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Calcutta’s real estate hunger has been circling the quaint red brick building in the heart of the city’s once-Chinatown for years. Now it stands at the wide, time-faded maroon-turned-black locked doors of Nanking Restaurant, a recently hung tin board stuck on the façade that had till even a few days ago said in letters cemented on the wall: Toong On Church.
In a petition to the municipal corporation, some trustees of the church have objected to the sale of the property by a renegade fellow member, Au Yau Wah, whose family started the Nanking restaurant in the building in 1924 but did not own it.
At a Chinese club, which also hosts a temple on its first floor, one building away from 22 Blackburn Lane where the Toong On property stands, an elderly Chinese said with a trace of anger in his gentle voice: “It’s a church. How can you sell a church?”
The air at Poddar Court — as the stretch between Bentinck Street and Central Avenue is known — is foul with fumes from the impatient evening traffic. Once upon a time the air here would have been fragrant with the smell of Chinese living, known in Calcutta mostly for the food.
The air here flows almost as if in a tunnel. Concrete soars high into the sky or squats in a Raj & Raj sprawl according to no particular design but with the obsessive purpose of hosting a commercial activity. Looks are not important — it’s the lucre. It’s in the looks, though, that the real estate greed is evident. You can’t smell it in the air because of the smoke and this Friday evening there’s storm whipping up swirls of dust anyway.
Dusty but not quite done yet with life, Nanking sits — a two-storeyed anachronism with large doors and windows with broken panes suggesting vast expanses from the city’s broken colonial past. As if it were once meant to be seen from a distance. It could really be. Once.
From the main road, a narrow lane turns in, squeezed between an overflowing garbage dump and Matadors parked cheek by jowl. There isn’t enough room for even one person to pass unless side on.
Nanking doesn’t look out on the main road but on a tiny shanty colony of Bihari settlers who have made their home behind a garbage pile that rises up at the back of a Sulabh Shouchalaya that hides the rubbish and their illegal existence from public view.
A few of their children play throw-ash on the stretch of ground in front of the locked doors, above which hangs the newly written label of Nanking, though there is no restaurant. There hasn’t been one since the seventies. The signboard is an attempt to assert the building’s past as a point of sale for Chinese food and obliterate the religious identity.
In their letter to municipal commissioner Alapan Bandyopadhyay two trustees — Li Hon Kaung and Wang Liang Sen Toon — have said: “If you do not take steps to stop the demolition of the church, heritage will be lost forever.”
They name Au Yau Wah and Jalaluddin Siddiqui (of 27 Weston Street) as the persons behind the effort. Nanking belongs to the church, the letter says, which means Au has no right to the property. But he has the papers.
Imran Zaki Siddiqui, speaking for his father Jalaluddin, denied any role. “We have no connection with taking over the church,” he said.
It’s a wonder — and a testimony to the dwindling Chinese community’s resilience — that the Nanking building has survived so long. On two of its sides rise menacingly high into the sky Calcutta Telephones’ twin titans, one 14 storeys and the other 12, painted a dirty white. Its northern flank, on the main road, is fenced in by what looks like the boundary wall of the telephone building. To the east, the threatening-to-extend frontier of migrant Bihar.
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| (Top) Li Hon Kaung and (above) Wang Liang Sen Toon. Pictures by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya |
Although the trust owns the property, the papers ended up in Au’s hands, thanks to Calcutta Telephone’s real-estate appetite that threatened to engulf Nanking in 1961. The Au family went to court and the temple trust handed the original deed of conveyance over to them, which they never returned, said Wang.
Nanking survived that attempt not because of the food it served but because there was a place of worship on the first floor. People with long memories say the food was good, too. Not the turmeric and chilli powder enriched fried Bengali chachchari purveyed in the name of Chinese food in today’s Calcutta.
“There was no chow mein, no sweet corn and chicken soup. Rice was served free in a bowl. The soups were clear broth and the vegetables were al dente — you had to use your teeth to chew them,” said 73-year-old Bijoy Sarkar.
Author Sunil Gangopadhyay, who used to frequent the restaurant with writer friends in the 1960s and 1970s, added: “It was very classy. There were no creaking chairs. Lining the main hall were the cabins which later proved to be its undoing.”
Silk and chiffon swish once, it fell into the nylon days of a pick-up joint before locking up for good.
Wang and Li alleged that Au had not only sold the property that belonged to the Toong On Church but had also vandalised the temple with its intricately carved altar and antique furniture. “The furniture is almost a century old. The people who have taken over the church have removed everything,” said Wang, adding that cubicles with shutters had been built, possibly in preparation for opening shops.
Au was not available for comment. A Telegraph journalist visited his third floor flat at 75 Ganesh Chandra Avenue on Thursday evening and Friday morning but was told by a lady that he had gone out.
Other than a complaint, the trustees petitioned the city civil court on May 16 to impose Section 144 at 22 Blackburn Lane, praying also that Au be barred from leaving the country. Wang said the Au family was very powerful, and the elders of the Chinese community had allowed them purely on trust to open the restaurant on the ground floor of the temple in 1924. Au never allowed anyone inside the Buddhist temple spread over approximately 150 sq ft, even denying its existence. When Wang once demanded he be permitted inside Au threatened to call the police. Wang stood outside and prayed.
Kaung had been inside the temple to the warrior god Kwan Tee holding a big knife and recalled seeing spears and scimitars hanging on the wall, as in the Sea Ip temple, a gorgeous tiled-roof structure of 1905 vintage behind Poddar Court.
Members of the Toong On community, who came from China’s Canton province, put the value of the idol and furniture at over a crore in the international market. “Only a handful of us are left and it’s our responsibility to protect the relics of our past. After all we have made some contribution to the history of this city,” said S. Wang, a member of the Toong On community.
It’s a city which recognises that contribution by besieging a monument to its past with a shouchalaya, a garbage dump, a shanty colony and a couple of brick-and-mortar monsters. Even two decades ago, Calcutta was home to more than 300 Toong On families; only 15 to 18 are left. Shortly there will be none. And then if the garbage doesn’t get the temple, the mall certainly will.
SOUMITRA DAS WITH INPUTS FROM ZEESHAN JAWED
Office in a church
A move to revive the proposal to construct an office building in the backyard of St John’s church (picture right), one of the city’s oldest, in Dalhousie Square was made on April 7 when the Chamria construction group made a presentation to the municipal commissioner and the heritage conservation committee.
In 1982, the Calcutta Municipal Corporation had sanctioned the proposal for an eight-storeyed office block with a basement, which was revalidated up to 1992 but stalled by court cases.
Thereafter, the court ordered the CMC to extend the time of the sanction. The civic body had not informed the court that St John’s church had been listed as a heritage structure. Its building department sent the plan to its counterparts in heritage to see if they had any objection.
The heritage committee made several trips to the churchyard and decided to seek public opinion, which was invited through a notice in newspapers in August 2001. Several members of the public and NGOs wanted the project to be buried. But the matter was kept in abeyance.
The church then filed a contempt move against the CMC, putting in a fresh application to implement the order of the court, extending the time of the sanction. In the meantime, the Archaeological Survey of India notified last November that the fabric of the church has been under its protection since May 21, 1949.
The heritage committee has said that legal opinion should be sought. St John’s is by no means safe — and the threat to the church is from an arm of the government, the city fathers, or the Big Daddy of all promoters. |
