My Story 4 - Calcutta, Belvedere

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With the allotment of a Government Quarter in practically the poshest area of the city was indeed the best thing that could have happened to my family. It was a newly developed colony that was located in the very picturesque compound of the famous National Library. The library used to be the house of the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal during the British Raj. After the independence of the country – it was converted into a Government Library, in 1953 when it was shifted from its location at Metcalfe House, to the present location at Belvedere. It is the biggest and the best library in the country containing about 2 million books and half a million documents. It is also the second-largest public library in Asia. According to popular belief, this building was not built by the British. Azim-Us-Shaan is believed to have constructed it in 1700 A.D. After the Battle of Plassey, Vanceytart got charge of this Bhawan. He was an Italian who named this mammoth building 'Belvedierre', giving the present-day name of Belvedere to the colony. The word connotes 'the queen of beauty'. Lady Hastings was also the owner of this house for a short while. It was sold to Major Tulley in 1780. The modern-day 'Tollygunge' in Calcutta bears memoirs of Major Tulley. However, this building was put to auction after the demise of Major Tulley in 1802. In 1850, the Govt. took charge of this palatial house. Some believe that Nawab Meer Zaffar had once stayed in Belvedierre Bhawan.

The Majestic National Library

The housing made here for Central Govt. officers consisted of fourteen 3-storeyed blocks of 6 flats each. Garages were also provided, though the number of garages was about 33% of the number of flats, I guess that was about similar to the proportion of officers who actually owned cars in those days. As it is Calcutta had a fairly efficient public transport system that included double carriage trams, single as well as double-decker state transport buses, and private buses. Taxis were also in the field and were reasonably convenient because the distances were not very large. There was nothing like the present-day autorickshaws (or tuk-tuks). No tongas or horse-drawn vehicles. Though rickshaws were there - not the cycle variety but the hand-pulled rickshaws. These are attributed to a colonial hangover. They could squeeze in two adult passengers. 

Life in the colony was totally different from the paada life at Lake Place. The senior government officials were totally in a different world from the Bengali and bhadralok culture that I had been exposed to until now. In Belvedere there was a club for the Central Government Officers – having facilities for tennis, swimming, table tennis, squash, badminton, etc, and of course card tables. One could see young lasses dressed in western attires, skirts, shorts, and the like. The shortcomings of games that I felt in the school were overcome in life in Belvedere. The friend circle that I moved into consisted of only a very small percentage of Bengalis. We were literally from all over India - Punjabis, Marathis, Sindhis, UPites, MPites, Biharis, Oriyas, South Indians (includes Tamil, Kannada, Malayali, and Telegu speaking folks) Parsis, etc., strange it may sound - I do not recall any Gujratis in the colony.

Hand-Pulled Rickshaw

Our small band of about 15 boys was into all possible games. We played cricket, hockey, badminton, football, and rugby (played with a football). Tennis and squash were also available in the officers club though all youngsters did not actively get involved in that. The spoken language amongst us was English. Most of the boys were students of Calcutta Boys School or St Xaviers; the girls were mostly studying in Loretto. Neena and I continued in South Point School. A smaller size school bus was made available for the far-flung areas, it was a station wagon or equivalent to the present-day SUV. It picked us up along with about half a dozen other children, from our area, Chetla, and Alipore.

The Central Government officers Quarters Area does not seem to have changed at all over the years, the Google Map still shows it exactly as it was in the fifties with all the green spaces intact. However, some more buildings appeared to have come up in the compound of the Library. There were 3 ponds, which used to have ducks waddling in them in the fifties. I was unable to spot them in the present-day maps. They have probably been filled up to reclaim the land for some buildings or the gardens.

Belvedere - Google Image (Present Day)

At times I used to wonder where my childhood buddies Subhash and Indra might be. There was no communication from either side. We were too young and did not know about the art of letter writing. One evening I was going to a friend's house in the colony and suddenly I heard someone calling out to me, "Cuckoo". What do I see, Indra her younger sister Munni and their mom Mrs. Tahilraamani, just a few paces away. Indra and her mom, both had recognized me. Contact got renewed. I discovered that Mr. Tahilramani had also got transferred to Calcutta and presently they were staying in a rented accommodation in Hazra Road. Subsequently, they too moved to Belvedere - to Flat no. 72. We were in Flat No. 73 while we were there, we had moved out and we were back in Delhi at that time. However, contact got re-established and we have been in touch with each other to date since then.

Once we settled down in the routine life at Belvedere, it was very peaceful and satisfying. When we stayed at Lake Place, Pitaji had got deeply involved in learning yoga, so much so that within a short time he had become a teacher of yoga. Every morning he used to go to the maidan opposite the famous Victoria Memorial. About 20 to 30 followers (or his students) would also assemble there and they would be performing the Yogic Exercises. His guru was the well known Dhirendra Brahmchari, who shot to fame many years later, as he became the personal yoga trainer for Mrs. Indira Gandhi when she became the Prime Minister of the country. Once we shifted to Belvedere, going to the maidan was not convenient, because of lack of public transport on this route. So he just picked up his dari (yoga mat) one day and started going to the National Library compound for his exercises every morning. He was soon noticed by other morning walkers and was adopted by quite a handful of them as their guru, all wanting to learn yoga asanas. In 1957-58 yoga was very rare and not a household word as it is now. He never said no to anyone for joining the group and soon he had a bigger following of the residents of the area than he had at the maidan. It was totally free for anyone who cared to join in

During the vacations of the schools, Neena & I used to also go for yoga classes. I discovered that my body was quite rigid as compared to Neena's and to that of many other youngsters, and they could do many exercises with ease whereas I was either unable to do so or found them extremely difficult.  Quite a number of my circle of friends also joined in during the vacations. Recently I met a childhood friend of mine, Prakash Karve, of Belvedere, who had also joined Pitaji's classes. He lives in Pune at present. He was remembering the yoga classes of Pitaji and mentioned it as a reason for his good health even at his present age.

In our small circle of friends, we had two brothers Deepak and Pradeep Mulay. Their father was the Deputy Librarian of the National Library. Deepak was my age. On one summer afternoon, he had ventured out to the duck ponds for a bath cum swim with another friend. He fell down in the not so deep water and he got stuck in the mud, his friend panicked and ran home and informed his father, who in turn informed Mr. Mulay. By the time help arrived, it was too late. Deepak had drowned and died. He was my age. It was the first time I lost someone close to the cruel hand of death. His death affected all in our friends' circle. It was quite an unnerving experience. It took a fairly long time of a couple of years for us to get over the tragedy.
Deepak had an elder sister, Suhasini. When Bhuvan Shome was released I noticed that the female lead was Suhasini Mulay. When I saw the movie, I was sure that it was Deepak's sister. That was in 1969, about 10-11 years after the tragedy.

Another family that had become a bit closer to us was the Mehtas. There were 3 young boys, Pradeep, Sudhir, and Randhir (Pullu). Their flat was bang opposite our flat - on the other side of the colony road. They also had a dog, a Doberman, which was very ferocious and all the dogs and the dog owners of the colony were terrified of him. Once the dog attacked a cousin of theirs who was visiting them and hurt her quite severely. After that, the colony folks put their foot down and the dog had to be given away. Sudhir was a dog lover. He now adopted a white she-dog and named her Rani. Things were not going right for the little puppy, who was now just a couple of months old. One day Sudhir fell on her while playing and she got internal injuries and died in a couple of days after the incident. The Mehtas decided not to keep a dog after that.

We often had screams and hysterics because of the girlie nature of the crowd at our house. Once a tiger moth had entered our house, my excited exclamation, "Moth has come to our room!" - was interpreted as "maut" which means death. I don't recall who all screamed but Mrs. Mehta came running to our flat to check on us.
Do you know the basic difference between a moth and a butterfly? Both can be very colorful. When a moth sits, its wings are spread and a butterfly sits with its wings folded.

Prem and Pushpa were also fond of Planchette - a practice of dabbling with the para natural. You summon Mr. Planchette and subsequently ask for the spirit of a particular dead person. At times, any random spirit could make its presence felt and it was rumored that such self inviting spirits enjoyed human contact and were had to get to leave when requested. One day the spirit of the "monkey's paw" (click here to know the story) made an appearance and it was followed by screams and Mrs. Mehta running across the road to our place. In retrospect, it seemed quite delightful and humorous.

Another couple of friends that we made at the time and who are still in touch were Pinaki Dutt-Roy, Samaresh Chatterjee. Pinaki is working freelance as a sound engineer in London, got located on Google. I do meet hin when I visit London for visiting my daughter Chaitali. Samaresh was found by a common friend, he stays in Delhi, not too far, and often meets up in our morning walks.

I have talked about my love for animals as pets. I got the opportunity to adopt a puppy very soon. There was an Anglo-Indian family in our colony who had two pets, one female dog and one cat. Surprisingly, they used to co-exist and had grown up together. Their dog had a litter and the pups were available for adoption. I went and met the lady and she interviewed me thoroughly before handing me a brown male pup. He was between 3 and 4 weeks old. We named him "Dicky".

Belvedere was sandwiched between Belvedere Road (on the east) and Alipore Road (on the west). In the north, the National Library compound's gate opened near the main gate of the Calcutta Zoological Gardens. This was one of the better zoos of the country in terms of number and variety of animals. The other entrance to the Zoo was near Kidderpore. We could frequently hear the roars of the big cats very clearly in our houses, especially in the silence of the night.
On the south of the colony, we had the Horticultural Garden - where Mataji and Neena were regulars in their morning walk. The garden was a paradise for botanists and lovers of plants. The garden also had two trees that were known as pagla trees (click for more info). The leaves appeared to have been cut in individual contours - all appearing different,  Neena was a lazy child (around 14  years old, at the time) and never liked to wake up early. She would go for the walk and promptly go back to sleep after the walk. In fact, Neena used to complete the morning walk with her eyes half-closed. After coming back from the walk Mataji would sit down for her morning puja and Neena would be in bed again, sounds crazy - I often spotted her sleeping while standing near the bathroom door. Before sitting at the puja Mataji used wooden slippers, khadaon, which made a clickety sound when she got up after the puja. The moment Neena would hear the sound of the khadaon, she would straightaway bolt to the bathroom. Once Dicky was trying to play with Mataji while she was at the puja, to shoo him away she picked up the khadaon and tapped it on the floor. I am not sure whether Dicky got shooed away or not, but we also saw Neena bolting to the bathroom.

Just across the Alipore Road, that was on the west of the colony, brought us to the gate cum check-post of an army establishment called Command Hospital. It was a very huge area the other end going to the Diamond Harbour Road as one went further west. It housed barracks, hospitals, Kendriya Vidyalaya, CSD Canteen, Gurudwara, Temple, etc. The premises is an army area even at present. Our gang of young boys had made friends with the guards that manned the gate on the Alipore Road. So on one Sunday, the guard invited us for sharing the langar, the community lunch at the Gurudwara. We were a happy and a bold lot and graciously accepted the invitation and enjoyed the meal. The guards became our cronies and invariably we would go to chit-chat with them.

Once we had a visitor from Delhi, one Captain Prem Varma. He was the brother of Mr. Chandra Prakash Varma - a very close family friend. He was addressed as mamaji (maternal uncle) by us(children). Capt. Varma had been posted to this Command Hospital area for temporary duty. He was received very cordially by Mataji & Pitaji. His visit just preceded my birthday that was being celebrated in a week's time. He was also invited to attend while going that day he asked mm my choice of a gift. He wanted to know between two alternatives, one being an airgun (have forgotten what was the other). I happily chose the airgun. On my birthday he promptly appeared with a DIANA airgun along with a box of 100 lead pellets. I was absolutely ecstatic. This airgun was with me for many years and I had developed into a very good shot. I could hit a match stick at nearly 30 yards. When my son Anurag was about a year old he was staying with Varsha's parents at the Netaji Nagar Government flat, the airgun was decorating the wall near the entrance door of the flat - that is roughly after 16 years of it having been acquired by me. Neena was also taught by me in the use of the airgun and while she was studying in Lady Hardinge Medical College, a few years later, she drove the airgun shooting stallholders at a fete' that was held there, into near bankruptcy by winning all the prizes. They had to literally beg her not to try for more. Just a corollary, saw Yasmin Daji from very close quarters in the fete' - that was in the same year in which she became Miss India and Miss Universe. She was still studying for MBBS in the college at the time.

Life in Belvedere had many hues and there are many memories of incidents that van be remembered for posterity.

The National Library compound had a fair number of mango tres, which used to yield a large number of mangoes. The area had a few watchmen to look out for children like us to protect the mango trees from our stone and catapults, from ruining the crop of the fruit that would have found the way to the Librarian's house. As a matter of fact, we used to gather enough stock of raw mangoes to make an endless supply of achaar (pickle) for the next one year, and aam-panna for our individual households, to last out the summer. I even recall storing the raw mangoes in the hay to ripen them successfully.

Once I was on a prowl with friends and armed with my airgun in the library area when we spotted a snake coiled and partly hidden in the roots of a large tree. I never liked to kill birds, I thought this is a good shikar. I pumped 5 pellets into the portion of its body that was visible. The head was hidden in the roots. Hearing the shots the watchman on duty came on the double. Ultimately the snake was pulled out but his lathi and bashed on the head to strike the death blow. When Mataji came to know that I had killed a snake, all hell broke loose.
"Your grandmother (daadi) would feed snake milk if it made an appearance in the house. We are Nagpal (meaning snake keeper or protector) and we have to protect the snakes and not kill them," I was admonished and made to do penance the following day by remaining locked in the house, reading a religious text.

In the Metro cinema on Chowringhee, we used to have a special show of children's movies or cartoons on Sunday mornings. We, meaning me and friends, used to attend most of them and enjoy clean healthy fun. The tickets were also on a reduced rate and were probably less than a rupee for the show.

On the 15th of August, our friend circle decided to have a party on one of the terraces of the flats. It was going to be a dinner with each person in the group was required to bring one special or favorite dish of the family. If I remember correctly I had taken Punjabi Chhole. It was the first time I got to taste Lobster. Pinaki's mom had prepared lobster curry for us. It was delicious and very hot. It was many years later that I got to taste lobster again, with our son, in the USA.

Once there was a test match in Eden Gardens, It was India vs West Indies. We kids decided to go for that. Getting tickets was out of the question. I recall that we climbed on the roof of the All India Radio building which was in the same vicinity and watched whatever we could see of the match from there. India team got a follow on after West Indies scored 614 runs. Pankaj Roy - our opener gave a miserable performance with 11+duck in the two innings. The match finished in less than 3-1/2 days. We even lost the series 3-0.

Our colony had a massive tree near its second gate on Alipore Road. The tree had a very interesting feature that almost made a natural machan, about 10-12 feet from the ground, by an unnatural formation of its branches. How could it remain hidden from our natural explore instincts! We started using it for a treetop picnics. The flat area on the tree could comfortably seat four youngsters with their hampers.

On the north side of the library, building was located a huge green lawn area that doubled as a playfield for hockey and cricket areas. On its west corner of this green, there was a cluster of banyan tree(s) that had money plants growing wild over it with leaves going up to 1-1/2 to 2 feet size. One typical branch came down in a majestic curve just about 3 to 4 feet above the ground, which could not only seat 7-8 of us swaying gently but also bear to take up our load. That was the favorite spot of the batsmen waiting to go on the crease.

Once granny (Pitaji's mother) had come to Calcutta. She was around the age of 80. After a few days, she developed serious diarrhea/dysentery, and being frail and delicate at her age, we were all very concerned. She had to be taken to hospital and was admitted to the R G Kar Hospital. Mataji was almost in a panic, she kept praying that she should recover and not succumb to her illness in our house. Else she would get branded the evil bahu. A few days in the hospital helped her to a full recovery, much to everyone's relief.

All good things also come to an end. Pitaji got transferred and we moved to Delhi in April 1959.

I shall continue the narrative in My Story 5 - Meri Dilli, Patel Nagar. Click here to continue.

My Story 3 - Calcutta, South Point School

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Neena and I had been admitted to South Point School in Garihat Area, in Ballygunge, in class 7 and 5 respectively. At the time we joined South Point - it was a relatively new school with a strength of only about 300 students. It had been started just over a year ago. It was administered and run very well. English medium and coeducational; one could avoid having to learn Bengali, we could choose Bengali or Hindi as the extra language, although Sanskrit was taught there as a compulsory subject. Thus the school suited us very well as transfer students from Delhi, it was also at a reasonable distance from Lake Place, just about 3 kilometers. We had a school bus service, so it was also very convenient. Pushpa had got admission for the MBBS course at the Calcutta National Medical College in the previous year itself, as per her heart's desire. Prem had finished her Senior Cambridge before we moved to Calcutta and she got admission into the Ashutosh College for persuing her under-graduate course for her English Litterature, in which she ultimately did her M.A. & Ph.D. 

Victoria Memorial, Calcutta

In spite of the fact that the school was just over a year old, it was well managed and we were a happy lot. It was strict in discipline yet maintained a friendly atmosphere with the students. Ii was a fairly small premises having a playfield that was a wee bit smaller than the area required for a football field. It seemed quite enough for most of the needs of the school. The administrative block was the size of a modest bungalow. Many of the classrooms were constructed with cement sheet walls, they were well maintained and did give a good feeling because of the newness. We had a good interesting faculty and many of our teachers were involved with the well known CLT (Children's Little Theatre) group who excelled in stage plays. They were very well known for their Shakespearean plays. Fantastic stage dresses, excellent lighting, makeup, direction - all were considered the best in the Calcutta theatre networks. The most famous name was that of Utpal Dutt, who not only made a mark on the Bengali Stage and Bengali movies but also excelled in the Hindi Bollywood cinema in the later years. While Neena and I were studying in South Point, he had already created and proved his histrionics on the Bengali Stage and Cinema. We had quite a handful of other teachers in South Point, who did not just act on the stage but also excelled in many aspects of the theatre, viz., makeup, stage lighting, dialogue delivery, etc. I still recall quite a few names - Mr. Chatterjee (PT & Games), Mr. Sen, Mr. Bannerjee (Fine Arts).

I remember I had gone to school one day without completing my homework for the Maths class. It was a fairly common practice to skip doing the homework with some lame excuse. No action was taken normally, except a reprimand. Today the maths teacher became strict - no excuse or story would be heard. We were six of us who had not done the homework. He got dunces' caps made for us and we were paraded and taken to all the classrooms to be shamed. When we reached Neena's class I started sobbing. I was terribly ashamed. She showed her kind nature and did not tell our parents about my humiliation.

Mr. Utpal Dutt had unique characteristics very much of his own and without compare. He used to teach us the Queen's English. He not only had mastery of the language but he also made his classes very interesting with his histrionics. He was a die-hard Marxist as far as I can recall. He had quite a loud and booming voice. His hallmark was a thick cigar that was always with him, matched his personality. While teaching his class, he was always with his cigar and he easily spent 10% of his time lighting the damn thing with a match, he never used a lighter. I think he used to think out his next step or direction while lighting his cheroot.
Another catchphrase of Utpal Dutt is illustrated here.
English has many anomalies that come up while teaching language and grammar. When an anomaly would rear its head Mr. Dutt would say in his booming voice, "BECAUSE....." and the entire class would respond in unison,"...ENGLISH IS A MAD LANGUAGE!"
All these little quirks, if you like to call them that, made him an interesting and memorable teacher. His historic cigar was always there even in his Hindi movies, starting with "Shakespeare Wallah" - his debut on the screen is lighting his cigar by a blow torch, he is busy doing some welding work. His most popular Hindi movie was Bhuvan Shome, a non-commercial film that went on to win three National Film Awards, including the one of Best Actor, for him. He is no longer with us except in our memories. He died in 1993 at the age of 64.

The deficiency of a big playfield got highlighted very cruelly during a football match with St Lawrence School. They had very huge premises, possibly 8-10 times ours. The match was held in their football ground. In spite of a valiant fight we were down by a dozen goals - the final tally was 12-NIL. A fairly large contingent of two busloads of students had gone to cheer our team. We were all so excited while we were going with slogans and cheers of an anticipated and misplaced victory. In the return journey, everyone was totally silent, you could hear a pin drop.

Like any other school of that time, we had our share of street vendors at our gate. I developed an insatiable urge and taste for the historic Orange Bar (of Magnolia), and also a digestive pudia of a gooie chooran. I also loved an occasional daab (tender green coconut) for its water as well as a layer of soft and tender coconut that had started forming within the shell. The vendor would split open the fruit with his hasiya a heavy sickle-like tool, and scoop out the yummy still soft and tender fruit from its insides, deposit it one half of the shell of the nut and hand it over as the 'bonus' - after all only the water had been paid for.

In 1957, the Naiya Paisa was introduced. India had overtaken many of the advanced Western Nations in adopting the CGS (and the decimal) system. The earlier rupee had 16 annas, Each anna has 4 paisas. Smaller denominations of paisa, viz., dhela and pai, had already been discontinued. Now we had coins of 1, 2, 5, 25, 50 and 100 (1 rupee) paisa. One Anna became equivalent of 6-1/4 paise; the earlier coins of 1 paisa (old), 2 paisa, 1 anna, 2 annas, 4 annas 8 annas were gradually withdrawn from the system. Initially, a lot of confusion prevailed but we gradually got used to the new system. We stopped referring to the Naiya Paisa as such and it was replaced by calling it Paisa only. Gradually miles were replaced by kilometers and yards by meters; degree Fahrenheit by degree Centigrade or Celcius. But we still live in a dual system. Body temperature is still Fahrenheit, though the weather is in Celcius, land measurements are still in square yards in many places.

The lack of playing fields in the school did leave me with a little setback as far as my sporting abilities were concerned. I was an outdoor person by nature and I did get my exercise in the improvised football field in the empty plot by the side of our Lake Place residence, but that somehow could never help me become a good footballer nor allow me to learn the finer aspects of the game.

Another change happened for the better in 1957. Pitaji was allotted government accommodation in a beautifully developed new colony within the huge compound of the famous National Library. 84 flats were constructed for the Central Government Officers in the area they called Belvedere, in fourteen 3 storeyed blocks. It was not only a modern and posh locality with lots of greenery and open spaces. Proper garages for parking the cars were also made, although owning a car was not all that common at the time. Thus we shifted to a new and totally different environment from the paada culture.

I shall continue the narrative in My Story 4 - Calcutta, Belvedere. Click here to continue.

My Story 2 - Oh Calcutta. Lake Place

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We moved to Calcutta in the year 1955, around the time of the start of the new session in schools, perhaps it was sometime between April and June. Pushpa had moved a year earlier for her MBBS from the Calcutta National Medical College. She had to take off from studies for a year because of her critical encounter with meningitis. 

Pitaji had found a house on rent south Calcutta - 22 Lake Place (Road), the address has been etched permanently in my memory. It was a typical Bengali area. There were at least half a dozen children in the neighborhood who were in the age band that could be befriended, which is within 2 to 3 years of my age. The spoken language was only Bengali. 

The Lake Place house was a 3 storied structure. Our Bengali house owner lived with his family on the top floor, with his wife, married son, and a daughter-in-law who use to sing and play the sitar. The ground floor had another tenant named Babbar, who was also a Punjabi. The first floor had a Tamilian family (a Central Government Officer) Still remember the lady as she had her hair cascading up to her ankles. The house also had a courtyard in the middle which was in the area of the Babbar family. After a few months, the Babbars moved out and were replaced by a Bengali family. There a girl called Tapti, of Neena's age, one fine day she broke half of her front incisor after a small fall in the cemented courtyard.
The house was a good-sized building that could house 4 families. We had 4 rooms plus a fairly spacious verandah, a kitchen, and a bathroom. A passage used to run behind the house and the boundary wall, in which all the windows opened, which helped in good ventilation for all the rooms. The adjoining plot of land (no. 24) was lying vacant and was used by us kids as a football ground. Bengalis had a yen for the game and we played football in all kinds of weather. The most interesting was during the rains, and we kids used to literally have a mud bath while we enjoyed the game.

The best part of this place was its location, Dhakuria Lake was just about a kilometer from this place and many an evening was spent by us children or even the family, in visiting the lake. We would go across the suspension bridge that connected to the small island in the lake, watching and feeding the large fish, with small balls of kneaded flour or atta.
There was a small ornamental garden called the Lilly Pool, near the entrance of the lake. It had beautifully manicured lawns and an abundance of colorful flowers. We had a few family picnics in this garden. For our regular walker, that is Mataji, she would encircle the complete lake, making about five kilometers for her morning walk.

Calcutta is a city with a soul and culture very typical of the Bengal you read about in the multitude of well-known writers. I will talk less about Calcutta and more of my life in the formative years of my life in Calcutta. For those readers of mine who want to see Kolkata through my eyes - please visit my blog http://tnagpal.blogspot.com/search?q=kolkata, I am sure that you will love it.

Conch Shell Blowing

Around dusk, there would be the soothing sound of conch shells coming from all households and shops. The shops in the market would burn a very sweet and strong-smelling incense to purify the atmosphere (and of course to overcome the "fishy" smell of the city). These sounds and the smell are as much a part of the city as a living being. Dusk is the puja time. Calcutta was well known for its nightlife and night clubs. The bhadralok would step out of the houses to visit their favorite haunts, be it a bar or a club. Donning a gajra of strong-smelling mogra or similar flowers on the wrists, along with a spotless dhoti and kurta, they exude a very regal presence. After 10.30pm - our Bengali neighbors would start frying the fish, the smell of which would permeate the atmosphere. The bhadralok would generally arrive home anytime after midnight. This was a regular feature in most middle-class and upper-class households. We did not get much direct exposure to the lower strata of the society, but I believe that the menfolk would normally return home drunk and would often get into brawls with each other or indulge in violence at home.

I was always fond of having a dog or some other pet. Till now my parents did not permit me to indulge in this luxury, the condition was that I will have to give my full time for it. Being a Punjabi and from north India, milk was an important constituent of our diet, as we were growing up. Pitaji managed to rope in a milkman who would come to the gate of our house and milk his cow then and there, the white foamy milk collected in a bucket clamped between his knees as he squatted to do the needful. He also brought a calf that would remain close to the front of the cow while he did the milking. The stupid cow would think that the calf is suckling and having the milk while the milkman filled his bucket. Once I noticed that instead of a calf, the milkman had a small wooden log with the skin of the calf wrapped on it, he suspended it near the front of the cow. The cow would lick that contraption while getting milked. How dumb are the animals, compared to us, the crafty humans. 
We would get fresh milk in our utensils. All four kids, my 3 sisters and me, hated milk. So invariably some milk would remain leftover by us dodging the intake of the recommended quantity. We did not have a fridge in those days and often the leftover milk curdled. Cats are really smart animals and one white cat with yellow patches adopted us. We started feeding her regularly with milk - curdled or otherwise. She became most comfortable with me and our family that she even had a litter in our drawing-room under a small low diwan. It was a litter of very sweet-looking three kittens. They were duly christened Beauty, Cutey, and Sweety by Prem and Pushpa. 

Pitaji's office at the Indian Museum was on Chowringhee and there was a direct and very convenient tram connection from the Lake Market to his office. It was so convenient that his office peon Ganesh would come home and carry Pitaji's dabba (lunch box) to enable him to get a hot meal. It was a tall lunch galvanized grey-colored lunch box with a double outer layer. It housed 4 inner containers and food remained warm in the case for more than a few hours. A monthly tram pass was also made for Ganesh, which allowed 2 journeys (one in each direction) every day.

Mataji had become a vegetarian after I was born, it was done to fulfill some mannat (a promise to the deity or god). Pitaji also became a vegetarian though he was less rigid about it. At home, only Neena and I were the only regulars for having non-vegetarian food. So much so that we became self-sufficient for it. I would buy the mutton and wash and clean it and Neena would do the cooking. I would often help her and developed my cooking skills which even hold me in good stead to date, I developed my basics in cooking very well. To augment our non-veg food, I once got fish from the Lake Market, mutton was not available in this market. Neena and I tried cooking it, we messed it up, it became like a halwa and the smell seemed to just linger on in the house for the next few days. I was getting desperate to eat some non-veg stuff, so Pitaji invited me to his office on one Saturday, as our school was closed on weekends. I went with Ganesh when he came to fetch Pitaji's lunch box. Pitaji had sent for a plate of chicken curry from Punjab Hotel (a dhaba, not far from his office, located on Lindsay Street). It was a small eatery and we had gone there with the family earlier - something like the Kake da Hotel in Connaught Place in New Delhi. The preparations were absolutely yummy, loaded with spices and ghee (oil was taboo in Punjabi eateries). I loved this lunch so much that it became my Saturday ritual. After lunch, I would hang around in his office, play with the typewriter, go up and down the manual lift, which resembled a cage. It was enjoyable for an 11-year-old. Then finally I would return home with Pitaji at the end of his office time. He was a person of few words, there were no lectures or sermons or tips for life. Mostly we both remained in our respective thoughts and worlds. It never occurred to me that Neena would have also loved this meal - I guess I was too self-centered.

At times Pitaji would have an invite to attend a Bengali wedding feast, and I loved tagging along for these, mainly for the food; I loved the Bengali food. Mutton curry, fish curry, and fried fish were the essentials along with at least two sweets like raj bhog, sandesh, rossogulla. I had a sweet tooth plus a non-veg tooth and I never missed a wedding feast. In contrast, if there was any other wedding, Punjabi, Marwari etc - it was strictly vegetarian food. I also developed a great liking for the luchchi - the small pooris made of the refined flour. Developed a love for eating with the hand. I still enjoy my rice and curry with my hand. 

Life was good as a child and I savored and enjoyed every bit of it. Calcutta always seemed to be celebrating some pooja or some function all the time. I had picked up a reasonable amount of Bengali and was managing to converse with the pada crowd. I could understand them fully and managed to communicate with words of English and Hindi thrown in the conversation. After defeating a boy of my age and size in a friendly wrestling match and I was accepted as a part of the gang. Reminds me of wolves (and dogs) I guess that is how their packs and territories grow bigger. I starting accompanying the group of boys in collecting chanda (donations) for the festivals. Was generally around for handy jobs in the pandals and even accompanying the group when they went for the visarjan (immersion of the idols, in the Hooghly river), with all the drums and music and a lot of vermillion being smeared on all. 

EMAM-DASTA

SIL-VATTA

Vishvakarma Puja was the kite flying festival for us and the Calcutta sky used to be a riot of color with kites of all hues and sizes. BHOKATA was the war cry we yelled when we succeeded in cutting the string of the opponents' kite during the pech (duel of kites). It was in this period that I not only learnt to fly kites but also learnt making the manja (kite string with embedded glass powder) to get an advantage during the pech. 
A lot of waste glass - bottles, bulbs, etc. - was collected, pounded, and ground into a fine powder in the emam-dasta (kitchen pestle and mortar) of wrought iron. Then this glass powder was mixed in the glue that was made by boiling refined flour. Care had to be taken to avoid the formation of lumps. The plain string would then be strung around two lamp posts in the street while applying the glue with glass powder by bare hands. (We had never thought that gloves could be used, if at all). The string would remain on the lamp posts for a good part of the day in bright sunlight to dry it completely before coiling it on the charki(s) - the spools on which the string is coiled while flying the kite. Making the manja caused a great displeasure in my family as I needed the pestle and mortar of our home. The Bengali homes used sil-vatta - which was not at all suitable for the job. Once there was a minor mishap - a bovine trundled through our manja that was drying on the lamp posts; bringing us to tears. 

Traditional Dance during Puja

The Durga Puja is celebrated across Calcutta for 10 days, with pandaals erected all over the city. One gets variety of savories and Bengali cuisine in each pandaal. Stalls for sale of clothes are also common. The evening hours are for puja, with conch shell sounds, loud drums, dances, and burning of incenses. The festivities generally carry on for the entire day, however, the evenings see the women folk decked up and dressed in all the finery and jewelry. Most of them are dressed in traditional white sarees with red zari borders. Generally, dances, songs, and plays are performed throughout the night  

Life could not have been better. It seemed all fun and play. The studies at school continued at their own pace without any special emphasis on performance or ranks or undue pressures that we see on the children these days.

We meet again in My Story 3, of my schooling at the South Point. Click here to continue.

My Story 1 - My entry into the world. Kashmiri Gate.

Modern School, Barakhamba Road

I am taking up the pen again, the present lockdown due to the COVID-19 scare does leave us with time at hand. Rather than go into a depression due to idleness, I decided I shall just be penning the story of my life - as I remember - as seen through my eyes.

My earliest memories are of our house in Kashmiri Gate, Delhi, where I was born and spent nearly the first ten years of my life. It was a government accommodation - a stand-alone bungalow.

My memory always showed the bungalow as a massive and very large property. I was disappointed and realized that it was not all that large when I visited the place with my wife and daughter, many years later. In childhood, one has a small frame and small steps, and the distances appear longer than what they are in reality. The bungalow also appeared massive in my childhood memories. 

Initially, the bungalow had 3 rooms. One was a large hall, which was our living cum dining room, It became an extended bedroom during the winters. The second room, on the western side of the hall and covering its full western wall, was a kind of a large storeroom. The third room, on the southern side of the hall, was also fairly large and longish. It was a bedroom cum pooja room. It also served as a labor room during my birth. There was a very large verandah on the northern side of the hall, that had a sloping roof of clay red tiles which was the hallmark design of English cottages and bungalows. This verandah opened into a cemented courtyard. The courtyard and the verandah were the family sleeping areas during the summer and the rainy seasons. We had a fairly large kitchen on the eastern side of the courtyard. It was in a separate building altogether and was not a part of the main building. The eastern side of the hall had an open passage connecting to the bathroom on its southern end. 

A lot of additions were done later on and I recall the addition of at least 5 more rooms over the years. 3 were made on the northern end of the courtyard, One of these was a small-sized room (probably about 6’x6’) and we called it the kothri. It was used primarily for storing coal (soft coke) and firewood for the hearth. Our kitchen used these fuels only. Kerosene stoves were a rarity. Cooking gas had not come to this part of the country, though piped natural gas was known to be available in some areas of Bombay and Calcutta, a legacy of the British Raj. The area in between the kitchen and the rest of the house had a tap and a washing bay, that was used for washing clothes as well as the kitchen utensils. My family here consisted of my parents and four elder sisters. There was another older sister, Phulan, she was already married and stayed separately with her husband and her children. Her place was also in Kashmiri Gate, though it was about 2 km from our house. On the north side, we had a row of rooms that housed the domestic helps and their families. Dhobi, sweeper and cleaner families lived these rooms. Their housing was also built like the English cottages having clay-tiled roofs.

Our bungalow was located on what was known as 5 Lothian Road. Now it is shown as "Kela Ghat Marg" in the present-day maps. The house was on a 7 to 8 foot higher ground than the road and about 50 meters off the main road. Presently the area is shown as Priyadarshini Colony - in the Google maps. The river Yamuna was almost where we have the present day Ring Road on the north side, Frequent floods in the river used to cause a lot of hardship and devastation. One could invariably see human corpses as well as domestic animals like goats, dogs, and cows being carried away in the flooded and fast-flowing river. During floods, quite a bit of the Kela Ghat Marg would be underwater and the river waters would threaten us from the steps as well as a sloping ramp that lead to the higher ground where our bungalow was located. Flood water did not ever our area because of the higher ground.

The next few paras are, of course, from hearsay and not my memory:

It was a cold December morning much before sunrise, with just a few days before the New Year of 1946, when my mom (she was called Mataji), Lilawati, went into labor before I was born. Although it was peak winter, the atmosphere in Delhi was hot and burning in those pre-partition days. A night curfew was clamped in the whole city with a shoot at sight orders. Shouts of Allah ho Akbar, Jo Bole so Nihal and Jai Bajrangbali could be heard amongst the clanging of swords and sound of gunfire. Screams and yells of humanity rent the air. My father had to go unseen and hidden to fetch the midwife to deliver me into this world.

I was born around 4 am. Word was sent to Phulan's house that an important event had taken place and she has been blessed with a young brother after a long wait of the parents after 5 daughters. What do we see next morning! Phulan and her family coming to our Kashmiri Gate bungalow with a regular brass band that one sees in traditional Indian weddings, to celebrate the birth of a son in the family! I was born with sounds of gunfire and swishing of swords and heralded into this world amidst sounds of trumpets and drums. I am sure, not many can boast of such a welcome into this world.

My other siblings were Neena, Prem, Pushpa, and Devika, in the increasing order of age.

My name had to start with the letter "T", it was drawn from Guru Granth Saheb, the holy book of the Sikhs. Accordingly, I was christened Triloki Nath, another name of the Lord Shiva, meaning the lord of the three worlds. During my growing up years, I was very protected and always treated with kid gloves. The son is the most important being in a Hindu family. He is looked upon as the torchbearer for the future generations. He is required to light the funeral pyre of his father to ensure the latter's entry into heaven. We had a family astrologer by the name of Ghananand. He was always consulted for all our family's religious needs. My birthdays were celebrated with a havan and it was followed by distribution of grains equal to my weight plus cooked rotis equal to my height when stacked. All this was done to ensure a long and healthy life for me. A huge weighing scale suspended from a tripod made of thick wooden bamboos would have to be erected in our courtyard for the purpose. I was made to sit in my underclothes in one pan of the weighing scale and a sack of grain with an open mouth would sit on the other pan. The grain would be added into the sack until it balanced my weight.

My oldest memory is when I was just around 2 years of age, I had gone to Vaishno Devi with my parents, to get my hair shorn - mundan. I do not have any recollection of the journey but I do recall the hot paved courtyard where my hair was shorn, and I was barefooted having great discomfort. I do recall seeing my picture in our archives with shoulder-length hair before going for the mundan ceremony. I also remember crawling on my stomach to enter the cave of the deity at Vaishno Devi. This was my first and last visit to this place.

The evening celebrations were non-religious and generally included the performance of any popular English play to be staged by my 4 elder sisters who were being educated in the most reputed convent of the time - Presentation Convent. The stage would be set up most professionally, with footlights, a draw curtain that could be closed with drawstrings. I can still recall two very well known plays very vividly, which were performed in our home theatre; viz., “Bishop’s Candlesticks” and “Blue Beard”. My sisters were very resourceful and used to get all the props for the play and well as the scripts from their school. I still recall the silver candlesticks that had been borrowed from the school for the occasion. I, on the other hand, did not study in a convent. My father was of the opinion that boys become too docile if they are taught by the nuns. So I had my schooling in Modern School at Barakhamba Road - which was considered the number one school in competition with St. Columba's School. 

The whole environment would be that of a festival matching the decorations of a pompous Indian wedding. This continued for the first ten years of my life before we moved to Calcutta because of the transfer of my father to the National Museum, Calcutta. He had got transferred in 1951, however, the family moved to Calcutta only in 1955.

While we were in Kashmiri Gate, a back room and the open space at the back was let out to a Sikh family who had two boys. The boys were probably a year or two older than me and were bullies. We never played together, in fact, I did not like them at all. In fact, I felt vastly relieved and happy when they vacated the place around 1952. The backroom and the entire open space came into our possession and was never let out again as long as we lived in this house. Later we did get a couple of our relatives viz., Yoginder (YL Arora) and Satish Gulati to stay in our back room. The open space had the passage through the back room. It was now converted into a vegetable patch and we had a good sprawled out kitchen garden with my first exposure to vegetable plants like bhindi, brinjals, tomato, peas, beans, karela, pumpkin, watermelon, cucumber and many more. Everything comes with a price, hordes of monkeys had started coming in to enjoy the fruits of our labor. Mataji had green fingers and the garden prospered well with her efforts. With our own garden, I started to develop an interest in nature, insects, birds, etc. I started keeping caterpillars in a shoebox and would wait for them to emerge as butterflies. A few of them did emerge as moths but none as butterflies.

Once I found a baby sparrow that had probably fallen out of a nest and was too tiny to fly. I kept it in a shoebox and tried feeding it for a couple of days but it just died. I was most embarrassed and ashamed and I did not tell anyone at home, not even my sister Neena who was just a bit older than a year and we shared most of my secrets. 

I did have a few friends in the neighborhood. One nearby bungalow had a family (Ahujas) and there was a boy of my age. I do not recall his name, however, I do recall some of his toys though. He had a train set which fascinated me. They also had a fridge - which was a rarity in that period. The father was a senior government official and they had also spent some time abroad - probably in England. I recall another neighbor's family, the Mathurs. They had children closer to Prem's age and Prem had found a friend - a girl from that family. The Mathurs' bungalow had a bigger open lawn and I recall Ram-Lila festivities being celebrated there. As a matter of fact, the characters who dressed/acted as Ram, Lakshman and Sita were revered by the crowd and many of the spectators bowed before them and touched their feet in obeisance.

Then we had a Sindhi family staying nearby, the Tahilramanis. The gentleman was a senior official in the Posts & Telegraphs. He was tall fair and handsome. Their flat was on the first floor in a building adjacent to the present day GPO. From their back courtyard of their flat one could look into our back courtyard (vegetable garden) and we could converse or exchange pleasantries very easily, the crow's flight distance being just about 15 meters. The wife was a housewife, as it used to be in almost all cases, a chubby sweet and short woman - very loving to all of us. Their son Subhash was almost my age, maybe a year senior. He had an older sister Indra, who was Neena's friend and her age. There were two younger siblings, Chandralekha (Munni) and Ashok (Kiku). The youngest - Kiku - was born during the course of our friendship.  Subhash and I had gone to their old residence a few years ago. The place had been converted to a guest house of the Posts and Telegraphs Department. We are still in contact with the family. Subhash and Indra do meet Neena and me quite regularly. Subhash is settled in Saginaw (MI, USA). Indra lives in Mumbai. Her children are also settled in the US. Our parents did not have much interaction with each other, but the children did. We used to play together every evening and our favorite play area was the green areas around the present day "British Magazine Memorial", opposite the General Post Office at Kashmiri Gate. As children, the various games that we indulged in or played in the limited area available to us were: Pithhoo (7 tiles), Hide and Seek, Geete (5 stones), hopscotch, skipping et all. It was generally just four of us in the group - Indra, Subhash, Neena, and me. Prem was much older and Munni was much too young. We lived in the Kashmiri-Gate house till mid-1955, before we permanently moved to Calcutta. 

Around 1951, Pitaji had got transferred to Calcutta on promotion as the Administrative Officer to the Indian Museum. However, we did not all move to Calcutta as Prem was to complete their Senior Cambridge. Pushpa fell sick and was diagnosed with meningitis and was hospitalized. The parents decided that Pitaji should accept and proceed to Calcutta and Mataji would stay back with the children and would move only after the problem of Pushpa's illness and Prem's school final were resolved. She became quite serious and was hospitalized in Irwin Hospital (present-day LNJP Hospital). Pushpa was very critical in some of the phases of the sickness and had to battle with life and death. As Pitaji was in Calcutta and Mataji had to battle it out without his support plus looking after 3 children at home. Prem was the eldest and was just about 13-14 years of age. Neena and I were between 5-7 years old. Pushpa's hospitalization lasted about thirteen months and Mataji had to spend all her time in the hospital leaving Prem in charge of the home and the two siblings. It was a tough life for both Mataji and Prem. The latter had to not only look after two siblings but also manage the kitchen and the cooking. This period with Prem brought Neena and me quite close to Prem. She was like our parent who had to look after both of us along with managing the household for the entire length of Pushpa's hospitalization. She had to invent stories and anecdotes to keep Neena and me engrossed and in awe. Using her very vivid imagination, she created stories out of shapes of clouds that flitted across the sky, stories made from the play of lights that would fall on the large side wall of our kitchen from any vehicle would headlights coming down on the unnamed road coming right in front of our colony from the side of St James Church in Kashmiri Gate. Ghost stories would be made up by her by the imaginary shapes on the neem tree after it became dark. The massive neem was in the north-east corner just outside of the hall. The squirrels used to make an unusual side, with a little imagination, you could hear the tinkling of anklets or ghungroos. There was such a fertile ground for an imaginative storyteller - ghungaroos and the shadows on the tree; and Prem was really good at creating stories from anything and everything. At times when she would bungle in the making of the quantity of dough for the rotis, she had to hide the excess dough by tossing it in a ball of the slanting red-tiled roof of the verandah. 

We had a lot of fat monkeys and their families as visitors in this house. They would invariably find their way to the verandah’s sloping roof and create quite a havoc there - fighting to grab the dough balls or the leftover roties thrown on the roof by Prem. The racket created by them would make us wonder if the clay tiles would hold on and not start braking and collapsing. There was a huge neem tree overhanging on the roof of the verandah, which was the playground for the monkeys, squirrels, and a variety of birds and insects. We could often spot a large honeycomb high up branches of the neem. 

Prem did prove to be the biggest support for Mataji during Pushpa’s sickness in being able to look after the house as well as her two young siblings viz., Neena, and me. The house problems and issues were getting resolved. Mataji’s strongest anchor during the crisis and illness of Puspa was our family astrologer, Pandit Ghananand, without whom no decision was taken during this crisis period. He had predicted that Pushpa would recover fully, in spite of her close brushes with death and long hospitalization. When it was finally decided and the complete family moved to Calcutta in April-May 1955, the happiest persons would have been Mataji and Prem, for their respective reasons. Mataji was finally able to be able to depend on Pitaji for the innumerable problems that she had faced all alone with the 4 children with the eldest in hospital in a critical condition most of the time. Prem, who had her childhood snatched from her by the added responsibility of the hearth and two young siblings. Pandit Ghananand also got left behind and we moved on to the typical happy family. Pushpa got admitted into the Calcutta National Medical College for pursuing her MBBS as per her life’s desire. Prem joined BA in Asutosh College to pursue her love for English Literature. Neena and I joined South Point School in class 7 and 5 respectively. 

Before I move to Calcutta with my next chapter, I would like to share some of the anecdotes that come to my mind as I pen (or rather, type) this document. Let m share some of them with you.

As mentioned earlier, Phoolan’s house was less than a couple of kilometers away and she had some of her children even older than the 3 of us, Prem, Neena, and me. Her one daughter Mohini was quite friendly with Neena as they were almost of similar age. She was extremely naughty in her childhood days. One day when we had gone to Phulan’s house, we children - Mohini, Neena, and I had gone to the market. Mohini hatched a plan of stealing guavas from a fruit vendor selling the fruits on a hand cart. The plan was that each of us would pick one/two fruits at a signal from Mohini and run for it. Mohini managed to pick two guavas, Neena picked one and yours truly just panicked and ran without any fruit. We ran on without looking back, till we reached Phoolan’s house. Neena hurt her hand on the next day. She felt that she had sinned so that hand injury happened. Result of her convent upbringing. 

Delhi summers were hot even in those days with temperatures going up to 40+ deg C and we had dust storms and loo (hot winds) even in those days. The hall had a wide door (about 6 feet) opening into the passage on the eastern side, into the passage for the bathroom. In summer months we had a khas ki tatti (wicker frame with fragrant grass) covering the entire doorway opening. My parents had got a G.I. pipe connected to the water supply fitted on to of the tati, that had drilled holes on the eny=tire length. This was connected to the main water supply of the house through a valve. So keeping the khas wet was no big deal and did not require a great effort of a person to keep splashing water on it. There were no G.I. sheet desert coolers we have in abundance these days. 

I was not just naughty but also quite destructive. A heap of clothes used to lie for washing on the stone slab outside the bathroom. One day I just lit a match and just burnt them. Neena was also there and witnessed the destruction She was absolutely dumbfounded by my act. She could not keep the secret and I received a thrashing from Mataji. 

One day Subhash and I were playing near his house. A truck was parked there and we would get into the driver’s cabin and jump out on a sand heap nearby - pretend to be doing a get-away. In one jump Subhash landed at a peculiar angle and started howling that his bone had broken. Some workers nearby immediately came and took him inside. I was very scared, I went away home without even knowing if he was badly hurt. When I came to play the next day, his arm was in plaster. He actually had a fracture.

So with these anecdotes, I close my Delhi (Kashmiri Gate) Chapter, please click here to move to Calcutta in Story 2.

Growing up in CP - Lalit Narula

Growing up in CP

LALIT NIRULA


Dilliwallahs was a term used for people whose families had been living in Old Delhi – or Purani Dilli – for generations. My family migrated to Delhi in the 1920s and settled in a brand new, still-under-construction, 20,000 inhabitant-strong, New Delhi. And that, I guess, would technically make us Nai Dilliwalas! My folks were one of the few Punjabi families who lived in Delhi in the ’20s and I, the Nai Dilliwala or CP wallah, was born at Lady Hardinge Hospital, just a stone’s throw from Connaught Place. The first four years of my life were spent at Hanuman Road, right next to CP and from then on, for the next 58 years, I lived and worked in CP.

My father remembered seeing a train track passing through the not-yet-completed Connaught Place complex, en-route to Raisina Hill, carrying building material for the under-construction Rashtrapati Bhavan, North and South Blocks and Parliament House. While the whole complex of the inner and outer circle is popularly known as Connaught Place, or CP, the outer ring of buildings was called Connaught Circus and the inner ring was called Connaught Place. Most of the buildings came up in the ’20s and ’30s and the last buildings to come up were as late as the ’50s.

There was a big divide between the old parts of Delhi and the new, culturally and physically. I remember an aunt telling me how in the late ’20s, she returned to Delhi by train with her brother and got off at the main Delhi station which was in Old Delhi. As her husband lived and worked in New Delhi, she wanted to go there immediately. However, it was winter and dark when she alighted from the train, and she was advised not to venture towards New Delhi until the next morning, as in the area between the walls of Old Delhi (where Asaf Ali Road and Ramlila grounds are now located) and Connaught Place, there was a jungle and it was not safe to travel at night!

CP was not a favoured shopping centre in the early days and there were very few people who wanted to open retail outlets there. While the ground and mezzanine floors were commercial space, the upper floors were residential and till the ’70s, continued to be primarily residential.

My father and uncle were young bachelors running a photo studio in D-Block and, being fond of good food, had to travel to Chandni Chowk or Kashmiri Gate in Old Delhi to get a proper meal. So was born the idea of starting a small hotel with a restaurant on half the upper floor of D-Block so they could be assured of good food! Encouraged by their neighbour, Mr Beaty of S.M.G. Beaty, they opened Hotel India in 1934. Hotel India became popular, as the only other hotel that existed in New Delhi at that time was a luxury hotel, The Imperial. Marina Hotel in G-Block came up a little later.

While CP was still developing, my father and uncle discovered a large ground floor location being used for charpai storage on the corner of L-Block in the outer circle. They negotiated with the four owners and took it on rent and opened a first class restaurant and bar serving continental and Indian food and named it Nirulas Corner House in early 1942.

During the War years, business improved substantially and the restaurant became well-known for its food and entertainment which included cabarets, flamenco dancers, magicians, and performance ballroom dancing. A friend’s father told me that as a young cavalry officer in the early ’40s, posted in Delhi Cantonment during the war, he would motorcycle down to our restaurant once a week to have ‘desi khana’, as all he got in his very pukka British Army Mess was insipid British food!
An Englishman who met me in the ’90s showed me one of our table d’hote menus from the early ’40s that offered two 5 course meals, for two rupees each! His father had picked up the menu when he was posted in India.



Gol Dakhana (GPO), New Delhi.

I remember being told of a legendary gourmand, a very eminent tall and rotund lawyer who was a regular at our restaurant for lunch. He would sit at his favourite table and ask the butler, Jameel, what was being offered. He would select one of the full meals and many times, after finishing it, would proceed to enquire about what else was available as he was still a little hungry. He would then order the second meal and proceed to finish that as well.

Christmas and New Year’s eve were magical times for me. The restaurant would be decorated for the festive season on the evening of 22 December, the eve of my birthday. I would go there on the 23rd and be delighted to see all the decorations which I thought had been done specially for me! Imagine my delight at seeing a sparkly, brightly festooned Connaught Place done up just to wish me a happy birthday.
Besides our establishment, there were two other restaurants in CP by then, both owned and run by foreigners – Davico’s, the present Standard Restaurant in Regal Building and Wengers. In the ’40s and ’50s many more restaurants opened – Kwality, Gaylord, Volga, Alps, United Coffee House, York, and more.

Post 1947, my family realized that with the British leaving, market requirements had changed. They closed down the existing restaurant and in 1950 started three new restaurants in the same space.
The first one was a 150-seat modern cafeteria which catered to the large new middle class, and soon became very popular. It introduced into India – what is now commonplace – clean hygienic food cooked to order in front of the customer, with payment at the end of the cafeteria line. It also introduced the long milk shake spoon which would often be in short supply as it became a great souvenir item!
The second restaurant was a ‘brasserie’ modelled on the ones in France, but the concept was 50 years before its time and not very successful. The third restaurant, the Chinese Room, was the first de luxe Chinese restaurant in India owned by non-Chinese people. It ran successfully for over 55 years.
The Chinese Room’s first chef, Li Wo Po, was introduced to us by the interior designer, Edwin Chan. Li Wo Po had come to India in ’42 with Chiang Kai Shek and decided to stay on. He was very happily married to a South Indian lady. They had an ideal relationship , as he did not speak English or any Indian language and she only spoke her mother tongue! How they communicated remains a mystery.
He came to work wearing a suit, but without a tie and was a great chef in the classical sense of the word. While communicating with him was difficult without an interpreter, he did manage to get his requirements across. I remember being in the office when he arrived all upset about something and started going red in the face as he tried explaining something he wanted and which my father was not able to understand. He then rushed off and returned with an egg which he placed on a chair, half sat on it and then said ‘no no’! It subsequently transpired that for his soup stock, he was getting hens while he wanted old male chickens.

In the ’40s and early ’50s, it was quite common for the well-off to go out for dinner and dance as all restaurants had a live band, many with crooners. As the ’50s and ’60s progressed, this became more and more expensive and by the early ’70s few restaurants had a band.

In 1958, we had opened the first modern fully air conditioned 3-star hotel in India at L-Block, above the restaurant complex. By the late ’50s, my family had seen the trend and in 1960, shut down the cafeteria and brasserie and opened two speciality restaurants without any live music. One was for Indian food and was called Gufa, with the interiors done by a close family friend, the artist, M.R. Acharekar, who had won Filmfare’s best art director award three times. He got his team of set designers from Bombay to do the work, and the restaurant was unique in its presentation. Created like the Ajanta Ellora caves, the entire service was silver and the waiters were dressed in white and red with high pugdees. The restaurant had three different chefs – one for vegetarian cuisine, one for meat, chicken and fish curries, and one for tandoori dishes.
I had by then started working part-time in the restaurants and was present in the office when the meat chef was being interviewed. He was a burly Sikh who had worked with the Maharaja of Patiala and when asked what his food was like, his reply was that it was of such good quality that our customers would taste it in their burp’s 24 hours later! He was hired but his rich food was toned down substantially to meet the digestive requirements of mere mortals.

The second restaurant was called ‘La Boheme’ and was designed by Luc Durant, a Swiss architect based in Delhi. La Boheme was avant garde and set a trend in food, concept and design. It had a wood beamed ceiling with the beams set at different heights. Jute fabric runners in black and white ran over and under these beams and lights in cylindrical lampshades with a switch, hung low over every table. Specializing in Austro-Hungarian cuisine, La Boheme served continental food. It was the first restaurant to serve a large variety of coffee and boasted of the second espresso machine in India, a chrome beauty by Gaggia. Heading the kitchen was the Hungarian Mrs. Messinger, a professional chef who made the best apple strudel I have ever eaten.

The restaurant was a novel concept and became popular with artists and writers and the regular business and shopping crowd who visited CP. It also became a favourite haunt of young couples as at that time there was a dearth of places for the young to hang out. After a few months we had to remove the light switches from the lamps that hung on top of the tables, so that the lights were always on, particularly in the quiet corners that had become very popular with them!
In the ’50s and ’60s, Sunday noon saw the college going trendsetters at jam sessions hosted by restaurants. These sessions served two purposes; first, the crowd got to hang out and meet new people and second, the dancing was considered quite trendy. These were times that saw the birth of the chacha cha and the twist.

Most of the corporate offices in Delhi in the ’50s and ’60s were located either at CP or Asaf Ali Road. It was the done thing among the managerial class, the shop owners and the local politicians to go to a restaurant for a mid-morning and early evening break. In the early 1960s, a very popular large India Coffee House was started by the Coffee Board in the area where the underground Palika parking is today, opening onto the inner circle. It soon became a favourite among politicians, the press and the ‘intellectuals’. When Palika Bazaar was planned in the late ’70s, it was removed to an upper floor of a building on Baba Kharak Singh Marg where it currently languishes.

By the time my generation reached college, we started visiting restaurants to listen to the music, and there were some good bands playing jazz. Of course, we could not afford to eat anything and had to make do with a coffee or a cold drink. As we wanted to spend the maximum time possible in the restaurant, and there were free coffee refills, this was not an issue. However, if one did not like coffee, bottles of coke were ordered and drunk with a paper straw pinched in the middle to reduce the flow of the cola to make it last for at least an hour.



Nirulas Corner House, L-Block, Connaught Circus.

By the mid ’60s, restaurants in CP wised-up to our money saving techniques and put a limit of two cups of coffee per person. They had discovered that even with a full house in the evenings, their sales were minimal and constituted primarily of coke and coffee.
In the early ’70s, with maximum income tax levels being 97.5 per cent along with managerial salary restrictions, the CP restaurants, including ours, found business dwindling. This prompted our experiment in ’71 with a new style of restaurant in CP, where food offered was very reasonably priced, cooked to order and picked up from counters. It had a variety of Indian and Anglo-Indian food items as well as soft drinks, soft ice cream and selected bakery products. It became very popular, with both maharajah’s and taxi drivers visiting it and even ending up sharing tables, where they ate the food standing.

In ’48, our residence moved to D-Block in the inner circle of buildings from Gokul Niwas in M-Block where we had lived for a couple of years. It was one of the few upper floors in CP which had an entrance from the inner circle verandah while most others had their entrance from the back of the building. As our building had only one upper floor, the ceilings were almost 18 feet high and we had internal courtyards for air and light besides a huge 12 foot wide verandah running the full length of the building and facing the park. We slept in it during the summer or on the roof with mosquito netting and it was magical in summer at night watching the stars and seeing the clouds move over the moon. Of course, any rain would cause much scrambling to remove the beds to safety. One of summer’s compensations was the fragrant motia (jasmine) strung into a small mala (necklace), available from the vendors roaming the corridors. Women would wear these malas in their hair or on their wrists. The men would buy them for the women and I would wrap one in a wet handkerchief to keep it fresh, and go to sleep with it next to my pillow.

The road on which D-Block was located abutted the building with a narrow pavement and cars (the few that were there) parked perpendicular to the building. The central park was much larger in those days as it included the area which is now the road, whilst the road was where today’s parking lots are located. During summer, a water tanker with a spray at the back would make a round of the CP roads in the morning, spraying water to keep the dust down. This continued until the ’60s.
The Central Park was divided into four parts with a small circular raised section in the middle like a bandstand where the Police Band would play every Friday. In the ’60s, a fountain was unsuccessfully installed in its place and the pavement surrounding it sometimes had impromptu art shows and other such happenings. This area now houses the metro station.
The park primarily had gulmohar trees and beds of canna lilies while the circumference was lined with jamun trees. As children we would throw stones at the trees to bring the fruit down, albeit unsuccessfully! And during the jamun season, fruit contractors would lay down large sheets onto which they harvested the ripe fruit by vigorously shaking the branches. We played cricket in the park in the 1950s using a gulmohar tree as the wicket. Its end came only recently when the Metro station was built.

I distinctly remember August 1947. We were not allowed to go outside after sundown. Late evenings were pitch dark, the shops were closed and one could clearly hear the sound of sirens. Sleeping on the roof, I remember looking towards Old Delhi and seeing a reddish glow in the sky and being told that there were fires burning in that area.
What I remember most distinctly after that was probably the second half of ’47 and ’48 when the inner circle was more crowded than it had ever been. The verandahs were full of people and walking space was limited as the refugees had opened little stalls with gas lanterns on the covered corridor floor. These people were initially shifted to Irwin Road (Baba Kharak Singh Marg) and Panchkuian Road where they opened kiosks and then some were later shifted to what became Mohan Singh Market. Many other pavement vendors were also shifted to Queensway (Janpath), as well as across the outer circle near Shankar Market, and are still there. Though Oriental Fruit Mart in E-Block was supposed to be the best fruit shop in New Delhi, the new Irwin Road fruit shops, opposite Rivoli cinema, soon became popular as they sold the best in terms of quality and price.

One of the most frequented dhabas in New Delhi in the ’50s and ’60s, Kake da Hotel, opened across the road from our restaurants and continues to be popular. It was then run by two brothers, each one doing either lunch or dinner with their own raw material and freshly cooked meals. Hence the food served was always freshly cooked and not leftover from the previous meal.
We were also taken for dinner to Moti Mahal in Daryaganj by the parents for tandoori food which was still a rare treat in the Delhi of that era. Kundan Lal, the owner of Moti Mahal, introduced Delhi to the delights of tandoori chicken as normally meats were cooked on horizontal skewers on a charcoal grill and the tandoor was used for cooking rotis and naans. I remember him as a large, smiling man with a large moustache, wearing a pathan suit with a pathani topi, who always greeted his regular customers at the entrance. I think he was also the inventor of ‘butter chicken’ which I was told came about when his chicken curry finished and to provide a gravy chicken dish, he took a half-done tandoori chicken, added butter, tomatoes and spices and cooked it in a frying pan. It has now become so popular that it has replaced the traditional chicken curry in popularity and is synonymous with Delhi cuisine!
CP was a very quiet place at night in the ’40s and early ’50s and I remember going for a family picnic in the inner park as it was absolutely deserted by 8 pm. I learned to cycle in the Central Park in the solitude of the early mornings. We often went for picnics to Qutab Minar and Okhla, which really seemed to be in the countryside, a long way away from CP. And the long distance made a visit to them into day trips. The area around Qutab Minar, including Mehrauli, had mango orchards and had some bungalows, and I remember hearing that the ‘Dilliwala Seth’s’ who lived in the walled city, had country homes here to house their mistresses! India Gate lawns with King George V at one end and Rashtrapati Bhavan at the other was also a favourite place in the summer evenings and for lunch during winter months up to the early ’60s as there were few people there. A favourite activity for us kids was rowing at the Boat Club.

I think most people in Delhi do not realize how the city has grown and that too, relatively recently. One day in 1962, my father and chacha brought me to an area full of fields, just beyond Moti Bagh, and showed a hillock they had bought. From the top of the hillock we could see people farming. This entire area now comprises R.K. Puram, Vasant Vihar, Anand Niketan, Shanti Niketan and West End!
Going for a picnic with college friends to Hauz Khas in ’61 is vivid in my memory and the monuments were then surrounded by a forest! I also remember a small village there, with no other habitation.
Very few cars were seen in the late ’40s and ’50s. The public transport system was not able to cope with the population growth post-1947. With the spread of Delhi, most people resorted to travel by bicycle. At 9.30 am, we could see hordes of bicycles interspersed with a few cars in CP. The most unusual bicyclist I saw from our first floor wore a dressing gown and was armed with a toothbrush in one hand. I have still not been able to fathom what this person was up to!
As we lived in D-Block, the Republic Day Parade would pass by on the street in front of us every other year and next to us on alternate years. As a matter of routine, this event would see many people visiting us who discovered that they had not met us for a long time and would, coincidentally, lean over the verandah railings to watch the parade pass by!

My schooling started at the age of four in a tent at Delhi Public School (DPS), a new school started by Reverend J.D. Tytler, a big (to me as a little child), smiling and very red-faced bearded man. It was located in the grounds of Cathedral Church of the Redemption in Church Lane near Rashtrapati Bhavan. DPS then moved to its present Mathura Road location and still operated from tents till I left the school in January 1954 to join a boarding school. Tents made for interesting classrooms and, as children, we did not find them unusual at all. In fact, whenever it rained, I had dreams of using my table as a raft and floating home on it!
Rains were a delightful and exciting time as CP roads were sure to get flooded at least once, with sometimes even the shops getting flooded. The flooding at Minto Bridge was a yearly event. I would look forward to going with someone older after the rain stopped to walk around CP, as water on the roads would be thigh deep for a 11 year old child. Minto Bridge would always be a great place to visit as normally there would be a bus or two roof deep in water! Ah, the excitement of those days!
Connaught Place in the evenings was exotic. There were peacock feather sellers, and people selling caged parrots which were also seen flying around CP in large numbers. Many times the bhaluwallah, the sapera with his ‘been’ and the bandarwallah would be seen on the open pavements and in the park.

The one person I have never forgotten was a dignified elderly white turbaned man who probably moved to Delhi after partition and who would walk with his bicycle in the verandahs of CP selling chooran of two varieties – ‘lakkad hazam’ and ‘patthar hazam’. He would ring his cycle bell to advertise his presence as he walked the corridors. As a child, I did not appreciate the the digestive properties of the choorans, but they were delicious and I would buy a small ‘purria’ for two annas or if we had more money, a small glass vial of chooran.
Edwin Chan lived in CP and was an interior designer who specialized in wood furniture and interiors and as a very young man had worked with his father on the woodwork of the Viceroy’s House (Rashtrapati Bhavan). His passion was to invent and develop a perpetual motion machine and till he died sometime in the early ’90s, when asked how the project was going, he would optimistically proclaim that it was just a step away from completion.
Another interesting and talented individual was Nishi Nakra, whom I got to know in 1960 when he did the music system for our new restaurant, La Boheme. He was a good engineer and passionate about sound. He developed speakers and amplifiers under the brand name, Enbee, in an era when such items could not be imported. Besides being an inventive engineer, he was also a very talented singer and I would often visit him at his shop in Shankar Market which was just a few minutes from my home and office. There one would often meet or see many of the people who were to become well-known in public life and business.
Looking at it today, it may be difficult to believe that CP was a great place to grow up. For a child and a teenager, it had everything. As children, we were sent to the central park every evening where we had a lot of space to run around and play games. There were vendors selling balloons, toys and sweets, ice-lolly chuskis which were made of shaved ice particles fixed on a stick with a choice of lovely coloured syrups poured onto them! Despite the scolding we knew we would get (the water was not ‘safe’), we loved them.

There was also the seller of buddi mai ke baal (candyfloss) who would sell his goods from a glassed in trolley. Delicious aam papad (beaten and dried mango) and soft imli (tamarind) was available at a bania’s shop in the middle circle behind M-Block and was another favourite. The aam papad was sour and leathery in feel but was utterly delicious, especially with a sprinkling of kala namak (black salt). The imli was soft, gooey and sour and much appreciated. When we had saved some money, we would go to J.B. Mangaram on the side of F-Block, facing E-Block, which had a great collection of sweets in glass jars on top of the counters which were the same height as we were.
D-Block, Connaught Place, located in the inner circle was a fascinating place to grow up in. Our neighbours included Odeon cinema, Snowhite dry cleaners, S.M.G. Beaty, Ramchander & Sons and Bata, among other well-known shops of the time.
One of our favourite treats was to go to Bengali Market to Bhim Sain’s shop and stand next to a opening on the side to eat gol gappa’s, except during the monsoon when we were forbidden to have any street food. After Shankar Market came up, the best alu tikki’s were available from a vendor who made them fresh, sitting in the verandah.

From a very young age, Hanuman Mandir was a popular place to go on Tuesdays when there was also a weekly bazaar there. My elder sister would buy bangles and parandis and I would look at the interesting shops and people, including the fortune-teller who used sparrows to select cards which answered your questions. The market had no electric lighting and all the luminescence came from smoky kerosene lamps. It was a magical place with hustle and bustle, lot of colour and textures and glittering products. Another popular place to visit was Jantar Mantar with its astronomy instruments made out of large brick structures set in a park which provided great places for playing hide and seek!
My elder sister and I would visit ‘Panditji’s’ bookshop on Irwin Road in the early ’50s to borrow books. Later on the shop moved to Shankar Market where it still operates from. The rate was four annas a book, returnable in a week! Panditji’s real name was Ram Gopal Sharma and he was a short rotund man who wore a Gandhi topi. He had a quick turn of phrase and would suffer no fools! I continued borrowing books from him till the early ’60s and my younger siblings followed the tradition.
The three main bookshops in CP that I visited were B.D. Galgotia, Rama Krishna and Sons and New Book Depot, located next to each other in B-Block. Rama Krishna had books not only on shelves but in stacks on the floor. It dealt with more serious stuff which at the time I was not interested in. I had little money and preferred the other two shops as I could read their hard bound comics till I was shooed away by the staff. In my college days, I started visiting another interesting bookshop in Shankar Market called Piccadilly which had fascinating books on sociology, religion and spiritual subjects and was, in the late ’60s and ’70s, frequented by hippies who were looking to give a new meaning to their lives.

The best movie halls in Delhi were in CP and the favourite recreational activity of many at a time when there was no TV and very few options for entertainment. There were four movie halls – Odeon (right around the corner from my home), Plaza, Regal and Rivoli. As a teenager, my desired quota was one movie a week and that depended on my pocket money. Tickets ranged from a low 12 annas to a high of three rupees and 12 annas. One of the earliest movies I remember seeing was ‘Bud Abbot and Lou Costello meet Frankenstein’. All I remember of it is that I spent half the time (which was whenever Frankenstein appeared on the screen) hiding my face on the seat!

The best dance schools in New Delhi were in the CP area, including one for ballroom dancing. As a little child, I would reluctantly accompany my sister to her school, Sangeet Bharati on the first floor of G-Block, where she learned kathak and I vividly remember the sound of bells on the anklets of the girls.
There were three well-known shops for haircare in the CP area – Roy and James, Tawar and Susan, and A.N. John & Co. where people got their hair cut in individual cubicles. Tawar, known as ‘Chuttan’ to us, came to our home once a fortnight since the late ’30s. It was only after he died in the 1960s that I started going to a haircutting salon.

The best shops in Delhi were located in the CP area, such as Empire Stores, Hamiltons, Trevelyan and Clark, Enid’s (for western dresses), Cooke and Kelvey, Kanji Mull & Sons, and the two large sports goods shops – Uberoi and Pioneer Sports. Harnarain Gopinath on the side of B-Block sold a large variety of good quality achars (pickles) and morabba’s (preserves). Next to it was Keventer’s which sold sweet bottled milk and other dairy products, including butter. M.R. Stores on the corner of G-Block was an unusual shop as it sold two very different items – hardware and knitting wool.

Shops selling musical instruments were located on the outer circle on G-Block below Marina Hotel as well as on Parliament Street (Godin & Co). The Cottage Industries Emporium opened in a temporary barracks sort of building on Queensway (Janpath) in the early ’50s and became very popular because of its large variety of well-designed and crafted handicrafts and handloom clothing available under one roof for the first time in India. Bata at D-Block and Baluja’s at B-Block were there even when I was a child and that’s where we went to buy shoes almost every year for school. The biggest toy shop in New Delhi, Ram Chander & Sons, was just about 40 feet away from Bata.

By the time the ’50s and ’60s came around, CP was the best commercial and retail centre of Delhi with all the new offices of the multinationals and airlines. Later on, when the new high-rise buildings on the connecting roads like Barakhamba Road and Curzon Road (now Kasturba Gandhi Marg) came up, its position as the commercial centre strengthened. In those days, most senior managers working in the CP area who had personal transport, would generally go back home for lunch and a quick siesta and CP would be empty with no one walking around as all shops closed for lunch.

Walking in Connaught Place recently was a strange feeling as I have rarely visited it after I stopped working there just over five years ago. CP now is so changed from the magical world of my childhood and youth, it is like stepping into unknown territory. Instead of the relaxed shopping centre it was until the ’70s, it has changed as has Delhi. By the 1980s, a large number of multistorey office buildings had come up both on Barakhamba Road and Curzon Road (K.G. Marg) and as life had got more competitive, all shops now remain open in the afternoons. The state emporiums have been given their own section on Baba Kharak Singh Marg (Irwin Road) and are popular with tourists. With the coming of the metro, CP is now charged with a very different energy and like the city of Delhi, not very sure of what the future holds.

Many old restaurants have disappeared, even as more new ones have opened. Most of the movie houses have long gone and the best shops are no longer in CP. The traffic is horrendous as it has become a transit point for people travelling to different parts of Delhi. The metro has also contributed to the crowds and eventually I see CP becoming the biggest and best market for the growing middle class in India, compared to my childhood years when it was the exclusive shopping ground

The article above is written by a person who used to live in CP years ago and describes the life then. Brings back memories. His father owned Nirulas .