Memoir

Here is my tribute to Kolkata where I lived decades ago!

Of all Calcutta streets that I’d walked, the one I keep remembering all these years is Harish Mukherjee Road, Bhowanipore, as a newcomer. On a Christmas eve I started walking aimlessly on a dark and cold afternoon from my humble abode alone, and walked along Suburban School Road, towards tramline Ashutosh Mukherjee Road, and suddenly found myself stopping at the interjunction that I later learnt was Harish Mukherjee Road. I’d learn also it ran from Kalighat to Chowringhee Maidan parallel to tram running SP Mukherjee Road, but at that moment in time, what fascinated me was its non threatening charm and elegance, and the well dressed Bengali women walking quietly, with little vehicular traffic on the road. I walked north up to its Chowringhee Maidan beginning, and at the end of the road appeared a military outpost, where I was stopped and asked to return.

In the days to come, the road became soothingly dear to me, indeed so safe to walk, enough to even sleep in the late summer evenings in the nearby Harish Park. The gardener once impatiently woke me up and asked me to go home. The well- maintained park had soothed me on hot summer days while coming back from Esplanade, and I found myself relaxed, and so safely slept, too tired to reach my lower middle class lodgings. Years later when I was to bid farewell to Calcutta,on transfer to western India I went there again and walked the familiar way just to re-experience my initial pleasant memory of it.

Decades later, in the digital era, recently I opened it in Google Maps to approvingly see.It had photos of all the glitter of a newly renovated metropolitan street. There were of course such renovated or refurbished streets from Gariahat to Kalighat, to Esplansade to Dalhousie, which I had walked as a bachelor and found the walk a down to earth street education, how a heavily urbanized society once lived there a city which had the benefit and privilege as capital of East India Co, and later British colonial India. Calcutta the city of palaces means to me differently, a society as a whole who lived in comfortable and modern mansions, with facilities for higher education locally, and abroad, and gainful employment later, while cities elsewhere in India were nowhere near achieving the fame of Calcutta in those days.

I wonder when Kolkata city would once again have the fame it once had!