“The loves we share with a city are often secret loves”, wrote Albert Camus in his Summer in Algiers. That was in 1936; but it rings true even today in this vastly changed world where we seldom find time to fall in love with people, let alone cities, like Joyce fell in love with Dublin, or Pamuk with Istanbul.
Things have also changed from the perspective of the story in which we appear “rootless” compared to our parents who were much more “anchored” because they almost never had to call more than a couple of places their “home”, whereas we, the Millennials, have lived in so many places that in most cases we have probably lost count of how many “homes” we’ve had so far. I really don’t know if this is a good story or a bad one in the final count, but I do know that you cannot “fall in love” with a city en-passant, even though you’re but a pawn, perhaps even less, in large modern cities like Kolkata and Mumbai. There’s no hard-and-fast rule of course, but generally, I’d say, you have to live for at least a couple of years in a city to truly get to its soul and explore its hidden beauties with all your senses — the sights, and sounds and tastes of the city — and only then can you fall in love with a city and call it your “home”.
Asansol: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asansol#/maplink/0)
I was born in Krishnanagar, in Nadia district, at the Mary Immaculate Nursing Home amid torrential rains that hadn’t stopped since the night before. But my childhood and youth were spent at Asansol: the first place I learnt to call “home”. My grandparents had to leave Bangladesh under difficult circumstances, and, after a long struggle, my grandfather built the two-storeyed house we, me and my sister, grew up in. It was our ancestral home and it still stands today with our portion of the house under lock and key.
Growing up in Asansol, a city, I soon realized, that didn’t have a soul, I would say to whoever may ask that “I’m from sans-soul”. It was my private prank which no one even suspected had been played on them. Our Bengali-bhadralok neighborhood was called, for reasons still unknown to me and others, Hill View Park (South), there being a Hill View Park (North) — where my grandfather’s younger brother, my Cadburydadu lived — and a Hill View (Main) also, although, for as far back as public memory could stretch, no one remembered ever having seen any hill from there.
Rummaging my thakuma’s trunk for old letters, I once found a true copy of the dalil that was registered by my grandfather for the two-and-a-half kathas of land that he had purchased from the St. Vincent’s Trust and on which he built the house we lived in. That was how I came to know that the whole of Hill View, North and South, originally belonged to the Missionaries, who owned the two schools with the best and most sprawling campuses I have seen, St. Vincent’s and St. Patrick’s: both iconic schools of Asansol, and where half of my friends studied.
I read in nondescript ‘English-Medium’ schools nearby till class eight, when I finally got admission in a proper affiliated school, in the adjoining township of Burnpur, where my father worked at IISCO. It was called Burnpur Riverside School, BRS for short (https://brsburnpur.com), and although it was no match for Vincent’s or Partick’s in terms of infrastructure, yet students of BRS excelled in studies and often performed better in IIT-JEE, due to its being affiliated to CBSE whose syllabus was better aligned with the requirements of the All India Competitive Exams, like IIT, NDA etc, than the ICSE syllabus. It is at BRS that I somewhat excelled at studies and passed my secondary examination with a respectable percentage, standing third in my school, and scoring the highest marks in English and Mathematics in the school leaving examination.
Today, Asansol is a Tier-II city, as per Government classification of cities for the calculation of House Rent Allowance. It is the second largest city of West Bengal after Kolkata and in 2010 was already 42nd among the fastest 100 growing cities of the world.
It was far less developed when we grew up in the 90s. Now, you have shopping malls and swanky apartment buildings slowly but surely filling up the skyline, like in Kolkata. It now also boasts of the new Kaji Nazrul Islam Airport at Andal, which is only 35 kms away from Asansol and can be reached within half an hour by road.
Asansol, then, the second biggest city and one of the seven Municipal Corporations in West Bengal, was the first place I called home. It is situated besides the river Damodar and my school, Burnpur Riverside School, was, as the name suggests, close to the riverside. But it was in college, Bidhan Chandra College , under the University of Burdwan, that I first really fell in love with Asansol.
I remember those walks with my then girlfriend when time used to fly by and hours felt like minutes. One cannot, of course, be entirely honest about one’s relationships with women, and neither is this about the women I have been fortunate to love and be loved by. But it is true that I started loving Asansol, only after I actually fell in love with a woman who lived in our neighbourhood. It obviously can’t be a bad place if she lived there.
It strikes me today that Asansol remains a place without a history really. Nothing spectacular ever happened at Asansol, and no great man or woman have ever been born there. Asansol was a place, where, if you were unlucky to have been born there, you escaped from. In my case, it also coincided with the place I graduated from. For, after completing my graduation, I appeared in the Entrance Examination of Jadavpur University Department of English which was really the turning point of my life. A ticket to study Masters in English Literature from the best English Department in the whole country. It was a confirmation of the correctness of the decision I had taken after my Higher Secondary Examination to not pursue science subjects anymore, but to study English Hons. giving my whole heart and attention to it.
Certain friends still remain from Asansol though, as if to remind me of my roots. We sometimes meet at restaurants and bus-stops in south-Kolkata, at Jadavpur Coffee House or at Blue Lagoon to gulp down their inimitable Mixed Fried Rice and Schezuan Pork. Not once has Asansol even come up in our conversations across all these years. It’s as if you’ve always been from Kolkata for those of us who have been fortunate to never have to always call Asansol “our home”.
Final Thoughts: Is this where my suspicion for over-zealous patriotism comes from? Patriotism is a virtue I really admire, but these are funny times and one must be careful not to be fooled by our politicians by being naïve-patriots.
