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...)
