When father remarked about the soil of Calcutta

Father had a thing about Calcutta. He remarked that Calcutta has a damp smell in it's soil that does not allow a person to work hard and excel. Make something of himself. So, when I was doing my tickets to go Calcutta back in 1988 from Nagpur, he was circumspect about my future there. I landed up. Got a job. Made a career somehow. Then, pushed off to Guwahati and two years later again landed back in Calcutta where we met up. These were times when Salman Khan and Sunny Deol were just about being accepted in the city. Mithun and Govinda ruled. And Sanjay Dutt was making news with every film that he was coming up with. He arrived in the early evening. We had dinner together. I remember I was reading a book that had some funny cricket anecdotes. So, I read some anecdotes out to him. He did not have his mind on those anecdotes. He asked me if I was happy doing what I was doing. Now, asking such a question to a 23 year old is a bit of stretch. I used to have a job at a decent hotel. I used to go to work everyday. I got paid for what I did. I had very less friends. I used to live at my maternal uncle's place. In their loft. I had nothing that you could call burning ambition. I didn't know if people had that in 1991. So he took his time and explained. Through his own experiences as a youngster in Calcutta back in the early sixties. He used to be a lecturer in a college and a tutor to some students. He spent the rest of his time alternating between the theatres, the cinema halls and Mohun Bagan football ground where he was a regular during the league season. But he motivated himself to be a better man. Read books. Gave competitive exams and then things turned out well for him within the year. In effect, he was asking me to be a bit more ambitious. I knew that some of my classmates were already blazing through better jobs and gaining better skills. I wasn't. And even if I was, I had no clue that I was gaining something. So, I knew he was trying to inject sense into me. The same thing about Calcuttan soil again came up. For once, I felt that he was anxious about my career. Every father has a right to think about his son's career. He did too. But anxiety was never father's forte. We turned in for the night. By the next morning, he had probably decided that he needed to be more ebullient and positive. He cracked a joke about father and son going to work together the first time in life. He to his head office near the High Court and me to Shakespeare Sarani where my hotel was. We took a train and then the ferry across the Hooghly that day. We parted awkwardly, he giving me a half hearted pat on my back. Probably to propel my deadening ambition. Two days later he went away. That was that. He passed away two months later. I was very late to Pune where he breathed his last. Oh, he was right about Calcutta. It even turned Kolkata for a change in fortune. But nothing's turned for the better. Now Bengal pulls Kolkata along.