I was still in my hostel-days when my father came to Kolkata and started living with my mother and sister. I was fifteen, and there was one more year for me to come out of the school. Father’s job included whole of India, as he was in the audit department of LICI that time, so most of the time he was out for work. I would see him in my visiting dates only, carrying a bag smiling towards me, as he would walk towards me in those visiting dates…or when I would come back home for a month or so, he would take a leave from work for some days. It was a whole new city for us, except for my father, who did some of his higher studies here. I remained inside the thick walls of a hostel, which was a very conservative and strict one that would not allow any student going outside, so didn’t have the opportunity ever to know the city very well in one corner of which we were actually living for six years.
Things started changing with the starting of 2005… to start with we had a maharaja at Narendrapur who started scaring us saying that he would actually throw us out once the test exams get over, given the fact that we do not behave properly inside the hostel. This was tough. For a student of class ten, this was a real threat. In one hand you’d like to live the last year of your life at Narendrapur to the fullest, doing all the stuff you didn’t for the past five years, and on the other hand you have the threat of this maharaja who dared each one of us, individually. Being a student of the school I can tell you how much value the tutorial classes held which were done in the post assessment session. Boy o boy, weren’t we scared!
So the time came and as usual three of us (me including the two roommates of mine) saw the doors of school for the next one and half months. Sourabh went back to Tarkeshwar (his ancient home) and Arunava and I stayed back in Kolkata to attend the tutorial classes. Now this whole scenario started the very first interaction between me and the city.
At first it was real tough. For a boy who was born in a mofussil, raised in a joint family and sent to a boarding school to spend rest of his childhood there, a big city like this was a real astonishing factor. You’ll have to admit that there are times when you just lose yourself in the vastness and aggression of the city people (A few years back I made this comment only to make a few city people angry at me). But anyway, life was good. I was experiencing the flat life for the first time. Besides, the colony I lived was real elite, calm and quiet…just perfect for me to have my first resident at Kolkata.
A couple of months passed. I went back to the school, appeared for the secondary exams and came back home, biding the goodbye forever to the hostel. This was the time when I took the decision not to go back to the hostel to further my studies back there. The fact that I got humiliated by the maharajas for no reason hurt me a lot. So before the results were out, I had already decided that whatever would be the result I was going to opt out Narendrapur anyway. Now after years I understand that specific maharajas had personal grudges with people and it was real good news for us that the particular one was transferred to someplace at south India. And my love for Narendrapur hasn’t decreased for any of the happenings that have happened with me inside the walls of the hostel.
Now something else must be said here about the colony we lived.
It was the property of Life Insurance Corporation of India we were living. Dad bought the flat in 2003-2004. We had some seventy-two flats spread over six buildings of LICI. In front of our compound, resided the Pramatha Chowdhury sarani…Chetla road started a couple of minutes’ distance away. On the other side of our compound, the slum existed. It was the infamous slum of Tolly place spread over kilometres. The same slum consists this bridge over the old Ganges which connected New Alipur with the rest of the city. On the other side of the P.C. sarani, at the diagonally opposite side to our flat, we had the relative of a very famous Bollywood star as our neighbour. Now it is different that I will not disclose the name otherwise you might think I am bluffing (considering the popularity of the actor it is alright). And just opposite to our building we had this old building, owned by an arrogant wife and her saintly husband, living at the first floor with their one and only daughter, full of vanity and ignorance (don’t ask me what’s the source though). The girl’s room faced mine and I found myself pretty curious about her. Things changed afterwards when I actually understood that she was no real beauty. Since then no further interests have come up.
At the ground floor of that building we had our favourite neighbour of the colony – the Punjabi family. They were the calmest people alive in the area. The Punjabi parents had two daughters. Both of them were around my age. My hitherto interactions limiting only to Bengalis made me curious about them too. In 2007 I started writing a story named ‘The no-private room’ loosely based on the life of mine in the living room where I was directed to live once I returned from hostel (I am still living in that very room alright) where I mentioned the Punjabi family in a very funny way. I feel I should copy the whole thing here.
“Beside the road, to the opposite side of my room, lives the Punjabi family; my favourite neighbour, and it is a nice job for me to watch them. They have two cars, and both the cars shout like bulls, and the little boys at the road shout at them. But you can curse them, laugh at them but you can’t help but love the two daughters of the Punjabi parents, the same two girls aging between 18 to 19, who were the popular topics of the boys’ talking in the town.”
It was a sad day for me when they actually left the colony and went away a couple of months ago…now everything in the colony looks so boring and formal. The Punjabis have taken away all the energy they had incorporated into our lives away with them. Even now as the monsoon has showed up…sometimes I just leave all the works behind just to keep looking at the closed doors of the rooms where they used to live. How on earth people define attachments and attraction when they don’t have any clue about it?
Living next to a slum area taught me a lot of things in these years. I saw a variety of people across the colony. A slum is like a system of a race or kind…and the lives of people staying there reflect the very basic premises and truths. Living with these people made me think a few things I wouldn’t have thought, had I not lived here. And that brings some positives into their lives, at least.
New people started coming into my life in various ways…There were people from ‘the great institution which promises you to find your path’ with whom I am still in touch, college friends were bizarre at first but after a few years we sort of got adjusted to each other’s madness. Pallabi came in from nowhere with all her Varanasi background n all and went away in no time. I am still in love with her memories alright.
Throughout my life, as I have experienced, I found three kinds of persons exist in our lives. First, those who mean everything to us, our loving ones; second, to whom we mean everything, to whom we are the most loving ones; and the third is the kind who neither means anything to us nor do we mean anything special for them. It’s as if we don’t exist for them and they don’t exist for us. But in the due course of time, as we find out, in the secret corners of our heart, we all keep the intention of knowing them more and they are the ones who remain with us forever as the most attractive and mysterious persons on earth, and whenever we think of them…our face turns into a rainbow of happiness, in the nostalgia of those days we had passed in the thoughts of someone or something else, and all the while those moments we could’ve passed with them to know them better had gone in vain.
- August '10
