André Beteille (1934-2026): From the memoir – going to ‘city of dreams’ Calcutta as a young boy

Calcutta 1946.

When I was a boy in Chandannagar, just past the age of nine, a new song burst upon us and achieved instant popularity. It could be heard on the gramophone, and it was played on loudspeakers all over the town. It had a sombre message presented in a mocking tone, in that peculiar north Calcutta argot in which English and Bengali words were artfully combined – the English ones pronounced in a Bengali way so as to rhyme with the Bengali words:

Calcutta 1943 October.
ARP, military,
Pathe-ghate bhikiri
Accident and crowd,
Control, permit, blackout;
And sab jinisher barlo dar:
Calcutta 1943 October.

It had everything: famine, destitution, overcrowding, the war, air raids and rationing.

Calcutta was the city of every mofussil Bengali’s dream. The sombre message passed me by, and I thought of Calcutta only in terms of its variety and abundance. It had everything that Chandannagar lacked. No doubt London was even more magnificent, but it was out of my reach, even in imagination. Calcutta, on the other hand, occupied a central place in our folklore, and it must be remembered that my earliest experience of the city goes back to the time “before the partition of India.

First: the Calcutta of my imagination, before my return from boarding school. Chandannagar was small, and it had few amenities. There was, of course, the strand within a couple of furlongs of our house where I went for walks in the evenings, accompanied by a maidservant at first, and then on my own, with my brothers or my friends. My mother also went for walks on the strand with my sister, but I preferred not to be seen with them. The strand, in fact, afforded a very pleasant walk, and people came from outside our town to walk along it or sit on its green benches and enjoy the river breeze. But for someone who had lived so close to it from the day of his birth, it had very little novelty.

There were very few places to go to in Chandannagar, whereas the places one could visit in Calcutta seemed inexhaustible. In our town, one saw only “cycle rickshaws and horse carriages but no buses, except for the ones that ran along the Grand Trunk Road on their way to Chinsurah or Hooghly from Bhadreshwar or some other place. I had never been in a public bus with a conductor from whom one bought a ticket until I came to live in Calcutta. For in Patna, as a very junior boy, my movements were confined almost entirely within the walls of St Michael’s. In Calcutta, there were not only buses, but also trams and taxis. I was to learn only years later what a nightmare a taxi ride, a tram ride or a bus ride could be in the city of joy.

Chandannagar had no real sights, by which I mean places that one sees not just by being there but also in pictures. The only pictures of Chandannagar I had seen were photographs taken by persons I knew, whereas I had seen innumerable pictures of Calcutta in books and magazines: the Howrah Bridge, the Ochterlony Monument, Victoria Memorial, St Paul’s Cathedral, and Chowringhee, which was a world in itself. Naturally, the places that I saw in picture books had a glamour that our strand, for “all its elegance, could not match.

My schooling in Patna extended my imagination of Calcutta on two of its important features: its cinemas and its restaurants. There were two cinema houses in Chandannagar: Sri Durga Chhabighar, the older one, which was about a furlong away from where we lived, and Cinema de France which came up within my sight where a hotel had stood almost directly opposite our home. My mother did not think Bengali movies suitable for us on the grounds that they were romances of the silliest sort: this was before the time of Satyajit Ray, whose films later transformed Bengali cinema. On the other hand, she wanted me to see all the Tarzan films and the films of Laurel and Hardy to which I was sent, usually in the company of some older person; even English films of the more romantic sort were not considered suitable for us.

The cinema houses of Chandannagar were plain and humdrum: the screen was small, the seats were hard and cramped, the lighting was of the most ordinary kind, and the projector invariably broke down in the middle of the show. In Calcutta, it was altogether different. There were dozens of cinema halls, among which pride of place was held by two: the Metro and the Lighthouse. I knew about these two and others from my brothers and from some of the boys whose homes were in Calcutta. The Metro and the Lighthouse were places of glamour beyond the films they showed. They had large screens, beautiful lighting, plush seats and, above all, the enchantment of air conditioning. My first and for several years only experience of air-conditioned comfort was inside the cinema houses of Chowringhee.

There was an elaborate lore of the cinema at St Michael’s. For some reason, most of the boys preferred the Lighthouse to the Metro, although the latter had the more imposing appearance. One important advantage of the Lighthouse was that it had a brasserie upstairs which some of the senior boys were reputed to visit for beer and potato chips when they were home for the holidays. The boys also talked endlessly of the stars of the silver screen. There were the great romantic heroes: Clark Gable, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power; the comedians Bob Hope, Eddie Cantor and Danny Kaye; the great singing stars Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Perry Como, whose more successful numbers were hummed, whistled or sung throughout the school. There were also the great heroines: Bette Davis, Esther Williams, Judy Garland and many others, but to me none so captivating as Dorothy Lamour on a South Sea Island.

Although we had no access to them as children, our town was well known for its hotels and bars: the Grand Hotel, the Astoria Hotel, the White Hart Inn, and many others. Chandannagar in fact enjoyed a certain notoriety on account of its bars because, under French administration, liquor was both cheap and plentiful, and the British employees of the jute mills across the river regularly visited its hotels and bars. I can still hear the languid notes from a piano or a gramophone record wafted by the breeze on a Saturday afternoon from the Caledonian Hotel, separated from our house by only a run-down and untenanted garden. But even so, there were no restaurants of the kind to which a schoolboy aged ten or eleven might have been taken by someone. Those existed in plenty in Calcutta, and many of the boys at St Michael’s had detailed knowledge of the kinds of food available there, the quality of the service, the prices, as well as the clientele. Looking back, those boys seemed to know little of the more expensive restaurants at which proper European food was available. They knew of places like Nizam’s, where the kebabs rolled in parathas were both delicious and inexpensive, and, above all, about the Chinese restaurants of which Calcutta had many and the best ones on the subcontinent.

I had, of course, made forays into Calcutta even before I came to live there in January 1946. Of those, I remember best the one on which we were taken during a long vacation by M Meteiyer. He was a French officer who had come to our part of the world during the war and had somehow made his way into our home, where he became a favourite with the children. He took me and my brothers on a day’s pleasure trip to Calcutta. We travelled by first class on the train (an unusual experience in those days) and by taxi. We had lunch at Firpo’s on Chowringhee and topped it up with a matinee show at the Lighthouse. It all seemed like a dream, of which my most vivid recollection is of the film Great Expectations, and especially of the scene in which Pip knocks down Pocket and is rewarded by Estella with her offer of a kiss.

For all the glamour of the metropolis, the move to Calcutta was not made without misgiving. My mother was determined to make the move while my father was opposed to it, so there was a sense of foreboding from the start. My mother had a strong argument concerning my brother’s health, but it was not certain that his health could not bear the strain of continuing with boarding school. Perhaps there was a deeper reason in her irresistible desire to get away from Chandannagar, although she may not have been fully conscious of it. It is also likely that my father had a better sense of the real reason that drove my mother to make the move to Calcutta.

The move to Calcutta meant that the family became residentially dispersed. My father had to stay behind, if only to keep his job, and at that time, no force could have moved him away from Chandannaga,r where his mother had lived and died. My sister had married the previous year and moved into the schoolhouse that had been my grandmother’s home. My eldest brother was in the last year of school, and there was no question of taking him out of St Michael’s and moving him to a new school. So when we moved to Calcutta in 1946, the move was made at first by only the three of us, my mother, Nielou and myself.

When we went to Calcutta, we did not give up our house in Chandannagar, for that is where my father continued to live, for a while even after his retirement. Until his own mother died, his loyalty had been divided between two homes, hers and ours; and just when he could fully make his home in ours, we decided to leave. But of course, much was still there, and my maternal grandmother was also there. Hence, it continued to be home for me in a way in which our Calcutta house was not, at least not until I entered college more than four years later.

My mother had no intention at all of abandoning her home in Chandannagar, and remained in a sense its absent centre even when we lived in Calcutta. She visited it frequently and regularly, and saw to it that no important decision was taken without her knowledge or consent. Her mother and my father let her have her way so long as she did not interfere too blatantly, and the servants remained deeply loyal to her. For all her good works in the public sphere, her loyalty to her home was unshakeable. Some time after my father finally retired, she succeeded in moving him and her mother to our home in Calcutta; she even found a place near our house in Calcutta for the last of the cows that remained from her dairy farming days. My mother could not bear to leave any living creature behind, so her great sorrow was that in the end, I left her behind.

I have said that for three or four years after we had made the move to Calcutta, Chandannagar remained my home, for to the schoolboy, home is where he spends his vacations. We all went back to Chandannagar not only for the long vacations but also for the weekends and for practically every school holiday. The distance was not very large, twenty-one miles by rail, and the fares were moderate since we invariably travelled by inter class; in those days the trains had four classes: first, second, inter and third. We made innumerable journeys on the slow passenger trains, which were invariably delayed as they had to make way for the faster express and mail trains. I must have been truly excited over those journeys, my heart yearning for the train to steam into Chandannagar station, for even after fifty years, I can still remember the name of every station on the route and in the correct order: Liluah, Belur, Bally, Uttarpara, Konnagar, Rishra, Serampore, Sheorapuli, Baidyabati, Bhadreshwar, Mankundu and then, finally, Chandannagar. There was no stop at Hind Motors in the early days, and when it was coming up, I cursed it for the further delay it was bound to cause to our arrival.

My horizons were expanding in Calcutta and even before that in Patna, and that gave me some room in dealing with the familiar world of Chandannagar. First, there was my grandmother and our old maidservant Billo to whom I was still attached. I could now tell them many things that they did not know, and for a growing child, it is always a great thing to be able to talk and to not just have to listen. Also, once I started living in Calcutta, I was given far greater freedom of movement when I returned to Chandannagar. No more could my grandmother deter me from going as far afield as the Grand Trunk Road on account of the traffic, because I could overwhelm her with my accounts of the traffic at Sealdah, Maulali and Entally.

My friends in Chandannagar were Bengali boys who were even less fortunate in their education than I. Two of them were uncle and nephew, the uncle, called Bhombol, a couple of years younger than the nephew. They lived next door in a completely ramshackle house which was separated from ours by a wall. The family had come down in the world and lived in dire straits. Yet they were known to have been wealthy within recent memory, being a branch of the family of brahmin zamindars of Telinipara. Another friend in Chandannagar was a boy called Shanti (not the Shantimay Ghoshal of St Michael’s High School, but an even older friend) who was being brought up by a widowed aunt in indigent circumstances, known to my grandmother. He was a very genial daredevil who was ready for any kind of prank. Later in life, he became a well-known tough, for some time the right-hand man of a better-known tough who rose to be a minister in the West Bengal government.

Excerpted with permission from Sunlight on the Garden: A Story of Childhood and Youth, André Beteille, Penguin India.