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How a Bombay Boy Fell in Love with Kolkata • Michael Chacko Daniels Hunting for the American Express Office

Over the years, when exploring urban areas in my native India, I’ve had some very interesting encounters with local people that I otherwise wouldn’t have had if I had gone about it with a map in hand.

And so it was on the last Saturday in February 2004, when my wife Teresa and I went searching on foot for the American Express office, which the Rough Guide said was on Kolkata’s Old Courthouse Road, where we wanted to change dollars safely into rupees for the next stage of our vacation, which was to start on the morrow in Santiniketan, Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s early twentieth century “abode of peace,” about 102 miles northwest of Kolkata.

Soon after we started, I felt the need to take a leak, and not being able to concentrate on the joys of the search in a city replete with pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial history, I decidedthe immediate priority was to let my nose find a public urinal, which I was sure was somewhere out there.

When my nose found the pit stop, I was disappointed it wasn’t like the clean, artfully designed ones in Kerala in India’s deep south. This urinal was heavily fly-infested, and several of the slots were loaded with feces, where burdened passersby had taken a dump, there being no free public full-service latrine nearby.

I selected a slot that had escaped such attention and gingerly relieved myself, trying to spray flies to keep them from taking a fancy to my exposed parts, always a losing battle, but a great way to concentrate one’s efforts in a discombobulating odoriferous setting.

Traffic on the streets and sidewalks was light, it being early in the day. The air was cleaner and the cityscape brighter than when we traversed some of the same areas on Friday, during the tourist agency’s city tour by car, when we got a hefty dose of particulate-heavy diesel and
non-diesel pollution.

Directions on how to get to Old Courthouse Road from several helpful pedestrians from whom I sought assistance in a halting mixture of Hindi and English seemed quite consistent. One gentleman even took it upon himself to take us part of the way as well.

When we finally got to the street that these persons had identified as Old Courthouse Road, it turned out to be Old Post Office Road, an understandable mix-up because only two words, “Old” and “Road,” must have made sense in my fractured Hinglish query delivered while I was on the move to people who were likewise on the move.

Disregarding the fact that we had mistakenly traversed a significant section of Old Post Office Road as a result of my previous queries, I decided to get back into the business of asking for directions, but this time from a stationary person, instead of from people in motion.

Seeing a seated man, I approached him immediately. He had several days’ worth of grey stubble.
Nevertheless, I thought he looked quite dignified in his striking combination of a navy-blue blazer and white dhoti. He was seated in a simple, cross-legged, yoga-like pose on a tiny board in his hole-in-the-wall cigarette-and-paan stand.

Having grown up in Bombay, I was sure that, like most city cigarette-and-paan-wallahs in India, there’d be little that he wouldn’t know about his urban surroundings, at least at ground level.

I explained to him that we were looking for the American Express office on OLD COURTHOUSE ROAD and were mistakenly directed to OLD POST OFFICE ROAD.

He looked at me from head to toe with one dismissive glance, and said that Old Courthouse Road was a 15-to-20-minute walk from where you are standing, and that—he pressed on—is what a foreign-educated man like you with a foreign wife gets for setting off without an exact street address and a map to look for the American Express office to change dollars to rupees, and then taking directions from strangers who might take advantage of you. And now, you, a non-smoker, are asking for directions from a cigarettewallah!

No, I didn’t think of saying then, as I do now, to this cigarettewallah Sherlock Holmes of Kolkata’s Old Post Office Road: The strangers were kind and helpful. None were disagreeable, although I don’t know a word of Bengali. You are the first rude person we have met in Kolkata. Maybe that’s because you are full of guilt for being a merchant of death.

A peremptory finger pointed. I accepted his succinct gesture, simultaneously dismissive and directional, without a murmur and followed the which-way-to-go line provided by his digit as if it had been drawn on the absent street map for our next foray at finding the American Express office on Old Courthouse Road.

After walking for a few minutes, just to be sure, Teresa, who had by now given up on the success of my rudimentary Hinglish attempts, inquired, in a full Midwestern-accented English, of a policeman at a curbside traffic control kiosk: “How do we get to Old Courthouse Road from here?”

“English?” he inquired. He shook his head, then waved to his partner, who was manually directing traffic as a reinforcement for the automated signals, a duet that, I am told, is often required at locations where people and vehicles are wont to perform a helter-skelter dance of exquisite precision when left to their internal orchestration.

Without any show of reluctance or irritation, the partner walked over, a little regally in his standard-issue helmet, black halter, and white uniform, which had its share of a dust-and-exhaust overlay. He smiled and apologized for his “little English.”

Better than my husband’s atrocious Hinglish, I was sure Teresa was thinking, and rightly so.

“Keep going straight ahead,” the good man explained, “until you come to the street where the tram tracks cross your path, then take a left.”

We thanked him and followed his directions, discovering at the junction a major artery with a majestic apartment building straight out of Calcutta’s British colonial past. Then, we took a left and looked for the distinctive blue that is part of the American Express branding.

We found it shortly, where, after our long meandering through a brighter Kolkata than we had experienced the previous day, we were informed politely that money exchange services were no longer available at that office, and that we had to go to the American Express office on Park Street.

Maybe all you map lovers, including the cigarettewallah Sherlock Holmes of Kolkata’s Old Post Office Road, will be pleased to know that Park Street was not too far from where we had started out that morning.

We decided to continue our search only after a quick refueling stop—a glass of strong chai without sugar for each of us—at Kolkata’s Madras Tiffin, home of South Indian-style idli and dosa, 1042 miles from the erstwhile southern Indian city of Madras (now known as Chennai), an inexpensive eatery that we were delighted to discover the previous day during our map-less meanderings after the tourist agency’s packaged tour by car.

The waiter, who remembered us, suggested that when we returned for lunch, we should try their full meals upstairs, where we could eat at our ease.

And that’s exactly where we went for a full idli-and-dosa thali, our favorite Indian meal, with several glasses of refreshing tea after we found, without difficulty, the money-changing American Express office on Park Street with its armed guard, who appeared, to my inexperienced eyes, to be toting a heavy rifle straight out of the Second World War, which, although no match for equipment available to 21st century criminals and terrorists, was, nevertheless, successful in keeping the location secure while we conducted our transaction there.

Sunday on the train to Tagore’s abode of peace . . .

I missed Kolkata
even as fresh green farmlands
stretched to deep blue sky.

© Michael Chacko Daniels May 2025

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