The spirit of globalization fuels the gusto with which this Hindu-Muslim city celebrates Christmas—another British legacy—with colored lights festooning the streets, decorations on sale everywhere, and life-size Santa Clauses sculpted of mud and straw in the same workshops that produce the myriad Hindu gods. On Christmas Eve, thousands of Calcuttans of different religions converge on St. Paul’s, the British-built 19th-century Gothic cathedral, infusing the holiday with a cosmopolitan ambience.

The pace of change in Calcutta still isn’t on a par with that of China, but the city is headed in the same direction. Shikha Mukerjee, who directs a nongovernmental organization and has spent her whole life in Calcutta, notes that the world of the leisurely wealthy, with their live-in servants, is disappearing, as the upper classes live a less secure, more frantic existence. But Calcutta’s middle class, which has always been here, has taken on greater visibility, thanks in part to its consumerist buying sprees. According to a recent study by McKinsey & Company, discretionary spending by Indian consumers accounted for 52 percent of average household consumption in 2005 (up from 39 percent in 1995); by 2025, it will rise to 70 percent.

“It’s not the fancy malls,” Mukerjee said, “but the low-end centers that are the heart of the change—the people who have created jobs for themselves by altering clothes, fixing appliances, and so on. I have a tailor who travels from an outlying slum area each day to occupy a particular place on the sidewalk with his sewing machine, where his clients come to him. He’s saving money, he told me. That’s what Calcutta is really about these days.” The pavement soup kitchens selling noodles and curry dishes testify to the rise of a lower middle class, up from abject poverty, that requires cheap meals during the workday. The increase in family cars has led to the most-persistent traffic jams I have experienced in the developing world, worse even than Tehran’s, Bangkok’s, or Cairo’s.

URBAN MAKEOVER: Street barbers in the Kalighat neighborhood of Kolkata

Sealdah was my own private, childhood nightmare,” Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri told me, referring to the railway station that in the late 1940s, after the partition of India, housed thousands of Hindu refugees from Muslim East Bengal, who had arrived in Calcutta destitute, with nowhere to go. Even today, because it’s the terminus for trains arriving from India’s under-developed northeast, Sealdah remains unnerving, with its armies of people disgorged onto the platforms, fanning out amidst the other armies squatting with their suitcases on the station floor.

“But you know what?” the gray-haired English professor said. “Most of those people, with little or no help from the government, settled themselves somewhere. They didn’t just die or go begging.” The process continues today. The Calcutta street, Chaudhuri and others explained, is less a dead end than a way station, just as shantytowns are in Turkey. But since India is so much poorer than Turkey, the way station is that much harsher. “If you come back each decade,” notes Chaudhuri, “the poverty looks the same, so you think nothing has changed. But the individuals on the street are different. They come from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, and Bangladesh, with no place to live, because on the streets you can earn something, save something, and move on.” Opportunity, as much as poverty, creates slums. Indeed, if there is a trend in Calcutta’s slums, it is the fitful transition—gentrification, in its own way—from kutcha (mud) and jhupri (burlap and cardboard) temporary housing to the more-permanent pucca housing, made of cement and corrugated iron. Whole areas are changing their appearance, as Calcutta begins to look less like some subcontinental Dickensian nightmare and more like any other dynamic city with great disparities of wealth.