durga are made from straw and mud for the festival of Durga puja, in which they are carried into the river. A barge behind one of the workshops was unloading river mud for the purpose.
To the south of the city is the temple of Kalighat, where the toes of the right foot of the goddess Sati are said to have fallen to earth. It's an important Hindu temple, crowded with rows of shops selling garlands of marigolds and other devotional items leading up to the gates.
The courtyard is full of life - and death. A goat had recently been sacrificed and was now being butchered in a corner. Inside the madhouse of the shrine itself, smoky with incense, people pushed and shoved to get a glimpse of the goddess. Black, with three red eyes and a long golden tongue protruding from her mouth, the dark mother goddess was swathed with garlands.
We escaped into the street again. Behind the temple, we looked into a new building that housed a dharamsala, a religious rest-house or sanctuary. It was a peaceful refuge with rows of empty beds with green covers and a Christian nun in a blue-edged white sari working with medicines, a complete contrast with the seething mass of humanity in the Kalighat.
