more memories

Calcutta- Before the” red “ takeover
Watching some old movies recently from the early 1970s, a rush of memories misted up my battle-hardened mid-life self, as I found myself transported back to a time when the city-scape was so different from the present grimy incarnation it now is. Populous it still was, perhaps as untidy as it is now, and with the same speckled bands of buses, rickshaws and streams of cards and droves of humanity,
Yet so much has simply faded away, and been blanked out of the world-view of today. Some vignettes remain in my minds-eye, signposts of a cosmopolitan and elegant city that was fast going to fade into oblivion….I recount some of these random snapshots before they slip into the eternity of amnesia.
Neon display signs in Esplanade. The one I remember was next to the Chowringhee crossing, there was a red teapot pouring out blue whirls of tea into two red cups, and amazingly the act was completed as soon as the signals turned green from red-so perfectly synchronized was the sequence. Of course there were no flyovers then, just a wide sweep of road and the impressive balustraded terrace of the grand old lady of the avenue-the Oberoi Grand…
New Market was still a treasure-trove for the un-initiated. Children like me used to be dazed by the cavalcade of shops gleaming with exotic wares, the well-lit interiors, the imposing cannon in the centre and of course the fashionable crowds, spiffily dressed, many of them pale-skinned and light-eyed, speaking and moving rather differently from the homely bazaars of Gariahat and Lake Market. We headed there for lots and lots of goodies-anything ranging from Nahoums cakes, biscuits and chicken patties to the ubiquitous boiled sweets and Kalimpong cheese-sold from a pokey little shop at the far-end and with its tiny shelves spilling out with the fanciest fare east of Fortnum and Mason!
A scary Chinese girl who trimmed my hair into the cutest fringe at “Eves” hairdressing salon. (they still called them that and not “beauty parlour”.) As she snipped away with a menacing dash of scissors I could hear the swish of chiffons and chintzy dresses belonging to the rows and rows of matronly ladies who settled in for their routines in front of huge boiler-like machines (later I understood these to be perm-machines and oversized versions of the latter-day natty blow-dryer). Some ladies sported a blue halo as they sat-the beginnings of then trendy “blue rinse perm” and others seemed to be growing nests out of their heads with elaborate bouffants and bee-hive hairstyles!
Meals out much looked forward to were at Park Street. There was a delicious and gooey ice-cream called tutti-frutti at Magnolia or “Mags”, light tea cakes with a swirl of pinkish cream or succulent sausage rolls at Flurys, a goblet containing a thick wedge of sauced up prawns called “Prawn Cocktail” at Skyroom. And there was chicken tetrazzini and steak Chateaubriand at Mocambo, plus a melt-in-the mouth lightly done noodles and sweet and sour chicken at “Peiping and Waldorf. On the days when the family budget was minimal (usually at the end of the month) there were some delectable thick paratha like rolls stuffed with chunks of meat and roundels of onion at Nizams and wrapped in a white band of paper which was greased with the dippings enough to be sucked dry once and roll finished! There was also an interesting pastry shop at the Great Eastern Hotel in what was still called Dalhousie and a clutch of interesting but un-assuming restaurants around Dharmatallah which did dainty savouries where grown-ups would rush us to after some hectic shopping at New Market.
The swish set: ladies wearing a lot of sleeveless blouses with sarees, and men sporting shiny polyester shirts with thick dark specs and long side-burns. Younger women wearing slacks, maxis and bell-bottom trousers and the men in flowery half-sleeved shirts left open at the collar wide enough for the hirsute chests to be admired! The women with bouffant, top-knots, bobs and fringe with a hair-band. Hoop ear-rings and deep kohl-lined eyes with a twirl at the eye-lid.
While the bands played “Tequila”, “Blueberry Hill” and sundry cha-cha/mambo/latinesque or Usha (still Iyer) sang in her bindis and kanjeevaram sarees couples twirled, twisted, jived and jammed on Park Street …
My grandfather, celebrated cinema critic NKG would often treat me to delectable fare from the Chinese kitchen at the Calcutta Club in a style of cooking which one rarely finds these days. He was an early and enthusiastic member and I would often wait in the car, as he stopped by for a few minutes, for those were strictly child-proof days and all that mites like me could do was to wait impatiently outside and gaze at the stately and gracious façade of the Club, conjuring up visions of what transpired inside !
Dredging up some stray memories: roads which were more tree-lined, cinema-halls with a grand sweep of marble and ornate wooden staircase and imposing portraits of Hollywood film stars, trams which glided along tracks fringed with lush green grass, less people living out their daily lives on the pavements, a great joyousness in the air around Christmas and New Year-revelry and frolic, carol singers and foo-foo bands, genuine Christmas pudding…Park Street and “south” of it was a landscape of hybrid sophistication.
But life got grimmer as one moved out of Park Street and South Calcutta’s l spacious avenues. There was another supposedly grotty part of town called “north” where some poor relatives crowded into drab two-storey houses cheek by jowl on narrow lanes. They had stoves in their bedroom where they cooked tasty food, and there were frequent sounds of staccato gunfire… I still remember my grandmother telling me to be very quiet as there were some dangerous men called “Naxals” on the prowl and our shiny Ambassador with uniformed chauffeur was an obvious target… there was a statue of an old man called Hemanta Basu garlanded in front of the lane-he had just been shot by those Naxals..
There was the odd wedding to attend to in that disturbed area, and amidst the clatter of brass pails heaped high with delectable mangsho jhol, rui maacher kaalia and various other goodies, served by “para” boys on banana leaves and relatives of the bride/ groom neatly attired in dhuti/panjabi a stray whisper of gunshots fatally wounding a rich businessman relative and some distant cousins who had been picked up in the still of the night for questioning and never heard of since then… (though an old aunt would murmur about their scholarly brilliance and industriousness)
Growing up in comfortably affluent Ballygunge, with gracious bungalows and mansions, sheltered in the Anglo-Indiana of Loreto House and wallowing in the last vestiges of the elegant decadence of colonial and cosmopolitan Calcutta, how would I know that the contradictions in the “north” and those wild Naxal boys who disappeared from their families and were never heard of again, would usher in a new era of a red citadel.. one which would leave my favourite home city to be robustly plebian, awash with mediocrity, insularity, tacky wealth and a new name of “Kolkata“- the butt of jokes in certain circles as a city of the dying….

Tailpiece: Childhood memories, much like poetic licence are notoriously politically incorrect, so, dear readers please bear with me!