If I am to believe my sources, I spent my first years in a house in Dhakuria. There are pictures of me in a house, but who is to tell it is the same one I am given to believe I was living in. The birth certificate, of course, mentions only the hospital. Be that as it may, I remember the days - as I am sure many of us do - when the streets around our house weren't so well-lit as they are today. It is tempting to embark on a history of street-lighting in Calcutta. P. Thankappan Nair has a wonderful section in his Calcutta Municipal Corporation at a Glance, but that can be reserved for another day, another discussion.
For now let me share this one photograph I clicked on my mobile camera today. Between Maharaj Thakur Road and Dhakuria Station Road there are several narrow lanes which run parallely (I didn't know until now that 'parallely' isn't a legitimate word)...so, narrow lanes which run parallel. One of these is the Kali Bari Lane, which I happened to take tonight on my way back. This is a few steps into the lane.
I am not sure if this was the only street lamp the lane had at one time or whether, when they were being replaced by the new ones, some nostalgic soul left this single lamp-post behind. It reminded me of Wall-E and EVE. (Ooh, did the worker who left it behind also defy orders from above, favouring sentiment? No. I'm romanticizing.) These lamps sometimes had wire-grid baskets to prevent the light-bulbs from getting borrowed. In the background you can see the Indian Oil building towering. The change in the colour of street lights is also visible. The main road is amber. This lane is white, fluorescent. I realized while passing through the lane that this is also where our old car mechanic, Rishi, had his workshop. Our Standard Super 10 or after that the Fiat Premier Padmini would occasionally force us to take a detour on our way to some place or the other, to stop here for some minor repair-work. I remember being told-off once when, while the Fiat (or was it the Super 10?) was malfunctioning somewhere near Gariahat (Ghatak Bari to be precise) and my father was trying his best to fix it, I was restricting my contribution to wisecracking. I had just started reading Hergé's Quick and Flupke series, and, drawing on recently acquired vocabulary, I was calling the car "Double Trouble".
