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 themfor 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 bankrup 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 walkshome, 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.
Thebuilding 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.
Thenthe 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 Chopstick 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 thattook 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.
Sent by Keith Hayward