Kolkata

The Victoria Memorial stands at the southern end of the Maidan, its white Makrana marble dome rising over formal gardens — part Taj Mahal, part British Museum, entirely unexpected in a tropical city. Built between 1906 and 1921, it now holds a collection of some 28,000 objects covering the East India Company era through independence, including rare paintings by the Daniell brothers and Mughal miniatures. The gardens are where the city jogs at dawn and strolls at dusk; arrive early to beat both the crowds and the humidity. North-west across the Maidan, BBD Bagh — the old Dalhousie Square — concentrates the finest colonial architecture in the country: the Writers' Building of 1780, once the East India Company's headquarters, St John's Church of 1787, and a General Post Office whose dome quotes St Paul's. What makes the quarter worth walking rather than photographing is that it is a working commercial district and not a preserved one: government clerks, tea sellers and courier bikes share the pavements with buildings in states of romantic decay that no restoration budget has yet reached.

The Howrah Bridge, officially Rabindra Setu, is the city's defining image: a cantilever span of some 705 metres carrying its traffic across the Hooghly without a single nut or bolt, since the entire structure is riveted. It was built during the Second World War under steel shortages, using a balanced cantilever design, and it remains among the busiest bridges anywhere, with well over a hundred thousand vehicles and an uncounted flood of pedestrians every day. Walk it at dawn, when the light comes through the steel lattice and the river below turns metallic. Then go down to the Mullick Ghat flower market at its western approach, which explodes into life before sunrise: marigolds stacked in heaps, jasmine strung into garlands, tuberoses arriving by the truckload from upriver farms. It is the largest wholesale flower market in the country and supplies temples, weddings and festivals across eastern India. The combination — the bridge overhead, the haggling below, the river running past — is the single best hour a visitor can spend here, and it is over by the time the heat arrives.

Bengali cooking works on different principles from the North Indian restaurant canon most visitors arrive knowing, and where it sits within Indian food as a whole is sketched in the India food guide. Its foundations are mustard oil — pungent and sharp — the five-spice blend panch phoron, and an almost devotional relationship with river fish, above all ilish, the bony, oily hilsa that Bengalis prepare dozens of ways and regard as the summit of the cuisine. Start on the street: phuchka, the local and tangier version of pani puri; kathi rolls, invented on Park Street in the 1930s and still best from the original kitchen; jhalmuri mixed to order in a paper cone. For sitting down, the city runs from unfussy Bengali thali houses to the smarter kitchens that have made the cuisine legible to outsiders without flattening it. Then the sweets, which are a serious matter here: rosogolla, whose origin Kolkata will defend against Odisha at length; sandesh in dozens of pressed-milk variations; and mishti doi, sweetened yoghurt set in a clay pot that you are meant to eat straight from.

This city produced Asia's first Nobel laureate in Rabindranath Tagore, one of cinema's great directors in Satyajit Ray, and a Nobel economist in Amartya Sen — and it has never once let anyone forget it. College Street, running past Presidency University, is where that pride becomes physical: the largest secondhand book market in the world, stalls stacked with everything from disintegrating paperbacks to rare first editions in Bengali, priced from pocket change to serious money for collectors. The Indian Coffee House nearby is the essential stop, a cavernous first-floor room with ceiling fans, marble-topped tables and waiters in fan-shaped caps who have been serving the same coffee and cutlets to arguing students since the 1940s. Tagore's family house at Jorasanko, where he wrote much of his work, is now a university and museum. For film, the Nandan complex programmes Ray retrospectives and Bengali art cinema at prices that make a habit of it possible.

For five days each autumn, Kolkata becomes something no other city replicates. Durga Puja is nominally the Hindu festival of the goddess's victory over a demon, and in practice it is the reason the city exists — a citywide carnival of art, food and music, drawing millions, that runs around the clock. The pandals are temporary structures built to house the idols, and the competition between neighbourhood committees to build the most extraordinary one drives genuine artistic innovation: past years have produced pandals made entirely from recycled electronics, full-scale architectural replicas, and immersive installations that would not look out of place in a biennale. Do both registers if you can — the traditional craftsmanship at Bagbazar, Kumartuli Park and College Square, then the experimental committees that push the form. Streets close, food stalls run all night, and the whole city walks. Book accommodation months ahead, because every room sells out. The immersion procession on the final day, when the idols are carried to the river, is joyful and unmistakably sad at once.

In narrow lanes near the river, Kumartuli is the artisan quarter that supplies those idols. Families of kumors have sculpted clay deities here for generations in workshops that open directly onto the street, and you can watch the whole process — bamboo and straw armature, river clay mixed with rice husk and jute fibre, layers built up, then the painting and the eyes, which are done last and ceremonially. Activity runs year-round but peaks in the two months before Durga Puja, when the lanes fill with half-finished goddesses drying in rows. A single large idol can stand several metres tall and take months. This is not a visitor attraction with signage and a ticket desk: it is a working neighbourhood where you step around drying figures, paint pots and delivery handcarts. Ask before photographing people, go early while it is cool, and give the artisans room to work. Kumartuli exports idols worldwide, but seeing them made here, in the humidity that shapes the drying time, is the part that cannot be exported.

Park Street — officially renamed, universally not — is Kolkata's most famous boulevard and the clearest expression of the city's mix of nostalgia and appetite. A 1920s tearoom still serves breakfast and pastries in a room that has changed very little. A legendary restaurant still queues out of the door for chelo kebab, minced lamb on buttered rice under a fried egg. A Continental place with a retro interior has been fashionable, then unfashionable, then fashionable again since the 1950s. For a drink, the bar at an old Anglo-Indian hotel is a genuine time capsule, and the newer cocktail rooms along the same stretch are good. At the western end, the South Park Street Cemetery — among the earliest non-church burial grounds anywhere, from 1767 — holds the elaborate tombs of colonial-era merchants and soldiers under old trees, and is peaceful, atmospheric and free to walk. On New Year's Eve the whole street closes and becomes one of India's largest street parties.

Kalighat Kali Temple is one of the most important Shakti Peethas in Hinduism and gave the city its anglicised name. It is a working temple rather than a monument, and it is intense: queues of devotees, flower offerings, vermilion, and a rhythm that has nothing to do with visitors. Animal sacrifice is part of the ritual practice here on certain days, performed in a designated area — worth knowing in advance so you can decide whether to be present for it rather than encountering it unprepared. The surrounding quarter gave its name to Kalighat painting, the nineteenth-century style that blended Hindu mythology with sharp social commentary and is still sold in contemporary versions nearby. A short distance away, the Missionaries of Charity headquarters is open to visitors: the simple rooms, the upstairs chapel and Mother Teresa's tomb on the ground floor stand in deliberate contrast to the global scale of the organisation that grew from them. Modest dress, no fee, and quiet expected in both places.

Kolkata's metro was India's first, opened in 1984, and the original north-south line remains genuinely useful, with newer lines opening in stages. Yellow Ambassador taxis are still an icon and still running, though app-based cabs now carry most of the traffic; both are inexpensive by international standards. In parts of the north, hand-pulled rickshaws survive — one of the last places on earth where they do. The climate decides the calendar: October to February is the pleasant season and holds both Durga Puja and the January book fair, which is itself among the largest in the world. March to May is severely hot and humid. The monsoon from June to September floods streets and slows everything down, while making the city photogenic in a way that has kept Bengali cinema supplied with weather for seventy years. Carry small notes for rickshaws and tea, and learn two words of Bengali — “dhonnobad” for thank you and “kemon achhen” for how are you — which will get you further here than in any other Indian city.