In 1966, OB (as I used to call him, my husband Neil) and I travelled to Germany, France and the United Kingdom. He had been chosen by his employers, Oxford University Press, for a training programme and I decided to go along. We were excited. He was 32 and I was 29, it was the first time out of India for either of us. Our boys, then five, four and three, were left in the care of my sister in Calcutta.

The highlight of the trip was of course London. We caught up with OB’s best friend, Ron Forbes, and his wife Pat. They had migrated to the UK. We watched a lot of theatre and went to music concerts. I remember Cilla Black and Cliff Richard and The Shadows. We also heard several episodes of a radio quiz (I forget the name) for college and university students and OB seemed to be loving it. Of course, he knew all the answers.

We were members of the Parish Club at Christ the King Church in Park Circus. This was and remained an institution close to OB all his life. We were married here, our sons were baptised here. Years later, they were all married at the Church. A year ago, we held OB’s funeral service here. It was special to him.

THE FIRST QUIZ
At the Parish Club, he was part of the entertainment committee, organising the May Queen Ball and so on. In 1967, the president of the Parish Club, Eddie Hyde, passed away and the club decided to commemorate his life with a public event. Everybody turned to the entertainment committee and OB came up with the idea of a quiz. He offered to conduct it himself and spent several days writing up questions, getting his sons to help him cut them into thin strips of paper. His cousin Errol O’Brien helped with the logistics for the quiz.

The first Eddie Hyde Quiz — the first open quiz in Calcutta and India — was held in November 1967 at the Parish Club. It was a fun evening, with six teams participating. Among the contestants was our old friend Francis Groser, a patent lawyer, and Renee de Santos, a geography teacher. They were to become regular quizzers. The winners of that first quiz were a young team called Youth Jet Set Go. I remember a young Julie de Santos being part of the winning team. Julie was Renee’s niece but was later better known as Julie Banerjee after she married Sadhan Banerjee, who started the North Star Quiz.

The first quiz found support from what became a loyal band of enthusiasts. In the same year, 1967, we were accepted as members of the Dalhousie Institute, which quickly became our second home. In 1970, OB conducted the first DI Open Quiz, which is now a tradition in itself. Gradually, the Dalhousie Institute (A) core team formed: OB, Errol Cowper, Phyllis McMohan (mother of journalist David McMohan, who old-time readers of this paper may remember) and K.C. Raghavan.

Those were innocent days and quizzes were not as colourful as they are now. You just sat around tables and the quizmaster walked up to you with a question. My sons did duty on the scoreboard. When they grew up, they began participating in quizzes themselves. OB enjoyed quizzing and was a keen competitor. He didn’t like losing. With one or two exceptions, the quiz fraternity became his friends and near family. 

The quizzing rival he most respected was Saranya Jayakumar of the team Motley Crew. The Jayakumars later moved to Chennai. Of the many generations of teammates he had at DI (A), the person he held in the highest regard was Souvik Guha, who he had seen quizzing since Souvik’s days as a schoolboy in Don Bosco. Souvik is a senior civil servant now and was a regular on the DI (A) team with OB.

MY HENRY HIGGINS
OB had a scholarly, academic bent. I often joked that he had a master’s degree and I barely finished school. Nevertheless he made me feel like the greatest woman in the world, and I learnt a lot from him. The most emotional moment of my life was when I wrote his epitaph: 
OB, Thank you for making me feel special and greater than I ever was. You will always be my Henry Higgins.

Love
Joyce

Those are the only lines on his grave.

A WELL-ROUNDED QUIZ
It was fascinating to watch OB meticulously set a quiz, think up questions, look up books to check something he remembered, find the right balance of subjects for a “well-rounded quiz” (a term he often used).

He set his questions all by himself. It was his ritual. It was only for the audio rounds that he took some help from his friend Shauri Banerjee. He generally discussed a list of songs and audio clips with Shauri, and Shauri diligently recorded them and handed him a cassette (it used be a cassette in the old days, played on a two-in-one that we brought along to the quiz). 

Strangely, despite being a publisher himself, OB only published his first quiz book, that too most reluctantly, in 1991. QuizziCal was a collection of questions related to the 300th birthday of his beloved city, Calcutta. From the mid-1970s, however, he began writing questions in diaries. Anything interesting he read or came across in his travels or in everyday life, he put down as a potential quiz question. 

SECRET DIARIES
When setting a quiz, he dipped into these diaries. Nobody else got to see these precious diaries. Now, as a family, we’ve decided to release the Secret Quiz Diaries of Neil O’Brien. The first volume will be out in 2018.

Late April and May were a special period for OB. His birthday fell on May 10 and our anniversary on May 23. Just before that, he conducted the DI Open Quiz. I did wonder why he had to choose the hottest time of the year for his biggest quiz! This year, we are moving the DI Open — the first DI Open Quiz without him around — to November.

At 6.30pm on May 10, OB’s birthday, we are having a little remembrance and celebration at the Dalhousie Institute. ‘Neil O’Brien Unplugged’, as the two-hour event is called, will be an evening full of OB’s friends and their happy memories, with a few questions thrown in. We will also be releasing his The Calcutta Quiz Book (my grandchildren tell me that it is already available on Amazon). 

This is for all those who love Calcutta, love quizzing or love life. OB loved all three.