Memory’s Oasis: Growing Up In Sealdah Railway Officers Colony In Kolkata

If you ever visit the concrete jungle around Sealdah station in Kolkata, you will see swarms of people packed into the roads moving in streams under a roaring monster of a flyover, a sea of heads making little eddies around stationery hawkers standing beside their tarpaulin-covered stalls, while street mongrels sleep in supreme nonchalance beside open dumpsters. You may sidestep a few slippery banana peels or small mounds of peanut shells until you make your way down A.J.C. Bose Road to the entrance of Kaiser Street. Once you pass the archway that signals the Divisional Railway Manager (DRM) building and past the thin guy selling mixed chanachur, roasted in hot sand in an iron kadhai over a fire, you will enter the gates of the green oasis that is Sealdah Railway Officers Colony.

When we were growing up in the 1980s, this walled space presented a big contrast to the surrounding north and central Kolkata. The road inside was tree-lined with green spaces between five buildings. When afternoon kalbaishakhis (norwesters) cooled hot summer days, we kids rushed out onto the green grass to collect buds of fallen Krishnachura flowers. We sat underneath those shady trees, opened up green buds to reveal red, half-formed petals. We stuck them on our fingers, like long nails, before we were ever aware of manicures. Later, we would dig up some mud, make tiny bowls of clay, dry them in the sun and play rannabati, role-playing household chores until a strict mom would send the bungalow peon’s wife to call us back.

Some of us girls went back to the flats in the buildings where the railway officers lived, and some went back to the row of garages converted into living quarters for domestic workers or peons and their families. We all played together, too young then to wonder about social disparities.

Growing up in a railway colony in India was unique. It was a microcosm of India, with people from different parts of this diverse country. You could get homemade Punjabi sev if you visited one flat and homemade Bengali mochaar chop (banana flower croquette) if you visited another. Club days were held at the railway club adjoining the Clem Browne Mancha, the hub of our social lives, with high tea on Saturday evenings comprising shingara, kachuri and mishti.

When colour TV came to India, we watched the full colours of the opening ceremony of the 1982 Asian Games hosted in Delhi, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in the club as uncles and aunties sat on chairs at the back. When the VCR first arrived, we had movie nights with a series of Amitabh Bachchan films or, better still, sat mesmerised by shiny Mithun-da in "Dance Dance" and "Disco Dancer."

New Year’s Day was the highlight of our year. The best dress obtained at Durga Puja was reserved for New Year’s Eve. There were quiz contests, while adults played Housie. During Kali pujo there was khichuri and labra (Bengali preparation of mixed vegetables) at the club, while the sky lit up with fireworks outside. The big hall at Clem Browne could be rented for weddings of the children of officers. The menu always included fish-fry and biryani until Indo-Chinese became the rage and weddings started serving chili fish right after the dalpuri and cholaar dal.

Train tracks lay beyond the fence on one side, where we could see the trains pass. The engines were electric and diesel, though I can still remember the occasional steam engine. A Shiv mandir under a huge banyan tree occupied the rough center of the colony. Girls from the garages gathered round loudspeakers at the temple on Shivratri. Hindi film music played all evening into night. Colony romances, successful and unsuccessful, flourished, as did gossip. We younger kids were mostly oblivious as we played Gadi and Pittu, drawing game courts on the road with broken bricks. Not far away was the mishti jol tap where domestic helps gathered with buckets and loud conversations to collect drinking water. I remember the soothing, dark interiors of those British buildings with thick walls. On hot summer afternoons, we sat on the verandah eating ripe tamarind, saving the black-brown seeds for board games. Come evenings, the colony transformed with children playing, aunties taking walks in the cool breeze, uncles with briefcases returning home and older boys and girls walking in groups followed by the colony strays. If there was powercut on a moonlit night, the boys would come out in the silver moonlight, play antakshari and sometimes clap their hands as though it was a night festival.

Childhood filters many realities. Memory turns the past into magic with a soothing hand. Sealdah Railway Officers Colony still exists, freshly painted now, developed by the Eastern Railways. For me, though, it will always be memory’s oasis, a place to return to in the mind’s eye, in vacant or in pensive mood.

I work in New York City and live in New Jersey now. Last summer, we spotted an apartment with a 180-degree view of the New Jersey Transit train tracks. I was immediately hooked. The love of trains is inexplicable to most Americans, perhaps because trains and tracks don’t occupy the same imaginary space as cars and highways do in the US. This has been an insurmountable cultural disconnect for me as an immigrant, perhaps even more so than the individualism that underpins this difference. Indians of my generation loved trains. The dark, silent presence of a goods train passing in the night evokes similar emotions in me as the famed dark mountains did for Wordsworth in "The Prelude." Trains are my portal for time travel, and I don’t want my portal to close anytime soon.

Dr Madhura Bandyopadhyay is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York; Rounak Patra is a Kolkata-based illustrator and cartoonist