I recently read Dan Simmons’ Song of Kali, his horror novel about an American literary magazine editor who travels to Calcutta to acquire a new manuscript from a presumed-dead poet. Now I’m seeing oblique references everywhere. From High and Low by Theodore Dalrymple:
Calcutta is the most literary city in India. The Bengalis have long prided themselves on being in the country’s artistic and intellectual vanguard — which explains, perhaps, why West Bengal has a Marxist government and why Calcutta, until recently, has lagged at the rear of the economic transformation of India’s cities. A disproportionate number of India?s well-known writers in English hail from this terrible and wonderful place, where reality itself has a hallucinatory quality.