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  • Calcutta, The City Of All Our Yesterdays

    CALCUTTA : THE CITY OF ALL OUR YESTERDAYS


    O Calcutta!
    Mihir S Sharma
    Posted online: Saturday , Apr 03, 2010 at 1443 hrs

    The fire at Stephen Court was a reminder of how little of the citys
    abundant past is left. But walk around the Brit bit of the city, Park
    Street , Free School Street , Sudder Street , New Market, and you also
    get a sense of why Calcutta is a city of second chances. Faded glory,
    yes. But failures are welcome to take another shot The waiter looks
    shocked for only a moment. Of course, Flurys couldnt stay shut, he
    explains, his gravely courteous manner returning. The old tea-room has
    been forced into temporary quarters at the Park Hotel, where it
    perches uncomfortably like an elderly lady forced to move in with a
    brash nephew. Cramped for space, he begins to turn away to return to
    the bustling cash register, but looks back to say, his eyes crinkling
    above high, Anglo-Indian cheekbones: Holy Week, after all. The people
    gotta have their hot cross buns, man. And, sure enough, a group of
    schoolchildren is standing at the counter sampling the sweet, slightly
    spicy rolls eaten during the week leading up to Good Friday. When
    100-year-old Stephen Court on Park Street burst into flames last week,
    more than just Flurys routine was disrupted. The dozens of fatalities
    reminded Indians that complacency and neglect has turned heritage
    buildings into deathtraps; but, for Calcuttans, it triggered a moment
    of near-panic. The sight of a devastating fire in the very heart of
    its faded glory, Park Street, focused attention on what little of its
    abundant past is left. The gawkers staring at the charred remnants of
    the buildings top floors kept on looking around too, at Stephen Courts
    graceful sisters, as if seeing them for the first time in years.

    Because, unlike what a hundred guidebooks will tell you, walking down
    Park Street is not like stepping into the past. The brands, the
    bustle, the chain stores, are like anywhere else in India . But look
    behind the illuminated shop signs, and you do indeed see the painted
    signs of British Calcutta; look above the hoardings, and youll see the
    elegant balconies and window-boxes of the shaheb para. Step into one
    of the many faded auction houses and youre instantly surrounded by
    crystal, carved teak furniture, giant busts of Athena, as if some
    Victorian volcano has suddenly erupted around you, each piece sitting
    with the quiet dignity of someone who remembers Park Street when
    everyone east of Aden envied you for being there.

    Manu Lilaram is one of those people. On a stool in his shop in New
    Market, dressed in striped shirt and suspenders, he looks more than a
    little exhausted; his house in Stephen Court , where he has lived for
    decades, is still inaccessible. Worse: he is dealing, internally, with
    no longer living on Park Street , another refugee from what was once
    the most cosmopolitan square mile in Asia . Stephen Courts owner, he
    remembers, was an Armenian, Arathoon Stephen. Flurys and Trincas were
    run by friends from Switzerland . Down the road, Anglo-Indians
    gathered every Saturday night at the Grail Club. Ornate Chowringhee
    Mansions next door was built by the Ezras; Jewish, from Baghdad , and
    definitely eccentric, Sir David Ezra also ran a private zoo at his
    home in Ezra Mansions on Kyd Street , a short walk away.

    Uniformed liftmen, two to a lift, would stand and hold the doors open;
    the big-windowed apartments would be swept twice, not once a
    day. People would walk in the private gardens that lay behind the
    buildings Gothic façades. All of that began to change in the 70s:
    people emigrated, companies left, previously pristine staircases began
    to feature paan stains.

    Those who thought that they could hold out discovered they
    couldnt. Most notoriously, the Bengal Club, which thought that
    admitting Indians wasnt really necessary an assumption that caused
    them to go gratifyingly bankrupt in 1971. Sadly that meant selling
    their magnificent Chowringhee frontage, which became the monstrosity
    that is the Chatterjee International Centre, Calcuttas tallest
    building, and so shoddily built that it rained its ugly tiles down on
    all passers-by for two decades dangerous but oddly satisfying in its
    symbolism.


    More remains of this heritage than youd think. Park Street was built
    by Armenians; theres still an Armenian Club next door to Stephen Court
    , in Queens Mansions. A few minutes away, on Free School Street , boys
    in rugby uniforms stroll out of the Armenian College , which still
    occupies the building where William Makepeace Thackeray was born. Turn
    right on to Royd Street , and youre suddenly surrounded by laughing
    schoolgirls; Jewish Girls School has finished its working day. (In
    another only-in-Calcutta cosmopolitan twist, the girl humming an old
    Hebrew folk song as she walks home, a pink star-of-David embroidered
    on her tunic, is almost certainly Muslim.) But everywhere is the
    threat of dissolution: look up, and looming over you is the
    still-decrepit fourth wing of Park Mansions, the old teak staircase of
    which caught fire in 1988, destroying among others Calcuttas Alliance
    Francaise and its old, extensive library which, instead of President
    Mitterands official portrait, used to be dominated by a giant painting
    of Napoleon, perhaps because it was, after all, in Calcutta, the city
    of all our yesterdays.

    But what is lost to fire can never compare to what is inevitably lost
    to unprofitability. The great department stores the Army and Navy,
    Whiteway-Laidlaw, Hall and Anderson went first, their huge, ornate,
    Chowringhee buildings falling into disrepair or taken over by
    banks. The building from which Hall and Anderson could once ship
    bathtubs to those stranded in mofussil towns still has their name up
    in lights that havent been turned on for decades; in it, now, the Bank
    of Rajasthan promises loans for weddings, and Warren Travels
    advertises package tours to Marwar. Then the smaller enterprises went:
    the Great Eastern Stores are only recognisable by a little notice
    asserting ownership of a spanking-new Adidas showroom.


    In some cases, only the names are the same: Castlewood, where once you
    went to get your golf balls and tennis racquets, now mainly sells
    treadmills; Austin distributors now push Korean cars; the furrier
    Alijoo, from 1871, sells carpets. But elsewhere, just enough has been
    passed on. At Barkat Ali, for example, set up in 1924, the master
    tailor will insist your suit shirt has proper, cufflink-sporting
    cuffs. At tiny Kalmans on Free School Street , owner Bishnupada Dhar
    learnt the cold-cuts trade from the tiny charcuteries founder,
    Hungarian Kalman Kohary. Everyone is in buying sausages for Easter, he
    says in Bengali, waving a cleaver in the general direction of his
    giant freezer.

    And some have become inseparable from the idea of Calcutta . In the
    1950s, the Olympia Bar was raffishly disreputable, a place where my
    mothers generation would not have gone, according to Ayesha Das, who
    moved into Queens Mansions opposite it in 1952 (The building, already
    old, was named for the new queen during the coronation hysteria that
    gripped the city that year, five years after Independence). But the
    place where a young Das had chips and ice cream has become Old Oly,
    the pivot of Park Street, a temple to beer and beefsteak, with formica
    tables and threadbare sofas, rats that are named and waiters that are
    nameless. The guitarist at the table next to yours will have just come
    from Braganzas on Marquis Street, a ten-minute-walk away, where
    Anthony Braganza, drumming his fingers on the counter, will tell you
    the business is going strong nobody wants acoustic any more, but thats
    OK, they survived the shift from sheet music, they will survive many
    more, music isnt going anywhere. On his desk lie little watermarked
    envelopes of rental bills, addressed to families throughout Calcuttas
    oldest buildings, in which his two hundred antique pianos lie up dusty
    flights of wooden stairs in drawing rooms stuffed with dark furniture,
    where they are passed down from child to child within the family as
    each learns Chopsticks and Fur Elise.

    Strangely enough, it is in famously anti-capitalist Calcutta , more
    than anywhere else in India , that the citys soul can be found in
    commerce, in shops and businesses that have survived the difficult
    decades. Though perhaps it isnt that unlikely after all, it isnt the
    easiest place to start anything either. Those who remember Park Street
    in the 50s remember a Tibetan girl with a red blanket outside
    A.N. John, the barbers, who would produce from a battered tin box
    blanket jewellery that looked startlingly different from what the
    shops were selling. That girls daughter, who now sits behind the
    counter at Chambalama, the shop in New Market that eventually replaced
    the tin trunk, says her mother would recall maharajas stopping their
    Bentleys to buy; following the British up to Darjeeling in summer, and
    coming back for the season, in winter; actress Suchitra Sen buying an
    oxidised silver necklace from the trunk which she then wore to an
    awards show in Bombay.

    Sometimes, it feels as if everything new in this square mile is
    actually old. Like New Empire, once owned by the Ranas of Nepal, a
    teak and cut-glass museum inside: which other cinema hall is left
    where one can order a whisky-and-soda in the interval?

    Like New Market itself. The Boer War gun that sat in its central
    crossroads may have disappeared, but Nahoums is still there, if minus
    the Italian plaster-of-paris ceiling, as frothy as anything theyve
    done with icing. The brownies are smaller, the service terrible now
    that old David Nahoum doesnt come in any more; but the fudge and cakes
    taste almost the same as they did. Unique in the world, surely, that a
    Jewish family bakery is central to a citys Christmases. David might
    be the third and last generation of his family to run it though: when
    asked about the younger ones he would shrug, and look sadly at the El
    Al wall calendar, as if resenting the airline that took them away.

    Then there are those that went away. Firpos, with its formal-dress
    dances, the location of a memorable scene in Vikram Seths A Suitable
    Boy, which few in Calcutta can locate. (Dont miss it at all, said one
    music-loving old-timer. The place was a barn. Terrible acoustics.) And
    the Sky Room, with a deep-blue ceiling and silver plates, and where
    the austere excellence of the service and the food made up for the
    lack music or alcohol. (The orange juice cost ten rupees in 1955.) For
    years after they shut shop in 1993, the most sought-after people in
    the town were their chefs. Everyone claimed to have given them a
    chance to keep creating: the Park Hotel, Mocambo next door, a carpet
    exporter near Vivekananda Park .

    Calcutta is, after all, the city of second chances. Failure doesnt
    close off options: companies never shut down in Bengal , do they? Look
    up across the street from New Market, and youll see St. Judes Academy
    , named for the Roman Catholic patron saint of lost causes, which
    proudly advertises it takes failures. The Metropolitan Building , old
    home of Whiteway-Laidlaw, was almost condemned and demolished a few
    years ago; but today, once again, the middle class flocks there, to a
    brand new Big Bazaar. And the Bengal Club, bankrupt once, now gleams
    with brass planters and wood panelling, defiantly insisting that
    nothing has changed but the ethnicity of the club board. Those who
    have stopped by Stephen Court , pausing to stare at its charred
    corridors, will be hoping that this spirit of renewal will not pass it
    by.
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