No gender, but plenty of respect

Here is the good news first. Bengali has no grammatical gender at all. Tables, rivers and teacups are neither masculine nor feminine, verbs do not change for a man or a woman speaking, and the same word, se, means both he and she. Learners coming from Hindi or French find this a relief. What takes its place is harder to see.

The verb changes with respect instead. Every verb has separate endings for the three levels of you, so will you come? is apni ashben? to a stranger, tumi ashbe? to a friend and tui ashbi? to a sibling. The same split runs through he and she: uni for someone you respect, o for anyone else. Pick the pronoun and the ending has to match it.

Counting needs a little tag. A number is not put straight in front of a noun: it takes a classifier, usually -ta. One tea is ekta cha, two sweets duto mishti, three tickets tinte ticket. The same -ta on its own works like the English the, which is why the kit asks for bilta, the bill, and -gulo makes a plural: boigulo, the books.

No comes after the verb. Bengali puts the verb at the end of the sentence and the negative after that: ami jani na, I know not, I don't know; jabo na, I won't go. Place words take endings too, so Howrah theke is from Howrah and Kolkatay is in Kolkata. Listen for the na at the very end; it changes everything that came before it.

Watch the digits on a price tag. The numbers from eleven to ninety-nine are each their own word, and on handwritten prices and old buses you will also meet Bengali numerals. One of them is a trap: Bengali four, ৪ (CHAR), looks almost exactly like a Western 8. When a sweet seems strangely expensive, check which digits you are reading.

Where Hindi says a, Bengali says o

Bengali shares a great deal of vocabulary with Hindi, and it still sounds unmistakably its own, because it rounds its vowels. The short vowel that every consonant carries comes out as an o, close to the vowel in English hot, rather than as Hindi's a. So the lotus that is kamal in Delhi is komol in Kolkata, and the poet everyone in Bengal can quote is Robindronath, not Rabindranath. Bengali has no v either, so Vivekananda becomes Bibekananda, and it says all three of its s letters as sh. Water is jol, not pani. Once your ear is tuned to those three habits, a lot of half-familiar words fall into place.

The script is its own, and so are the digits. Bengali letters hang from a top line like Devanagari's, but many of their shapes have a sharper, more triangular look, and the same alphabet, with small changes, also writes Assamese. Start reading where it pays: the boards on Kolkata's private buses, many of which give the route in Bengali only, and the price cards in sweet shops. For speaking, begin with nomoshkar, kemon achhen? for how are you, thik achhe for okay, and koto?, how much?, and you can already shop.

Six things that catch visitors out

A Bengali meal has an order, and it starts bitter. At a traditional lunch the courses arrive one at a time with fresh rice: first something bitter, often shukto, a mild stew of bitter gourd and vegetables, then dal with fried vegetables, then fish, then meat if there is any, then a sweet-sour chutney, and finally mishti doi or payesh, rice pudding. Mixing everything together at once is not wrong, but it misses how the meal was planned.

Fish comes with its bones. Hilsa in particular is full of fine bones, and Bengalis eat it with their fingers precisely so they can feel them. Take small mouthfuls, work the bones out with your fingertips, and leave them in a neat pile at the edge of the plate. The head is a delicacy, cooked into muri ghonto with rice; being offered it is a compliment.

Never arrive empty-handed, and never with the wrong sweets. If you are invited to a Bengali home, the right gift is a box of sweets from a well-known mishti shop. Families have strong loyalties to particular shops and particular sweets, so asking your host's favourite in advance is a perfectly normal question, and a box of sandesh chosen with care is noticed.

Ask a taxi before you climb in. Kolkata's yellow taxis are meant to go anywhere on the meter, but many drivers will lean out, hear your destination and say jabo na, I won't go. The way round it is to ask first, jaben?, will you go?, name the place, and agree that the meter will run before you sit down. App cabs avoid the conversation entirely.

A bandh shuts the state. West Bengal still sees the occasional bandh, a general strike called by a political party, when shops shut, buses and taxis stay off the road and offices close. They are normally announced a day or two in advance in the papers. On a bandh day, stay put and plan on walking; hotels will know.

Durga Puja runs all night. For five days each autumn, in September or October, the city builds hundreds of elaborate pandals around images of the goddess, and Kolkata turns out to visit them, in crowds that peak after dark and go on until dawn. Go late, wear comfortable shoes, and expect queues of an hour for the famous ones. On the last day the images are carried to the river, to cries of asche bochhor abar hobe, it will happen again next year. The city all but takes a holiday for the festival, so book rooms and trains well ahead.

A city that argues in Bengali

Bengalis are proud of their language in a way visitors notice within a day. Kolkata's newspapers, theatre, cinema and pavement bookstalls all run in Bengali, and the city's great pastime, adda, long and opinionated conversation over tea about politics, films, football or anything else, is conducted in it. Bengali is also the national language of Bangladesh, where 21 February, the day students died in 1952 demanding its recognition, is now marked worldwide as International Mother Language Day.

Kolkata itself is more mixed than its reputation. Marwari merchant families have run trade in Burrabazar for generations, many taxi drivers and porters come from Bihar, and there are old Chinese, Armenian and Anglo-Indian communities; Tangra, in the east of the city, is the home of Kolkata's Chinese community and its Indian-Chinese cooking. In the big markets, at New Market and Burrabazar, and in most taxis, Hindi works as well as Bengali. Educated Kolkata speaks fluent English, and on Park Street or in a hotel you will not need anything else.

Outside the city it changes. In the districts of West Bengal, in small towns and villages, Bengali is the language of every exchange, English is patchy, and Hindi is understood unevenly. Up in Darjeeling and the hills, the everyday language is Nepali. Wherever you are, a sentence of Bengali is received with real delight, and ami ektu ektu Bangla boli, I speak a little Bengali, tends to start a conversation rather than end one.

Dada, didi, and the art of lagbe na

Begin with apni and wait to be invited down. This kit uses apni throughout, and it is right for anyone you do not know. Younger Bengalis drop to tumi with each other almost at once, and an older person may switch to tumi with you as a kindness; that is your cue that you may answer in kind with people your own age, never with them. Tui belongs to childhood friends and family, and from a stranger it sounds either intimate or insulting.

Every man is a brother and every woman a sister. Dada, elder brother, is how you call a shopkeeper, a waiter or a taxi driver, and it is shortened to -da after a first name, so a colleague becomes Sourav-da. Women are didi, or -di after a name. A married woman in a market is often boudi, sister-in-law. Older people are kaku and kakima, uncle and aunt, or mashima for a motherly figure, and you will hear these used for neighbours who are no relation at all.

Praise does more than thanks. The kit's dhonnobad is right with officials and service staff, but in a home or with a new friend it can feel stiff. What lands better is saying what you liked: khub bhalo laglo, I really enjoyed that, after a meal or an afternoon of adda, or simply darun, wonderful, about the food.

Learn to say no without saying no. To a hawker, a tout or anyone offering you something you do not want, the phrase is lagbe na, literally it won't be needed, and it is both polite and final. At the table a host will press another sweet on you, then another; ar na, no more, and then pet bhore gechhe, I'm full, said with a hand over the plate, is the honest way out. Expect to be overruled once, and to eat a small piece anyway.

Kolkata, the delta and the hills

Kolkata was the capital of British India until 1911, and the city still wears it: the Victoria Memorial, the red-brick Writers' Building, the cantilevered span of Howrah Bridge across the Hooghly. North Kolkata is the old Bengali city of narrow lanes and crumbling mansions, where the potters of Kumartuli sculpt the clay goddesses for Durga Puja; College Street, with its miles of secondhand bookstalls and the high-ceilinged Indian Coffee House, is where students have argued for a century.

Rabindranath Tagore was born in the family house at Jorasanko in north Kolkata, now a museum. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, the first non-European to do so, and wrote the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh. His songs, Rabindra Sangeet, are still sung at every family gathering, and the university town he founded, Santiniketan, a few hours north by train, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Bengali is not one accent. Families whose roots lie in what is now Bangladesh are called Bangal, those from the west Ghoti, and the old teasing between them comes out in vocabulary, cooking and above all football: East Bengal against Mohun Bagan is the city's great derby, and supporters still trade insults in fish, hilsa against prawns. To the south, the Sundarbans mangrove forest is home to the Bengal tiger; to the west, Bishnupur has brick temples covered in terracotta panels of scenes from the epics.

And Bengalis eat with great seriousness. Machhe bhate Bangali goes the saying, fish and rice make a Bengali. Shorshe ilish, hilsa in pungent mustard sauce, is the monsoon's prize; chingri malai curry cooks prawns in coconut milk; kosha mangsho is mutton fried slowly until it is dark and dry. Mustard oil and panch phoron, a five-seed spice mix, flavour much of it. Breakfast can be luchi, puffed white-flour bread, with potato; the street gives you puchka and jhalmuri; and the sweet shops sell rosogolla, sandesh and mishti doi, sweet set yoghurt in a clay pot.