The first thing you notice when you are about to land in Oslo is the quality of the light.
One minute you are surfing the clouds soaking in the late-noon gold of the six o’clock sun and the next you are enslaved in the grey of the cloud only to emerge in to a shell pink and harsh orange duotone that appears to tease the wingtips making mockery of the time of evening you know as ‘night’ back home in Calcutta. The captain has switched on the seatbelt sign.
Oslo Harbour by Akershus (Photo: Naveen Kishore)
April-into-May and there are traces of snow around. Grey-white. Slate? Matte. Like the foam the sea left behind as if teasing the setting sun.
Viking Ship Museum at Bygdøy (Photo: Naveen Kishore)
Sitting on the sidewalk. Outside the Literaturhus. Facing the now dark green of the park-with-the-palace. My skin begins to take on a hue best described as fluorescent blue. Ten at night. Or is it evening. That particular shade of indigo that makes the occasional rain clouds look translucent and pregnant with Midnight. As if it were a character from a child’s book of fairytales. Such a pleasure this sitting in the open. Being able to watch life go by even as the evening changes into night.
Aker Brygge (Photo: Naveen Kishore)
You come from a city that is full of life. Like an ant-hill. Calcutta with its noise and colour and smell and its frenetic helter-skelter. Its heat. And humidity. You anticipate a ‘rupture’ or at the very least a ‘disorientation’. After all there is Quiet here. Oslo is not densely populated. And nobody seems to be in a hurry. Instead you slip into the rhythm of the city quite easily. The contrast is soothing. Even restful. Not in a lethargic kind of way but in the manner of ‘engagement’. As in ‘conversation’. The quiet urban landscape invites you to converse. The impression one gets from the city is that it ‘expresses a thought’. It makes one want to respond. To explore.
Photo: Naveen Kishore
You’ve always been a walker. Oslo is a city you can traverse on foot. Comfortably. This is good.