CALCUTTA : THE CITY OF ALL OUR YESTERDAYS

O Calcutta!
Mihir S Sharma
Posted online: Saturday , Apr 03, 2010 at 1443 hrs

The fire at Stephen Court was a reminder of how little of the citys
abundant past is left. But walk around the Brit bit of the city, Park
Street , Free School Street , Sudder Street , New Market, and you also
get a sense of why Calcutta is a city of second chances. Faded glory,
yes. But failures are welcome to take another shot The waiter looks
shocked for only a moment. Of course, Flurys couldnt stay shut, he
explains, his gravely courteous manner returning. The old tea-room has
been forced into temporary quarters at the Park Hotel, where it
perches uncomfortably like an elderly lady forced to move in with a
brash nephew. Cramped for space, he begins to turn away to return to
the bustling cash register, but looks back to say, his eyes crinkling
above high, Anglo-Indian cheekbones: Holy Week, after all. The people
gotta have their hot cross buns, man. And, sure enough, a group of
schoolchildren is standing at the counter sampling the sweet, slightly
spicy rolls eaten during the week leading up to Good Friday. When
100-year-old Stephen Court on Park Street burst into flames last week,
more than just Flurys routine was disrupted. The dozens of fatalities
reminded Indians that complacency and neglect has turned heritage
buildings into deathtraps; but, for Calcuttans, it triggered a moment
of near-panic. The sight of a devastating fire in the very heart of
its faded glory, Park Street, focused attention on what little of its
abundant past is left. The gawkers staring at the charred remnants of
the buildings top floors kept on looking around too, at Stephen Courts
graceful sisters, as if seeing them for the first time in years.

Because, unlike what a hundred guidebooks will tell you, walking down
Park Street is not like stepping into the past. The brands, the
bustle, the chain stores, are like anywhere else in India . But look
behind the illuminated shop signs, and you do indeed see the painted
signs of British Calcutta; look above the hoardings, and youll see the
elegant balconies and window-boxes of the shaheb para. Step into one
of the many faded auction houses and youre instantly surrounded by
crystal, carved teak furniture, giant busts of Athena, as if some
Victorian volcano has suddenly erupted around you, each piece sitting
with the quiet dignity of someone who remembers Park Street when
everyone east of Aden envied you for being there.

Manu Lilaram is one of those people. On a stool in his shop in New
Market, dressed in striped shirt and suspenders, he looks more than a
little exhausted; his house in Stephen Court , where he has lived for
decades, is still inaccessible. Worse: he is dealing, internally, with
no longer living on Park Street , another refugee from what was once
the most cosmopolitan square mile in Asia . Stephen Courts owner, he
remembers, was an Armenian, Arathoon Stephen. Flurys and Trincas were
run by friends from Switzerland . Down the road, Anglo-Indians
gathered every Saturday night at the Grail Club. Ornate Chowringhee
Mansions next door was built by the Ezras; Jewish, from Baghdad , and
definitely eccentric, Sir David Ezra also ran a private zoo at his
home in Ezra Mansions on Kyd Street , a short walk away.

Uniformed liftmen, two to a lift, would stand and hold the doors open;
the big-windowed apartments would be swept twice, not once a
day. People would walk in the private gardens that lay behind the
buildings Gothic façades. All of that began to change in the 70s:
people emigrated, companies left, previously pristine staircases began
to feature paan stains.

Those who thought that they could hold out discovered they
couldnt. Most notoriously, the Bengal Club, which thought that
admitting Indians wasnt really necessary an assumption that caused
them to go gratifyingly bankrupt in 1971. Sadly that meant selling
their magnificent Chowringhee frontage, which became the monstrosity
that is the Chatterjee International Centre, Calcuttas tallest
building, and so shoddily built that it rained its ugly tiles down on
all passers-by for two decades dangerous but oddly satisfying in its
symbolism.

More remains of this heritage than youd think. Park Street was built
by Armenians; theres still an Armenian Club next door to Stephen Court
, in Queens Mansions. A few minutes away, on Free School Street , boys
in rugby uniforms stroll out of the Armenian College , which still
occupies the building where William Makepeace Thackeray was born. Turn
right on to Royd Street , and youre suddenly surrounded by laughing
schoolgirls; Jewish Girls School has finished its working day. (In
another only-in-Calcutta cosmopolitan twist, the girl humming an old
Hebrew folk song as she walks home, a pink star-of-David embroidered
on her tunic, is almost certainly Muslim.) But everywhere is the
threat of dissolution: look up, and looming over you is the
still-decrepit fourth wing of Park Mansions, the old teak staircase of
which caught fire in 1988, destroying among others Calcuttas Alliance
Francaise and its old, extensive library which, instead of President
Mitterands official portrait, used to be dominated by a giant painting
of Napoleon, perhaps because it was, after all, in Calcutta, the city
of all our yesterdays.

But what is lost to fire can never compare to what is inevitably lost
to unprofitability. The great department stores the Army and Navy,
Whiteway-Laidlaw, Hall and Anderson went first, their huge, ornate,
Chowringhee buildings falling into disrepair or taken over by
banks. The building from which Hall and Anderson could once ship
bathtubs to those stranded in mofussil towns still has their name up
in lights that havent been turned on for decades; in it, now, the Bank
of Rajasthan promises loans for weddings, and Warren Travels
advertises package tours to Marwar. Then the smaller enterprises went:
the Great Eastern Stores are only recognisable by a little notice
asserting ownership of a spanking-new Adidas showroom.

In some cases, only the names are the same: Castlewood, where once you
went to get your golf balls and tennis racquets, now mainly sells
treadmills; Austin distributors now push Korean cars; the furrier
Alijoo, from 1871, sells carpets. But elsewhere, just enough has been
passed on. At Barkat Ali, for example, set up in 1924, the master
tailor will insist your suit shirt has proper, cufflink-sporting
cuffs. At tiny Kalmans on Free School Street , owner Bishnupada Dhar
learnt the cold-cuts trade from the tiny charcuteries founder,
Hungarian Kalman Kohary. Everyone is in buying sausages for Easter, he
says in Bengali, waving a cleaver in the general direction of his
giant freezer.

And some have become inseparable from the idea of Calcutta . In the
1950s, the Olympia Bar was raffishly disreputable, a place where my
mothers generation would not have gone, according to Ayesha Das, who
moved into Queens Mansions opposite it in 1952 (The building, already
old, was named for the new queen during the coronation hysteria that
gripped the city that year, five years after Independence). But the
place where a young Das had chips and ice cream has become Old Oly,
the pivot of Park Street, a temple to beer and beefsteak, with formica
tables and threadbare sofas, rats that are named and waiters that are
nameless. The guitarist at the table next to yours will have just come
from Braganzas on Marquis Street, a ten-minute-walk away, where
Anthony Braganza, drumming his fingers on the counter, will tell you
the business is going strong nobody wants acoustic any more, but thats
OK, they survived the shift from sheet music, they will survive many
more, music isnt going anywhere. On his desk lie little watermarked
envelopes of rental bills, addressed to families throughout Calcuttas
oldest buildings, in which his two hundred antique pianos lie up dusty
flights of wooden stairs in drawing rooms stuffed with dark furniture,
where they are passed down from child to child within the family as
each learns Chopsticks and Fur Elise.

Strangely enough, it is in famously anti-capitalist Calcutta , more
than anywhere else in India , that the citys soul can be found in
commerce, in shops and businesses that have survived the difficult
decades. Though perhaps it isnt that unlikely after all, it isnt the
easiest place to start anything either. Those who remember Park Street
in the 50s remember a Tibetan girl with a red blanket outside
A.N. John, the barbers, who would produce from a battered tin box
blanket jewellery that looked startlingly different from what the
shops were selling. That girls daughter, who now sits behind the
counter at Chambalama, the shop in New Market that eventually replaced
the tin trunk, says her mother would recall maharajas stopping their
Bentleys to buy; following the British up to Darjeeling in summer, and
coming back for the season, in winter; actress Suchitra Sen buying an
oxidised silver necklace from the trunk which she then wore to an
awards show in Bombay.

Sometimes, it feels as if everything new in this square mile is
actually old. Like New Empire, once owned by the Ranas of Nepal, a
teak and cut-glass museum inside: which other cinema hall is left
where one can order a whisky-and-soda in the interval?

Like New Market itself. The Boer War gun that sat in its central
crossroads may have disappeared, but Nahoums is still there, if minus
the Italian plaster-of-paris ceiling, as frothy as anything theyve
done with icing. The brownies are smaller, the service terrible now
that old David Nahoum doesnt come in any more; but the fudge and cakes
taste almost the same as they did. Unique in the world, surely, that a
Jewish family bakery is central to a citys Christmases. David might
be the third and last generation of his family to run it though: when
asked about the younger ones he would shrug, and look sadly at the El
Al wall calendar, as if resenting the airline that took them away.

Then there are those that went away. Firpos, with its formal-dress
dances, the location of a memorable scene in Vikram Seths A Suitable
Boy, which few in Calcutta can locate. (Dont miss it at all, said one
music-loving old-timer. The place was a barn. Terrible acoustics.) And
the Sky Room, with a deep-blue ceiling and silver plates, and where
the austere excellence of the service and the food made up for the
lack music or alcohol. (The orange juice cost ten rupees in 1955.) For
years after they shut shop in 1993, the most sought-after people in
the town were their chefs. Everyone claimed to have given them a
chance to keep creating: the Park Hotel, Mocambo next door, a carpet
exporter near Vivekananda Park .

Calcutta is, after all, the city of second chances. Failure doesnt
close off options: companies never shut down in Bengal , do they? Look
up across the street from New Market, and youll see St. Judes Academy
, named for the Roman Catholic patron saint of lost causes, which
proudly advertises it takes failures. The Metropolitan Building , old
home of Whiteway-Laidlaw, was almost condemned and demolished a few
years ago; but today, once again, the middle class flocks there, to a
brand new Big Bazaar. And the Bengal Club, bankrupt once, now gleams
with brass planters and wood panelling, defiantly insisting that
nothing has changed but the ethnicity of the club board. Those who
have stopped by Stephen Court , pausing to stare at its charred
corridors, will be hoping that this spirit of renewal will not pass it
by.