At any given weekday morning, Dalhousie Square can give you the impression of being the centre of everything. It has a spin of its own— a wilder orbit inside the earth’s calm blue whirl. Office goers drive through red-lights, cursing each other as they negotiate their way across a sea of humanity. There is no time to loiter around, not when you are on everybody’s way. By afternoon, calm descends, and a sense of hopelessness drifts across its weathered bylanes. It’s then when you notice things around you. The dilapidated Currency Building for instance, its battered exterior gives way to an even more ravaged interior, the gigantic arches of which are mute testimony to better times.

It’s the shock of such ravaged beauty that wakes you up to the ground realities of our city. “We forget that in this city post-Independence architecture resembles habitats for human roaches. The older specimen of architecture is still the best things that the city can offer,” writes Soumitra Das, whose book White & Black: Journey to the centre of Imperial Calcutta (Niyogi Books) is a “clear-eyed view of the changing face of Kolkata’s power centre from the tumultuous days of its establishment to our sad times”. The book threads its way through several recurrent journalistic obsessions, the ebb and flow of the city’s fortune, its fascinating social structure, but White & Black manages to give immediate context to the story.

Das is partnered by photographer Christopher Taylor in this project whose keen, poetic eye for detail brings a sense of forlorn to the frames. His sense of the subject is beyond the perfunctory, Taylor in tandem with Das’s flowing narrative invests a small fortune of visual eloquence in the book, and they get more than the fashionable bare minimum of literary return out of them.

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