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http://www.rediff.com/getahead/slide-show/slide-show-1-travel-inside-is...
The city of Istanbul is easy to fall in love with. Kushal Chowdhury was the latest victim.
I travelled to Turkey for ten days with two friends in July 2011. Now, almost a year later, reading about the turmoil the country is in at
the moment, my mind, invariably, takes me back to those ten days and it occurs to me that I must document them as best as I can, before more images slip away into that unforgiving labyrinth like the first view of the Bosphorus has. As I write, I realise that I recollect a great many scattered images in glorious detail while large chunks in between have gone missing. I suppose it is comforting to presume that the brain intuitively retains only the best and the most important bits, but really, can one be certain? I remember, for example, a mundane breakfast in one of the many by-lanes that thread their way through Istiklal Avenue. It isn't our first day in Istanbul. We are in a cafe; the tables are set outside on the street. We eat what we have throughout the trip -- simit (ringshaped bread with sesame seeds) with cheese and tea (cay in Turkish; pronounced chaai). There are two old men sitting on chairs set out for them next to us. They share a newspaper and a cup of tea. There is no table laid out for them. They are regulars. The street is quiet and peaceful at this hour. I remember sounds the swishes of brooms, the unseen scooters on another street and the sirens of ferries. Why do I remember all this? Istiklal Avenue, incidentally, is right in the eye of the storm that Turkey faces today. It is where the fiercest protests have been. It is where the voices against Erdogan are the loudest. From having spent several hours there, it is not hard to understand why this must be the place. It is in Istiklal that Istanbul is at its
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7/31/2013 7:51 AM
http://www.rediff.com/getahead/slide-show/slide-show-1-travel-inside-is...
most modern, most liberated -- or most 'western' if you like. I am trying to remember the first evening of revelry in Istiklal. It is easily one of the most memorable evenings of the trip, indeed one of the most memorable of any trip. A flurry of bright images appears, out of sync, but the disjointed nature of the recollections is probably more to do with all the raki we drank than natural erosion. From them, I piece together, what I suppose, is a chronological sequence of events.
And so it is that we head to Istiklal for the evening, having been simultaneously awed and underwhelmed by what we have seen
during the day, with high hopes of an exuberant evening. My cousin, who is incidentally in the city for some months as a visiting faculty at the local university (Man, how I hate him!), has assured us that there isn't a better place to be in after the sun goes down. He meets us at the Sultanahmet end of the Galata Bridge near the Grand Bazaar. We walk on the bridge over to the other side as the sun sets, the inimitable Istanbul skyline behind us. On both sides of the bridge, we see hundreds of men -- tourists and locals, rich and poor -- fishing. Their fishing rods are placed on the parapet, the lines plunging to the water below. Next to each man lies a basket or a vessel to hold the day's catch. It is a unique sight. The bridge deposits us into Karakoy (Galata district; for the football minded, this is where Galatasaray belongs) from where the Tunel -- a two-coach shuttle train inside an underground tunnel -- takes us to Istiklal. An astonishing range of colours and lights and smells greet us. There are neon lights of every conceivable colour; the shops on either side, the quarters over them, the spaces between them -- they are all covered in these lights. The street itself stretches out ahead of us and although it is only a few kilometers before it opens on to Taksem Square, just then it makes us believe that it never ends. All around us there are food stalls and restaurants and cafes and pubs and Turku bars (dimly lit spaces with live Turkish music).
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Somewhere in the middle of all these, there are the unavoidable McDonald's and Subway; we are grateful to find that they are both nearly empty.
7/31/2013 7:51 AM
http://www.rediff.com/getahead/slide-show/slide-show-1-travel-inside-is...
W e take the ferry back near sundown, and this time, the domes and minarets and everything else form silhouettes against a gradually darkening orange sky. The waters of the Bosphorus are no longer turquoise; they too reflect the sky's orange. Some of our best pictures of Istanbul are from then. Is it then that our memories are slave to the pictures we take? I wonder while I write. Is it then that the fact that I remember so much of certain passages and nearly nothing of others is merely a product of the pictures I have or have not taken? I haven't a single photograph of the Bosphorus when I first passed by it. But I remember so much else that is not captured in pictures, that can perhaps not be captured in pictures. I remember searching desperately for ways to grasp the concept of Huzun, as I have imagined it, from reading Orhan Pamuk's fascinating memoir on Istanbul. Pamuk describes 'Huzun' as it applies to the residents of Istanbul -- as individuals and as a people. 'Huzun', he explains, is a Turkish word, without a precise English equivalent; it defines a state of mind in which one experiences a melancholy that comes from a mixture of great spiritual loss and hope. Istanbul evokes it, according to Pamuk, through the awareness of its glorious past and the realisation that the city's greatest era is, perhaps, left behind forever; a forlorn pride that the people of Istanbul experience throughout their lives. Although I have spent hours in the neighbourhoods Pamuk actually describes -- Cukurcuma, Cihangir, etc -- it is, in fact, in Kadikoy that I recall sensing this feeling most palpably -- perhaps because the old, short buildings, red-gray and decrepit, the damp streets, the old people gathered in cafes such as the one I just described and a general sense of artsy decay remind me of Kolkata -- a city that I believe will understand and embrace Huzun as much as Istanbul does. It is a great city, Istanbul -- to me, the greatest city I have seen yet. The sights are breathtaking. The people are warm and friendly. The women are gorgeous. The food is sumptuous. And the memories of it still left to me are incomplete and haphazard but filled with indelible images and cheerful vagueness. And there's the Bosphorus.
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