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while crossing Belvedere Road near its intersection with Baker Road, I noticed a tiny little house, forlorn and old, with a notice board on top announcing that it was the Indian Red Cross office. The stairs were wooden. The first-floor office comprised dusty tables and chairs and cobwebby gentlemen. They said the house belonged to the Biswases and they have been tenants since 1958.
Walking past the half-moon curve of dingy grocery and sweet shops, I encountered the first door with the name Biswas inscribed on it. Next to it was a vacant plot, screened off. The house had been demolished but a marble plaque on the gateway read: Dulce Domum, 37A Baker Road.
Next to this plot, were three almost identical houses, not larger than cottages, both pretty and petite, with flower beds in front. The little flower beds were neat, but the houses ? one of them with a wall neatly slicing it into two halves ? concealed behind outsized iron gates, could have done with a coat of plaster and whitewash. As I was to discover soon, these two houses and several others belonged to the Biswas clan, perhaps the first Bengalis to settle there.
Their properties existed right up to the Eastern Railway quarters, the last house named Kamala Cottage dating back to 1908, opposite the ornate Calcutta Corporation office on Belvedere Road. One Biswas house on Baker Road has turned into a pile of bricks overgrown with trees. It is still occupied.
I met Pradip Biswas, 68, whose family has lived there for about six generations since their paterfamilias Srish Chandra Biswas settled there in 1901 and had acquired a huge property covering four-and-a-half bighas. In recent times, his descendants have been gradually selling them to developers. He had donated a large sum to Entally Baptist church, and a tablet testifies to it.
His house was Srish Lodge at 25A Belvedere Road. He had made his fortune by selling patent medicine named anti-pyretic mixture that warded off tropical diseases such as malaria, filaria and kala-azar and was much in demand in Assam.
The medicine used to be produced at home and was sold in dispensaries in the Red Cross building and at Kalighat.
The 68-year-old frail man lives in Lily Cottage at 33 Baker Road with his wife and son and daughter-in-law. Gas lights used to burn in Baker Road and it was only in 1951-52 that buses emblazoned with huge Royal Bengal tiger heads on 3B route were introduced.
29 Baker Road used to be constables? quarters. Now police officers live there. Next to it lived advocate-general Snehangshu Acharya, his house closer to Judges? Court Road, turned into two highrises. His daughter, Bijaya Goswami, said her grandfather, Maharaja Sashikanta Acharya of Mymensinh, had bought the two houses from WC Bonerjee?s daughter in 1941-42. The property was developed after her father?s death in 1986.
Binapani Patra, 83, who had inherited Kamala Cottage but who now lives with her brother at Mudiali, was able to provide more details about her grandfather-in-law Shrish. His father, Rev Jadab Biswas, was from Nabadwip. Jadab was a kayastha and converted later. Shrish died in 1905. However, except for the pictures of Jesus Christ there was no indication of the religion of this family. Vermilion shone bright in the partings of all the ladies.
Biswas is house proud. Promoters have tried to tempt him but he has resolved never to rise to the bait.
The plot where the Eastern Railway quarters have come up used to be a Muslim slum, said Patra.
Nobody knows for sure after whom Alipore ? nestled amid the Hindu villages of Bhowanipore, the non-existent Radhanagar and Gopalnagar ? was named. In his latest book on the Belvedere, where the National Library is situated, P. Thankappan Nair writes: ?Lord Curzon, HE Cotton and others have stated that Warren Hastings got his Alipore properties which included undivided Belvedere Estate, Hastings House, the Paddock and lands appurtenant to them, as a free gift from Mir Jafar Ali Khan, who took up his residence in Alipore upon his deposition by Governor Henry Vansittart in 1760 from the musnud of Murshidabad. Mir Jafar was restored to the throne as Nawab Nazim of Bengal by Vansittart in 1763. The story is that Mir Jafar made a free gift of a portion of his property in Alipore to Hastings in gratitude for his support to the deposed Nawab.?
Though Muslims are not quite conspicuous in today?s Alipore, one cannot miss the ubiquitous bikriwalla from Lakshmikantapur in the streets of mornings, along with droves of smart purohits in crisp white dhoti-kurta and tikas burning on foreheads emerging from the homes of their rich patrons.
Many of the kabadi shops of Chorbazar along the Judges? Court Road tramlines too belong to these itinerant hawkers as well as to the clan with the surname of Kayal, as the scrawls on signboards announce. These shops of Gopalnagar once stocked a wealth of 78 rpm records besides odds and ends of ?antique? furniture and light fixtures.
The first mosque I found was at the crossing of Alipore Park Road and Burdwan Road, next to tiny eateries for labourers and taxi drivers. The maulana had no idea of its age.
The other was on Gopalnagar Road, next to Aftab Mosque Lane, opposite the sprawling BG Press, which is separated by a few buildings from the Directorate of Land Records and Surveys, a big red building, at the crossing of Judges? Court Road and Gopalnagar. The press has a sales counter where books for varied interests ? illustrated handbooks on the adages of the fabled mathematician and astronomer Khana, and Indian history, besides district gazetteers and records ? can be obtained for a song. Crowned with brand new plaster minarets, the old mosque had a plaque calling all faithful to namaaz.
On New Road, next to the Reserve bank officers? quarters is the tiny Imam Husain darga ? tiny but definitely, and unquestionably, there.
In BG Press, too, I found a small prayer room for namazis next to the library for staffers. The huge compound is hemmed in by the roofs of hundreds of shanties with pantile roofs ? the famous slums of Chetla.
On Burdwan Road itself, close to a house of concrete stilts named Babylon and behind a huge Coca-Cola ad painted on a tiny double-storey house, I found, to my surprise, a small slum. Bengalis and Biharis ? both Hindus and Muslims ? have been living here for generations, residents said. They co-exist with the hammer and sickle.
After this, I was not taken aback when I found men and selling khaini, sattu ghol ? a cooling drink made of chickpea flour ? and other street food on the pavements, children defecating along kerbs and huge porkers loitering around Raja Santosh Road at the Majherhat bridge end.
As in the rest of Calcutta, nothing is sacred in Alipore, nothing has a simple explanation. High walls protect as much the rich and the privileged as they immure criminals in the two prisons located there, confine wild beasts in the zoo and lunatics in the hell constructed exclusively for their delectation.
Alipore resonates with stories of the beautiful Madam Grand later Princess Talleyrand, the duel between Hastings and his archenemy Philip Francis, Hastings? haunted house on Judge?s Court Road, and the Englishman named Penn who had set up an arrowroot factory in the Baker Road area.
The memories of two former institutions belonging to more recent times are, however, fading fast. One of them is Bhuban babu?s nursery covering three to four bighas on Gopal Nagar Road near Naba Roy Lane near BG Press. Betel leaf used to be cultivated in this densely-populated Chetla neighbourhood where ponds existed before Partition. It was closed in the 1960s and the Bank of Baroda building came up there. Thespian Ahindra Choudhury lived close by, and on Sundays, sahibs would visit the nursery with an array of exotic greenery. Naba was Bhuban?s father. The Roy family has moved out of the lane that still bears the name of their ancestor.
I had first heard of Miss Higgins from Gaurav Swarup when I met him at his 17 Alipore Road residence. This English spinster ran the school named after her at 1 New Road, where Swarup, like many other children of Alipore, went to imbibe English values and etiquette. ?We used to eat in school with knives and forks. She died in the late 1980s when she was 90 plus,? he said.
Later, Rita Dalmiya, who came to live to Alipore after her marriage in 1951 and whose children went to Miss Higgins School, said she had few Indian students. Most of the children were from the embassies. ?She was a strict and caring mistress,? said Dalmiya in fluent English and Bengali, which is quite surprising for a Marwari lady in her mid-70s. Her forward-thinking parents had sent her to Loreto Convent.
The school building turned out to be a house with a porch. Smritikona Sandel, who is the principal of the school she joined in 1968, said Miss Higgins had come to Calcutta in 1935. I saw Miss Higgins? smiling photograph in the school.
Sidonie Parashar, a long-time resident of Alipore, told me about two other English spinsters ? Miss Srimshaw and her eponymous school, and Miss Weatherall, who had a stable with horses, behind the school. The school used to be situated at the spot where Food Bazaar has come up on Alipore Road, and as a child, Parashar would walk down the court compound with friends to reach it.
To be continued
