Bhagalpur, June 5 :    Bhagalpur, June 5:  This silk city wants a slice of the glory, too. Devdas the film may have made waves in faraway Cannes, but the novel's plot is supposed to have been set here. Residents of this place want the area where the late Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay spent his childhood named Devdasnagar. It is here in this Bihar city that the writer might have fallen in love with the girl he called Paro in the novel or met Chandramukhi, the courtesan. A building near Buranath Chowk, where Chandramukhi is believed to have lived, is drawing hundreds of visitors every day. The area where this two-storeyed building with arches and old gothic pillars is located used to be known as the 'red-light zone'. There was a time when evening fell with sounds of music flowing out through the huge windows as big landlords stepped off their horse-drawn carriages. For old-timers, it's a banquet of memories. Nearly 90 years after the novel was published in 1917, they are dredging up whatever they can - like titbits about the author's childhood which he spent with his maternal uncle Kedar Ganguly or his friends in the Collegiate school of Bhagalpur where he was admitted in the primary section. Though Ganguly's house is in ruins, his name is a household word. 'The city and specially the residents of Bangalitola here are overpowered by sentiment and nostalgia,' says Asim Ganguly, a relative of the writer's uncle. According to Bengali writer Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay, it is impossible for anyone to say for sure that the novel was conceived here. But Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay 'indeed spent his childhood in Bhagalpur and his novel Devdas is apparently set in the city's background. If the people of Bhagalpur imagine a school where he got educated or a building in which a Chandramukhi-type woman lived, they are entitled to their fancies. All that I can say is this would not be distortion of history,' he says, adding that it was a different matter that he left Bhagalpur in his youth. Devdas, scheduled for commercial release in India in July, was internationally premiered at the Cannes film festival on May 24. In the film, Aishwarya Rai plays Paro and Madhuri Dixit Chandramukhi while Shah Rukh Khan features as Devdas. There were at least two other versions - one Bengali and the other in Hindi - in the sixties, but none matched the hype of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's film. Tapan Kumar Ghose, a professor of Bhagalpur University, says there could still be some second-generation relatives of the writer who could relate real-life characters to their fictional counterparts in the novel. Though no one can relate Paro, who had driven the hero to despair, to any real-life contemporary of the author, stories about a woman who used to live in a 'kothi' at Buranath Chowk still do the rounds. 'The woman's real-life name was Mrinmoyee and she used to live in this kothi,' said Sravan Mishra. Satya Banerjee, who claims his grandfather was a friend of the novelist, says since his childhood he has been hearing stories about the author's life and that the novel was based on personal experiences. 'It is very difficult to verify the truth,' he said. 'I would love to have a park named after the writer,' says Utsav Mazumder of the Bhagalpur Bengali Association.