C.Y. Gopinath marvels at the revival of a city that loves itself too much to let itself die.
Bandopadhyaya was definitely following me. He had been on to me since I got off the tram at Dalhousie Square. Of course, he might have been a Chatto-padhyaya. Or a Ganguly. Or a Sanyal, for all I knew. The only sure thing was that he was as Bengali as they come: a mustardy old man in a starched panjabi and dhoti, with straight black-framed glasses, skin supple and shining from the morning's oil bath, lips reddened by paan. And mind, by the way, clearly riveted by the confused-looking stranger from the western half of the country.
It was my first trip to Calcutta since crossing into legal adulthood. College was behind me, but employment still somewhere ahead. To pass the uneasy interval in between, I had taken on a part-time project with a Bombay market research firm which wanted, of all things, a survey done of letterpress printing presses in Calcutta. I had a list of about 30 of these dark, clangorous establishments, worked no doubt by ancient bent-backed men with thick glasses and nimble fingers that deftly assembled the leaded messages of revolutions and indefinite strikes on composing trays.
It was the perfect opportunity—revisiting the city of my boyhood with all expenses paid, but more importantly, a chance to pay homage at my generation's holiest of holies, the offices of the stupendous JS magazine, which fed the spirit and imagination of the entire flower-power generation in India.