SHANTANU DATTA returns with a hangover

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast. ERNEST HEMINGWAY to a friend in 1950.

I happened to be in there on a Sunday Zidane and Co. were to take on Maldini and his men in Rotterdam. I was raring to go, the city would surely present interesting opportunities, I thought. Alas, Paris on a Sunday morning is a tired Paris, not plain lazy like Calcutta or Bangalore. The city ofEiffel’s pioneering tower is worn out. ‘Cause the night before, it was a full house at the Crazy Horse and Moulin Rouge, the cafes stopped serving wine early morning and shut shop and all the late night shows of Mission Impossible II were over-booked. Most Parisians take a time-out on Sunday mornings.

So as I was escorted out of the mammoth Charles de Gaulle airport and its amazing array of flyovers. Luggage was on the rollers in 10 minutes flat and maybe a certain Narayana Murthy had something to do with it as in its early days Infosys worked out a software solution for handling cargo here - I thought of the things I could do that morning. And while on the hour-long drive to our Grand Hotel on Rue de Littre, I tried in vain to get some ideas from the escort of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on whose invitation I was there. We were 14 journalists from Asia getting to know about the French presidency of the EU. ‘‘Sorry Monsieur. Don’t mind,.we speak French,’’ Hamid said smiling as the chauffeur ignored the sudden downpour and went on blabbering. Damn! What a fool I was. The bubble burst fairly early: Paris cold to visitors?

That evening things changed dramatically. The shower had washed the streets, neon signs shimmered, the massive video screen on the Galeries Lafayette Tower at Montparnasse — the tallest building Parisians love to hate.— flashed clips of street soccer. The mood was distinctly Euro 2000. At Cafe Leffe, they began unscrewing some of the lampshades that were blocking the view to the television sets. By 7 pm it was packed. Youngsters with their faces painted blue and red sang ‘‘alle alle’’ and I got talking to an old lady already on her third beer that was going at a premium of 50 francs. The only time I had such football fun was when Mohun Bagan played East Bengal in Calcutta. The rest is history. France won and Paris exploded. Champs Elysees had millions partying that night.

Yes, Paris is warm after all. Make the effort, she’ll help. Otherwise she lets you be. That suited me fine. The next few days were spent on EU matters: a day in Strasbourg to hear President Chirac and another in the land of Tintin’s creator Brussels where we drooled over her old buildings and Belgium’s untiring efforts at preserving them. In Brussels we also met Shada Islam, a Pakistani journalist working for the Far Eastern Economic Review and The Nation. Daughter of Qamarul Islam, ICS and Pakistan’s ambassador in Brussels during the sixties, it was she who put us in tune, perspective and all, about the European unity effort over some divine chocolate mousse. And Mohammad Ziauddin of The Dawn and yours truly took perverse delight in sharing some details in Hindi.

Friday was free. A bus tour of the Eiffel Tower, only to see it streaming with American tourists with handy cams, the gargoyles of the Notre Dame and the Louvre gave us the mandatory pictures. We skipped the Mona Lisa, naturally, but fell for the golden mummies who would bow to say ‘‘merci’’ the moment you tipped them. Later, Ziauddin and I roped in Noorca Maasardi, an editor from Indonesia, for a little expedition on foot. We chose the intellectual delights of the Sorbonne area on the Left Bank as opposed to the Jean Paul Gaultiers of the Right and spent 25 francs to take home a bit of Paris air that comes in sealed tin boxes. We stopped by at the Shakespeare and Co, named after Sylvia Beach’s bookstore, the first publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s distasteful to call it a bookshop. Shakespeare and Co is an idea. It is quaint, old, dank and stacked with books. Very College Street, very Calcutta. The difference is that it has a writers’ commune upstairs, and we even met one dishing out invites to the launch of his latest translation of poems by Bengali poet Pradip Choudhry.

Maasardi took us the long way. He knows Paris well, he studied journalism there. We took our time through the narrow Rue de Beux Arts, Rue Bonaparte and Rue Jacob to see the art galleries where the hopeful and the established both book space years ahead. At the Theatre De La Huchette, they still play Ionesco’s Lesson ever since it started but there were no tickets left for that evening. Or else...
We walked on and breathed in the antiques, art, porcelain, pottery, tapestries, cognac and champagne as we hit Place Sarte-Beauvoir, newly christened as France is commemorating the 20th anniversary of the French thinker’s death this year. Just across is Paris’s existential mecca, Cafe de Flore, which takes pride in retaining its ’30s decor. Next to it is Les Due Magots, a favourite of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. We touched base there. We had to. Over coffee, we stared at the place, teeming with people on a working day. Gosh, to think the old man’s sea was here. Our legs were giving way. It was time to go back to De Littre. Retracing our steps on Rue de Rennes, Maasardi told us about a cafe in Spain that was so tired of queries on whether Hemingway had ever had coffee there, it decided to change its name to Hemingway Was Never Here. Madrid wasn’t on our itinerary, and we couldn’t check that story. But who cares, we all had a good laugh.

They call Paris the best city in the world. Eight hours on its streets and we knew why.

Next - Crossing The Bridge