The Remembrance of Things Past

Last week my dear friend in charge of editing this souvenir reminded me, once again, to get my act together and come up with the article I had promised. I was asked, with a generous dollop of sarcasm, if I thought I were Proust. I was also directed by him, in that same (grammatical) breath, to take my finger out of my @#$% and start writing.

I found this reminder poignant, not least because I had decided to write on the lobby; it was one of the places Mr Editor and I hung out for a while to transform ourselves from acquaintances to friends. So, in a true Proustian vein I bought myself some mass-produced madelines from Starbucks to help me indulge in some gratuitous remembering – of things, times and spaces past.

I remember my days well spent at (or, more truthfully speaking, just outside) the Department of English of Jadavpur University. Those days were spent mostly, and most memorably, on a flight of steps just inside Gate 4 of JU that we fondly – very fondly – called the lobby. As far as physical descriptions go, the lobby was a long row of four steps along the main entrance to the JU Arts Faculty building. These steps were intersected at regular intervals by pillars that held up, among other things, the collective weight of learning of the Arts Faculty. At a baser level it turned the long row of the short flight of steps into neat cubicles. It produced for students of the Arts Faculty and beyond, the university’s premier social and socializing space.

And every day, much of the variegated humanity that comprised JU’s students would converge within these spaces. The lobby was for most of our generation at JU a place to chat and argue about the world, its second cousin and the phenomenology of lemon pips in Swapan’s lebu cha. This is where we debated and disagreed; laughed and fought. We played cricket and twenty-nine, adopted stray dogs and indulged in seemingly endless jamming sessions on the steps. We spoke about literature, recited our (often quite terrible) poetry to each other while some of the loons from Film Studies extolled the virtues of “pure cinema.” And yes, we also made friends and found love. These friendships and loves would last us – not all of us, but quite a few – our blessed lifetimes.

And the lobby sure had a reputation. For some faculty members of the English department, this is the closest you could get to the ninth circle of hell. Quite clearly, the “treason” in this equation was one against the attempts at making us discerning readers of literature and culture. (On a different note: hell was close at hand, most materially manifested in the form of the men’s loo in the ground floor of the Arts Faculty).

So there was I, during my first week in the department, trying very hard to make the transition from balancing chemical equations to figuring out if Tess (of the d’Urbervilles) had been raped or seduced – tricky question this. Amidst all this, I was told about the lobby. Not by classmates or seniors but by a stately lady professor who wore her hair in a bun that was almost as big as her head.

“And one final thing,” she announced at the end of a class as she shut her volume of History of English Literature by Legouis and Cazamian, “do not go to the lobby.” We were given a tour de force of the evils that awaited us if we did not watch our steps. It would be drugs, disease and all quite downhill from there. Now which eighteen-year old would not think this a tantalizing introduction?
So off we cantered in that direction to be welcomed with open arms by this alleged space of moral decrepitude. And there we stayed for the full five years of our JU life never ever letting said staid professor(s) interfere too much with our education. This needless to say had been the trajectory of many a student of the JU English department.

But much has changed in JU these days. For starters, the lobby is no more. A few years ago, the JU administration demolished the steps that made the lobby into a beehive of frenetic social activity. The socializing and the activities continue today at a different place with the lobby becoming a piece of congealed memory for many of us. So then let me end with the time-tested cliché: the lobby is no more; long live the lobby.

(Written for the JUDE Reunion 2009 Souvenir).

A Tale of Two Cities

In Calcutta, the Indian Museum is my favourite colonial-era building. As a child, I would be fascinated by it, but not only because of the Egyptian sarcophagus or the Gandhara Buddhas in its collection. This grand European building – neoclassical layout, lofted arches, Ionic pillars, sparkling white walls and tall wooden doors and windows the colour of dark chocolate – not only dominated the landscape of the Chowringhee area, it also had a characteristic way of slipping and growing into view every time one approached it. This is what caught my fancy.

If you moved towards the Chowringhee – Park Street crossing from Dalhousie Square, the museum would glide into view from between the trees; it would then grow bigger and bigger (the view, better and better) as you came closer and closer. And because the road curved and curled in a certain fashion, this majestic specimen of colonial architecture would also twist and turn to keep up with you. This was my first brush with magic realism, long before Jorge Luis Borges happened to me. And each time I approached it thus, I felt I knew exactly why we Bengalis call the museum jadughar – literally, the House of Wonder.

Last month when I was in Calcutta, I happened to travel down that much travelled path toward the Indian Museum after many years. As my cab approached Chowringhee I looked out, hoping to see the building do what it had so many times during my years in that city.

I saw nothing. Actually, I saw a gigantic slab of concrete suspended in mid-air. A flyover had grown in between my museum and me.

This is the new Calcutta, one that has dropped magic realism for hard-nosed naturalism. The Communist city is busy telling the world it is reforming; progress has arrived here, cast in concrete and reinforced steel.

As the city reforms, its landscape – and its mindscape – are also being re-formed. For flyovers do more than just add that extra layer to a city’s roads. They alter a city quite fundamentally – the way it looks, the way it feels – and most crucially – the way those living and moving through, relate to it. For instance, generations of Calcuttans will now never experience the Indian Museum doing the shimmy when they come down towards Chowringhee. That visual, and decidedly spatial, experience is lost forever. It’s a relationship (between the city and its user) that could have been, but now will never be. Flyovers are building distances between the city and its people.


The most persuasive exemplar of Calcutta’s progress, however, is a mammoth flyover linking the city’s airport bypass road to one of the bridges across the Ganges. This elevated road, that straddles much of South Calcutta, also happens to pass by the first floor window of Seagull Books, a publishing house run by my friend Sue. Earlier, Sue would look out to a giant neem tree, whose shady branches – apart from strong, black, bitter coffee – helped calm her fraying nerves at the time of desperate deadlines. Nowadays, she relies only on coffee.

Her tree has been felled to make way for the flyover; looking out entails a strange visual communion with stranger commuters in varying stages of animated suspension. Flyovers are engendering new (and perhaps more dramatic) ways of seeing in the city.


I don’t hate flyovers. This lofty concept in urban planning has its uses, especially if you need a quick-fix solution to traffic congestion. But then, not all cities lend themselves to flyovers with effortless ease. Delhi thrives on flyovers, adding a new one every six months or so. Strangely enough, I never seem to mind those flyovers. In fact, I quite like the perspective I get of Humayun’s Tomb while travelling up (and down) the Mathura Road – Nizamuddin one to and from my workplace.

I have often wondered about this peculiar paradox of mine. Why do I loathe flyovers in one city and love them in another? I am now beginning to think it’s not about flyovers as much as it is about Calcutta and I.

Calcutta is my city of memory; the city of my memories – of a group of people and a clutch of places. Like me, most of these people have moved out of the city in search of pastures new. What have been left behind are hazy memories of random conversations in sunlit rooms and porticos; the scent of smoke-filled laughter among cafes and eateries. The places remain, etched in the map of my mind.

Every time I return, the city allows me the comfort of a familiarity that almost never breeds contempt. Calcutta, the physical city, for me is the joy of familiar expectation: of seeing the known, of knowing what one will see and how.

Flyovers do not have a place in that cognitive map of mine. They may be helping Calcuttans drive that bit faster but for me they hinder the unfurling of the remembrance of times past. They disrupt the way I have grown to see and know my city unfold before me. The new flyovers sprouting in Calcutta violate my known ways of seeing the city and therefore my relationship with it. Perhaps I am being selfish, but then I cannot help my desire to cling on to my city of memory; the city of my imagination.

In Delhi I began life as an outsider, mostly in the company of other outsiders. This accorded me the luxury of detached observation. So the city which I thought an overgrown village at first, I now acknowledge mine. And I have grown to love it: its brashness, the rude and abusive residents, the cafes, bars and bookstores, and above all its ability to coexist in history and in the present with an inimitable ease.

But Delhi does not come with this (sometimes oppressive) baggage of nostalgia that I feel for Calcutta. Delhi for me is a city of new beginnings, a city that I am only now beginning to see. The flyovers of this city are little more than the warts and pimples on an acquaintance, an acquaintance who has all the makings of becoming a good friend.

Images: (c) Bibek Bhattacharya - All Rights Reserved