Howrah

There was a town, a city and a district all by the same name. Howrah. I was never sure whether I lived in the city or the town of Howrah. Or whether the city was in the town or the town in the city. My Dad didn’t know either, neither did my grandmother. She had lived her maiden life in the very happening high brow hub of Calcutta- the College Street- and although she had spent more than 63 years now in the rather non-happening factory splattered dingy Howrah, she always kind of lived and identified with the place where she had spent the first 22 years of her life. She wasn’t really bothered or keen about anything related to Howrah. On my way to tuitions when I sped along at full speed on my bicycle on the drainage canal road that skirted the Stadium, I wondered whether this was where the town and the city of Howrah ended and the rest of the district began. Here you could see stray isolated huts made of finely sliced bamboo tiles that sold tea and sweets and small random knickknacks. There were huge water pipes lying on one side of the road where old men and little children, young mothers and middle aged women gathered during the happy noisy hour of fading afternoons.

I always kind of thought that once our streets would be smooth and clean, all our problems would be solved. Foreign countries, as we thought of the developed world, had great roads. All Hollywood films we saw in the VCR at my brother’s place bore testimony to that. Our streets were what we named as Uday Shankar roads. Angular bricks and granite chips stuck out all over them. The cycle rickshaws which were the chief means of transport in the myriad of narrow streets and lanes and bylanes, would jerk up and down and down and up and make the ceaseless ghatang ghatang noise as we clutched onto the bamboo overhead cover and prepared our bodies for the everlasting unpredictable jerks.

The first time I remember our lane was repaired was soon after I had my first bad fall that left a circular dark patch on my knee for the next 20 years or so. Since then I had dreaded dettol whenever I had a cut. I think I was in kindergarten then and thought jumping on the road back home from school was as good a way of coming home as walking. That same road would see the next repair some decade or so later. We would be insanely happy when a road would be repaired. And then someone would take a telephone line, the telephone company guys would come and dig up a narrow stretch of the road to put in the underground cable and leave after roughly filling up the ditch. They weren’t the municipality, so they had no truck to hold with repairing roads after they messed it up. And then there would come the months of the dark, cloudy, mysterious and wet monsoons and the road would be in a mess ever since.  I felt very attracted to the hot molten charred smelling black tar in huge drums that were kept on roadsides with a fire underneath when the roads were made. If your feet got stuck on a little bit of hot tar you would pull and pull and it wouldn’t come off. There was a little bit of me that wished to climb on the gigantic Roller and drive it on the road. The man sat so contentedly so high up and could roll over and smoothen whole stretches of the ECG like roads.

I couldn’t think what problems would remain in our world once all roads all over the place felt grey black and newly made with the pressed out soot and tar and small chips making the uneven lines next to the cemented drains. I never thought drains looked ugly or that we needed to do away with them and make them underground like in Calcutta. The ducks, the crows and the dogs always drank water there and you could float paper boats when the water rushed down the gutters and watch till they disappeared. The bylane that went past our house into the interior of the para was what we called kacha or raw- meaning it was never made. It was probably made at some prehistoric time but all the stone chips and tar and long been buried under the earth. It was a muddy one and grass grew on both sides and on holidays when I lay stretched across the bed on our first floor room and looked out of the window, I could see little yellow butterflies fluttering on the grass. The skies would be all of light blue with floating white clouds and the sunshine would be leisurely and comfortably happy. The house next door to us was one storeyed, so there was nothing to block the view from my window. I tossed and turned and hugged the side pillow and looked out at the expanse of sky blue. They had a tall palm tree whose hard dry leaves rustled to make the swishing sound whenever there was a little breeze. If I craned my neck I could see the lower edge of the pointed leaves. Most other houses in our by lane had a coconut tree. E had a wavy neem tree in the back garden outside this window. And a guava tree. Sometimes we had banana trees there too. The neem tree spread its branches far and wide till you could touch them just outside the window. I would break off little branches and lightly draw them over my body when I was recovering from chicken pox in class 2. And then one day they wanted to make our back garden into a garage for the second hand ambassador we had bought and chopped off the neem tree. I had cried myself hoarse and my Dad actually thought of chipping off the wall to make room for the car and spare the tree. But everyone else said that would weaken the house and so the tree was cut. I cursed and cursed the white car. Maybe, the curse had some effect. The car was with us only for a few years and then we had to sell it off. By then I was kind of fond of it. We called it Badalbabu, because it rained so heavily the day we bought it. It was an old petrol model of the WME series.

(contd...)