When 40g of Calcutta Namkeen brought back memories from 40 years back

 

Chowkhas namkeen from Mukhorochak

I was 6 when we moved into Calcutta for good. Our travel bookings, plans, were made by a certain Mr Kho … oops. Let’s not rush down that path.

We initially stayed in the house that my father had built at Sonarpur. He’d already built the ground floor for his parents a couple of years back. The second floor came up when we moved in. He believed in DIY though I don’t know if the phrase existed in the 80s. He designed a dressing table for my mom. With a stool. I try to carry on the legacy by being the one to buy dressing tables (furniture doesn’t last for 20 years anymore and hence plural) for the missus as and when required. 

He designed some of our furniture too. The dining table. The showcase which divided the huuuuuge hall on the first floor. You displayed souvenirs on one side. Kept books on the other. Dividing the room into a drawing room and a dining room. His design ideas were based on his living abroad for 14 years. Unfortunately Sonarpur was far removed from the city centre back then. Not anymore I am told. Goat grazed in fields around us. A girl I played with, a cousin or a neighbour perhaps, told me that the droppings were berries! Not a common sight in Canterbury, Liverpool or even Rasht, where I had lived before. Someone stopped me

from eating them just as I was about to! My chhoto pishi think as the family was wondering where I had strayed off.

I was very chubby and chants of mota mota often followed me. Thankfully I didn’t understand Bangla then. My mum would say I was ‘healthy’ and ascribe it to the better quality of milk and chocolates abroad. 

We eventually moved to a rented house in Dhakuria. Dad’s chamber was closer. His friends too. As was my school, Calcutta International School, where my mum would take me everyday and hang on and then bring me back. Must have been an ordeal when we were in Sonarpur and had to travel by local trains. I remember the smelly garbage dump near Ballygunge station. Hawkers selling goli sodas and jhal muri in the train which my mum would not let me touch. She decided to do her BEd at a nearby college in the time spent waiting for my school to get over. Took her final exams when she was waiting for my brother to join the family. She was heavily pregnant. The decision led to her taking a job as a professor in a college in Howrah. Providence you could say, as my dad passed away a year and a half later. It was this job which allowed her to bring us up independently. 

I learnt at a young age that friends and family can both be quite fickle as it was left to my mum and her side of the family to create a bubble around my brother and me. Perhaps that’s why I never committed much of myself to friends beyond a very, very select few. 

My mum at BK Girls College, Howrah, where she was the HOD of BEd. This is ‘97. The year I moved out of Calcutta. She retired ten years later.

Our time in Dhakuria is quite vivid in my mind. I was possibly at an age where one began to think for oneself rather than let grown ups do all the thinking. Or perhaps because it was the last year that my father and I spent together before he passed away. And we were very close.

There was so much that was so new and different to me. Load shedding. Mosquitoes. The heat. The language.

As it was for my father. He would express his frustration at having to use his hands for signalling while driving his car; not indicators. Perhaps there was more that he shared with my mother who once told me that he found it hard to adjust to the professional environment of Calcutta. My dad had to get used to living with his parents after being away for 14 years and I often wonder how he found that. He’d refer to his father as aapni (formal) and would hide his drink or extinguish his pipe out of respect when my grandfather came up. Very different from the very informal and intimate relation that my father and I had. I was his Baby Loaf! 

Baby Loaf. The first born and first of his name.

There was so much I missed of the life I had to abruptly leave behind when we moved into Kolkata. Instead of large Coke bottles in our fridge, I had to now be satisfied with a weekly Limca or Gold Spot where the bottle had to be returned after use. Instead of my favourite multicoloured ice rocket lollies, there were the rather insipid Kwality orange sticks. Instead of Kellogs cornflakes in many exciting flavours, there was the crumbly stuff in Mohan’s packs that I had to contend with. And the rather frail slim Cadbury mini bars were no substitute to the Penguin Perk-like wafer chocolates that I doted on. Toothpaste in strawberry flavours and electrical toothbrush? Just your plain vanilla Colgate or Forhans with a blue stripe in between. For ham, sausage and salami, dad found a shop called Happy Seasons if I remember right at Jodhpur Park. The house had an Indian toilet and my parents got a wooden throne as I did not know how to squat. It only strikes me now how privileged a life I led back then. Though some realisation did seep in after my father passed away and my mother raised us with meagre resources, but you adjust faster when you are a kid.  

There was a stationery shop in our neighbourhood which had treats on offer, limited as they were in pre-liberalisation India. Chocolates, cold drinks, pencils, erasers and ‘Tiffin cakes.’ There were glass jars full of ‘logenz’ – orange, lime (translucent), jhaal (purple) – chanachur and chips. The former too hot for me. The latter as I discovered were what my beloved crisps were called in India. There was hojmi. Soft digestive toffees. Not up my street though my friends loved it. One day I stumbled across ‘chowko biscuits.’ Cubed namkeens. That I loved. I’d go with our househelp with a ten paisa coin and get a thonga (recycled newspaper bag) full of them. The oil staining through the paper to blend with newsprint. No one considered it toxic back then. We are still alive!

Little Nimki. Second born. First of his name. Discovers chowko biscuit.

I remember many things from back then as I realised today. One being my dad sending me on a Sunday afternoon with our house-help to the corner shop to get soda to go with his drinks, and a lady stopping me and showing me how I should fold the currency notes I clutched in my hands and put them in my pocket so that no one steals it.

What I do not remember was his telling our driver one night to take my mom and my brother to my maternal grandparents house for the weekend. I do remember going back in the car next day escorted by my maternal grandfather. Being taken to the burning ghaats to see my dad for one last time before I lit the pyre. My mother holding my baby brother and telling me, ‘I am there for you both.’

I don’t have any ‘last’ memory of him. It was too unexpected for that. For me at least. 

My brother’s annaprashon. A rare picture of the 4 of us together.

And that was the end of the Sonarpur and Dhakuria chapters of my life though K and I once did go a decade back in search of the house in Dhakuria in which I spent a charmed year of my life. It was still standing firm. As rooted as my memories from the time.

I came across a shop in the Kolkata airport last week selling sweets and namkeen at exorbitant airport prices. I saw my chowko biscuits and got myself a bag. I opened the bag a couple of nights back. I think the ones I had in 80 were lighter and more crumbly in texture and perhaps bigger too in comparison to the compact and refined ones in the Mukhorochak pack that I bought. Possibly made in a more

mechanised and regulated manner compared to ones in the smaller unorganised outfits 42 years back. 

Did it taste the same? It’s hard to say. It did bring out a rush of memories and that does count for something. 

This post is my tribute to Ruskin Bond inspired by his autobiography, Lone Fox Dancing, which I am reading these days. It is based entirely on my memories of the time. 

A picture of my dad. Possibly from the early days of our moving to India.