It had taken a long time to fulfil the promise. To be precise, twenty six years!
Sometime after I got married, I had promised my wife that I would take her to the college which had transformed me from a hesitant, lanky young man into a confident professional, from a bungling student into a reasonably competent professional and from a boy to a man.
But one thing always led to another and months turned into years, years into decades before I actually did. And even this opportunity had not been planned in advance, but happened virtually on the spur of a moment.
After having spent nearly five decades in Bengal, and most of the last decade outside it, my wife and I had to undertake one of our infrequent trips to Kolkata due to some family obligations. It was quite a packed schedule but destiny had other plans. One of the planned tasks had to be cancelled at the last moment and this left us with a free day in between engagements.
We initially planned to spend the day in leisurely meeting friends and relatives, but then it struck my wife that we could also spend the day in making a quick tour to my college campus in Kharagpur, some 120 kilometres from Kolkata. We could have taken a train, but I thought a drive would not only give us flexibility with the timings, but would also allow us to pass through the Bengal countryside. So quick surf on the internet, and a self drive car was hired by evening and we were off the next morning for a day long trip to a place which had been my home away from home for five years of my life.
The drive to the outskirts of Kolkata was as maddening as ever, what with narrow, congested roads, traffic signals every couple of hundred meters, and yellow dilapidated cabs driving in a completely crazy manner. Anybody, who has not driven in Kolkata is extremely likely to suffer severe trauma after surviving a ride in the peak time traffic. Though I had been used to driving in Kolkata earlier, the last few years had made me complacent. After the initial terror, the old Wild West attitude soon came back, and it seemed as if I had not been away at all!
After a good part of an hour, we were approaching the outskirts with the highway visible in the distance before I let my guard drop. Once on the highway, things were a lot better with wider lanes, less jostling and a clearer view of exactly where we were going.
The Bengal countryside is very different from the countryside of North India. The highway traffic is slightly slower, the surroundings are substantially greener in stark contrast to the dusty countryside of north India. The air is a lot cleaner in the countryside compared to that of the cities and the drive is much more enjoyable. After sometime, though we were not really tired, we stopped for some tea just to savour the sights and sounds of the Bengal countryside.
Having tea in a small roadside tea shop in Bengal is an experience in itself. Within a span of some fifteen minutes, the shop owner will not only serve you hot, flavourful tea, he will also want to know everything about you and also update you on everything that had been happening locally.
Stay any longer and you are likely to become part of a heated debate on any topic under the sun, which can also be quite political and quite partisan. The other customers will also join in and suddenly there will be two or more groups, with a person or two who would be passively disagreeing with both sides and shaking their heads in contempt. This contempt would not be directed to people for engaging in a pointless debate but towards both active points of views being professed. The shopkeeper will make it a point to offer refilling the tea cups and other meagre offerings that would be available, to ensure that the debate did not break up.
Oh! How the Bengalis love to argue! No pretence of a stiff upper lip here.
I was quite familiar with this and after finishing our tea, we quickly settled the bill – which is surprisingly low compared to Delhi, and started off.
It was a fairly enjoyable ride and we absorbed the familiar sights and sounds once again. The once familiar names hidden away in the depths of our memory again came to the fore though the order of places was quite mixed up. The roads had substantially improved during the time that I had been away and this was a welcome change.
Soon we entered Kharagpur and it was only with the help of GPS guidance that we were able to make our way towards the campus. The town had changed a lot becoming more densely populated with even familiar areas looking unfamiliar. There used to be an open land through which we used to take a shortcut between the railway station and the campus gate which had been jostled out by new construction. Though I kept a lookout for Waldorf (our Chinese food joint run by John, and for Anarkali (our favourite Punjabi food joint run by a jolly Sardar), somehow I missed Waldy’s. Even the open undulating tract of road between the two branches of Railway tracks just before the so called campus boundary had vanished to be replaced by a series of houses and shops. The wide open spaces which separated the town from the campus had given way to hordes of humanity and this was somehow disappointing. The mind was having difficulty absorbing and accepting the change which probably was inevitable.
The last straw was the new flyover across the Puri Gate railway crossing, or so I thought!
After crossing the monstrosity, two things were immediately evident – Chedis, our first and most dear 24X7 food joint was past its glorious days and that the campus now had a formidable entrance gate, manned by uniformed guards and protected by barricades. We always had a loosely demarcated campus boundary with the entrance being represented by the Puri Gate railway crossing and there was nothing guarding or monitoring the movement of people through the campus.
I made the register entry for my car, took the visitors card and just to drive home the point to the Security guard that I had been there before him, I informed him that I was an ex student of the Institute. This was not necessary, but it did help me overcome my indignation – how dare they try and control my entry into my campus!
I was driving slowly through the campus eagerly trying to reconnect with every tree, every wall, and every blade of grass like a kid who had returned to the home where he had spent his childhood. Old memories of times I had spent here with friends kept rushing back. As I swung into the main campus through the imposing gates, I stopped the car for a brief moment in front of the main building. “Dedicated to the Service of the Nation” was the logo which was lit up in neon at night, but for a very long time the neon lights on “Ser” had gone kaput and the logo read “Dedicated to the vice of the Nation” at night. Perhaps as an ode to some of the more adventurous characters that inhabited the campus at night during our times!
My wife was aware of most of the stories and she acknowledged my brief halt there with a smile.
Unfortunately, the main Institute canteen was shut for some reason of perhaps it had been moved elsewhere, I never did find out, but there were stories attached to that place too! As students we were always short of cash, which lasted precisely three days after it arrived via money order, and tabs accumulated in all places, except the institute canteen which operated on a strictly cash only basis. Here, the girls of the class were saviours, God bless them, but the number of customers were always far more than the cash available. As a result we would order weird amounts like six teas divided in seventeen cups and never had a whole cup ever. The proportions and division was so cumbersome and the canteen manager was so familiar with the ploy, that mostly we had nearly full cups irrespective of how much we paid! It was only on our last day at the institute that we all gathered at the canteen for a final meeting, and went to order tea before we bid farewell to each other, perhaps never to meet with some. But the canteen manager refused to take our order. He sternly looked at us and said- “You shall not fool me anymore! Today, you will order a full cup each and I will pay for the entire lot. Nobody should be able to say that you never had a full cup of tea in this establishment.” There was a lot of laugher and back slapping after this rebuke, but such were the times.
There were many other tales, but all that for some other time!
Entering the Department was like going back in time. Virtually nothing had changed in all these years. The rooms were the same, the stairs were the same, and I must admit, as I walked through the corridors aimlessly, there was also the familiar feeling that any time we may need to duck into the nearest classroom or toilet to avoid coming face to face with Professor Rajagopalan, or Professor D V S Murthy coming down the corridor. The old man in me was struggling to overcome the young student who had magically reappeared!
After spending an hour or so with a couple of friends who had opted to become professors in the institute, I was eager to go to the place I felt most attached to – my hostel- Radhakrishnan Hall of Residence! I had been my home many years ago, but still felt like home. It was home to nearly four hundred students at any given point of time and we had stayed there for five long years which now is not more than a blur, a small wrinkle in time. It was a place one identified with, it was a place for which one would not accept any insults, it was a place for which one worked tirelessly to see it at the top of any of the events of the institute, a place to rejoice, to cry, to make lifelong friends, to fight for, to love, to give vent to madness, to share secret desires and fears, and ultimately to belong, to return to!
But before I went there, I took my wife for a Campus tour. The Old campus, the Old building of the institute, the Old Tower which used to be part of the historical Hijli Jail, the Tech Market, The Gymkhana, Gyan Ghosh Stadium. There were many new buildings, and many more hostels now. Driving a car in the campus for the first and only time in my life made the distances shrink and soon we were in front of the gate of my hostel – R K Hall.
I sat there in the car. Everything had a memory attached to it. And they all came rushing back. It was as if the intervening time did not exist. As I got down from the car, I noticed that my wife did not. Seeing my surprise, she asked me if it was all right for her to go in. I laughed. The stories that she had heard about girls in boys hostels in KGP were the reason. I assured her, that in all probability her apprehensions were still true, but she was not a girl any more, she was an Auntie, so it should be OK.
As I walked towards the gate with the cow trap I noticed that there was a new food and juice joint bang across the road. This was probably one of the culprits that killed the popularity of Chedis. And it had so much variety to offer. In our ties, people were innovative. They would offer infinite combinations of bread, eggs and potatoes with a dash of tomatoes thrown in every now and again for glamour. The first thing I noticed was that there was a security room as soon as one entered the gate. This was different from when we were there. Our Security man appeared only at night and the poor fellow would grab a chair from the common room to promptly go off to sleep. One of the primary and mandatory qualifications that he had to have was to be able to sleep through anything short of an asteroid hitting the earth, and to be able to wake up twice during the night to respond to the whistle of his mobile supervisor. Failure to do that would result in a lot of grief for him.
As we entered the man building, it seemed that not much had changed. It appeared that the toilets had been renovated, and the stalls of the smaller vendors had been removed, the barber shop was gone and a new block had been added. It also seemed that while we all had single occupancy rooms, now most rooms were occupied by two people, which left very little space for someone to walk in. After a tour of the hall, it was time to visit my old wing – B First East. As I climbed the stairs, each step seemed to be reminding me of a story, an incident – some funny, some sad, some intimate, and some which cannot be repeated in genteel company.
As we had planned, we had arrived at the Hall during lunchtime, which would create more possibilities for the rooms to be unlocked and people to be present. And we were not disappointed. We met three or four guys, who were the present occupants and got chatting, getting to know more and more about the place which was mine yet now it was theirs too. The old familiar relaxed style of interaction came back, though some of the lingo had changed. The present occupant of my erstwhile room was fortunately there and the room appeared to be unchanged, though I must admit, it appeared cleaner! These guys appeared to be as interested in knowing about my times as I was in theirs, and the conversation came easy.
As we were chatting, another guy appeared from the room next to my old room right at the end of the corridor. He had apparently woken up just now disturbed by the sound of our discussion. We shook hands, and got to know his name. I casually asked where he was from. Before he could reply, one of the other guys says “Sir, he is fro Bihar, but his parents are now in Vizag. Since I am also from Bihar, I enquired which part of Bihar he belonged to. He said Ara, and this got an immediate reaction from my wife, who had been busy clicking pictures and who also hailed from Ara. She turned and looked at him closely and suddenly asked – “Are you Gudda Bhaiya’s son?”
The guy was so stunned he was rendered speechless, he just nodded. Imagine the probability of waking up in the afternoon, and suddenly being confronted by your Aunt, who you have never met and do not have the foggiest notion of what she was doing there. She had seen the uncanny resemblance with her cousin, and joined the dots in a flash. She hugged him but the guy was so shocked he could barely speak for some time. I remembered her cousin telling us that his son was in my college but we never expected to meet like this. His friends were rolling in laughter at the poor guy’s plight and I could share his feelings. It was the same situation as when my father had surprised me by paying one of his two visits to my college completely unannounced.
Anyway, soon he was at ease having discovered that his Aunt was not one to reveal his secrets to his Dad, and while I chatted with the others Aunt and her Nephew spent some time bringing each other up to date. Soon it was time to bid farewell to our newfound friends and we climbed down the steps for our final stop – the Hall Mess.
The Mess did not hold particularly fond food memories, since the food there had been notoriously bad. But that was the only negative side of the place. It held fond memories – some that make you laugh, some that bring on a wave of nostalgia.
Two Freshers standing on the tables singing different songs, while another went round and round like a gramophone turntable and yet another standing erect with his arm outstretched with his finger on the “turntable’s head – in an elaborate setup of the Stereo system – was a common sight during the month long ragging period.
Those of us who were not planning to go abroad for studies after the Final year played a rather dirty trick on those that were planning to do so. Three of us would mug up a few rather uncommon words and as we were having dinner, we would casually start a conversation which would always end in a challenge – one guy would throw one of these words and the accomplices would blurt out the meaning and usage, and this would be repeated over and over till the aspirants were really psyched about their lack of preparation and would hurriedly finish their dinner and rush back to their rooms to start preparing all over again!
The night long bridge competition, the endless debates, the crazy, impromptu jokes of Ajay Anand, the General Body Meeting for plans to oust one of the wardens (which actually never happened), the rehearsal for the plays – they all were part of the mess scene.
But the most vivid memories of the mess involved the Mess workers. They had to take the cribbing about the terrible food, the delay in serving the Rotis, the unchewable mutton, and the inter table politics in their stride in their own way. And each had a different personality and usually catered to a particular table only. Apanna –the flamboyant man about town, Thamaiyya – the quiet one, Khitish – the man who also supplied milk on the side…. each was different. The running joke was that R Kites did not draw sustenance from cow milk but from Khitish’s milk!
But the man who served our table was for me the best of all. Kondaiya was a middle aged person, quiet, with smiling, kindly eyes and an average built. Not remarkable in any way! But Kondaiya was special. He was always the first to welcome a fresher even before the college officially opened every year. He was a support for the new entrants most of who arrived not with great dreams but in apprehension of the torments of the ragging period. Most would be accompanied by their parents, but that protection would only last a day or two. Kondaiya would often go to their rooms and talk to them to help them tide over the perceived horrors of ragging. This would also put the parents at ease in this unfamiliar place and the tales of ragging usually had also reached them.
But I was one of the few who arrived unaccompanied by a parent or a friend, tugging along a suitcase and a hold-all (for those who are unfamiliar with the hold-all, it is somewhat like a knapsack which was used to carry the blankets, maybe a thin mattress, pillows, and everything else that could be crammed in and then rolled up into a bulky bundle for ease of carriage) lost and making a valiant effort to put up a brave face. Kondaiya helped me carry my luggage to my allotted room and seeing that I was alone, he said in his broken Hindi – “Chinta nai karne ka, Saab! Ladka log accha hai, kuch nahi hoga!” (Don’t worry, the kids are basically good guys, nothing will happen to you!).
From that day onward, I was always greeted by a wonderful smile when I met him. I also made it a point to sit at the table where he served and I noticed that he would bring the hottest Rotis to me during dinner or lunch. He also used to dust off the extra flour that stuck to the Rotis in large quantities before he served me. It was a small gesture of care but significant for me. And I was not the only one. While he served all those who sat at that particular table, he had his special ones, as is natural.
As time went on, the bonds became stronger. There were many small instances that reflected the attitude of Kondaiya. He looked on all the regulars at his table as his children. He would not usually comment on the drug users but we could sense the disapproval even on his impassive face. If someone was making an attempt to get rid of drug abuse, or alcoholism he was supportive in his own small ways. A special smile and sometimes even a pat on the head!
During our First year, we decided to do out for dinner one evening. After a jolly good time when we returned to the Hall at about 10:30 in the night, we saw from a distance, a lonely figure squatting outside the mess with a few covered plates of food. Kondaiya had not seen the three of us at Dinner, and as the Mess closed down for the day, he filled three plates and had been waiting for us for the good part of two hours. We apprehensively approached the man and the look of worry was very obvious for us to see.
He asked in a gruff voice – “Khana khaya?” We could only nod!
“Bol ke jaana tha! Mera itna deri ho gaya, khana bhi thanda ho gaya. Hum socha padhai kar raha hoga. Kamra me bhi dekha, nahi tha.” (You all should have informed me. It is so late now; even the food has gone cold. I thought you were busy studying, I checked your rooms too, and you were not there). He had not raised his voice but the worry and anger in his voice was plain to see.
Like children who had been caught in the act of some mischief, we kept standing with our heads bowed, muttering sorry. Once we heard the magic words “Abhi jao!(Now, go!)” we were off like arrows. Never, never again, would we dare go out for dinner or lunch or to Calcutta without informing him.
He would remember all the previous residents of the Hall who
would come for a visit from time to time and the closeness that he shared with
many of them was obvious. He updated us on a rather strange and intimidating person who had suddenly appeared one day.
This person, was our senior of many years, and had unfortunately developed
schizophrenia during his student years. We were advised by Kondaiya to steer
clear of him if possible as he could turn violent and often did. But Kondaiya
treated him like a son, arranged food from the mess, talked to him at times and
we could see that he treated Kondaiya with all the respect that is due to a
parent till one day his family members came to take him away.
A friend of mine,
who had actually joined a year earlier but had been admitted to a branch which
offered little job prospects, had taken the entrance exam once again with
better results which got him admitted to a more sought after branch. Kondaiya
was not aware of these developments and when his earlier batch mates were
graduating and there was discussion around the mess tables about new jobs, new
scholarships he once casually enquired as to where my friend was moving. When
he was informed that this guy would graduate next year, Kondaiya was really
sympathetic and encouraging. “Koi baat nahin, Saheb, ho jaata hai. Mehnat
karega to agla saal aur accha hi hoga (Don’t worry, these things happen, work
hard, and next year you will get an even better job!). Kondaiya has assumed
that this guy had failed to clear his exams and we did not have the heart to
correct him!
One day, I was
not feeling well. I had fever and when the other wing mates were going down for
dinner, I told them that I did not feel like eating. They offered to get me
something when they returned but I was not just up to any food.
Sometime later,
there was a knock on the door, and there stood Kondaiya! Angry, because I had
not been to the mess and I had also not informed him. But as soon as he saw me
and the condition I was in, he understood and his eyes softened. He touched my
forehead, turned back and went down without a word. Ten minutes later, he was
back with what was referred to as a “sick diet” – four slices of bread and a
glass of milk. He had also brought a bottle of warm water. He waited. I also
waited for him to leave. But he did not. Said nothing, just stood there
waiting. I just had to eat and finish
the milk, before he left. He was back the next day and the next.
There were so
many instances! But the one that remains with me is when we were finally
leaving. The mess had been closed for nearly three weeks now and all the under
graduate students except us final years had left the campus. Kondaiya would
come by every day, and enquire about us. One by one people were leaving every
day. The day I was planning to leave sometime in the afternoon, Kondaiya was
there since morning. Not saying much but checking the small room, again and
again to ensure that nothing was left behind. Most of the things I had already
given away and I knew that it was just an excuse to spend the last few hours
with us, to say farewell, knowing that we would probably never meet again.
He must have gone
through this every year, year after year. I could empathize with the sadness,
but there was also pride in those eyes. Pride that his wards had successfully
completed their course and were off to find the goals of their own life. I was
too young and too much full of my own dreams and plans to be very expressive
then, but the poignancy of the moment when I looked back from the departing rickshaw
for one last look at my home for five years and to wave to the receding figure
of Kondaiya was not lost.
As we got into
the car, and started on our return journey, the scene in the Mess in the last
fifteen minutes played in the mind. The mess hall had not changed much but
there were a few minor differences in the way the mess worked. We stood there
absorbing the familiar sounds and scenes of students walking in, leaving after
their lunch, some just hanging around chatting with friends, and some were
giving us curious looks – after all, middle aged couples aimlessly walking into
a students’ mess was not a very common sight! We asked around, but it appeared
that Kondaiya was a forgotten entity. Finally, we were able to locate one mess
worker who had heard of him and informed us that his son was around working
somewhere in the campus, though he could not be more precise.
On our return
journey, I was full of regret at not having done anything worthwhile to have
made his life a little better. A person who deserved some meaningful consideration
for the selfless care that he showered on us while we were there and I am sure
that his blessings played some part in making us what we are today. In a
selfish manner of making something of my life, I had been callous and
unthinking enough to erase him from our memory for many years. A bit of money,
maybe a communication once in a while may have made him a litter happier, his
life a bit easy. That is a regret that
will remain with me for the rest of my days.
This story is an
attempt to pay a tribute to a soul who had come into my life to help me grow as
a person and who treated me like a father treats his children.
I hope that, wherever he is, the thought that he still exists in someone’s heart brings a smile to his face and a twinkle in his eyes!