PROSE NON-FICTION

Asha Chatterjee

The Search for My Great Grandfathers

After Edmund de Waal

I walk down the road from the Salt Lake house past the Punjab National Bank, dismissing the rickshaw-wallas who persistently tout for business on the corner of Broadway. I wait at the GD bus stop with two women planning their shopping trip at New Market, bags on shoulders, ready for action. The VS14A arrives and I get on it, quickly re-occupying a seat that has just been vacated by someone leaving at my stop.

On the thirty-minute drive I am subjected to an assault of all my senses: the constant honking of battered, yellow taxis; the jolts from relentless braking and sudden swerving throwing me into seemingly unperturbed fellow passengers; tiny women in dusty saris carrying unfeasibly large and heavily-laden fruit baskets at the roadside.

When the bus reaches the Esplanade terminus I board an electric tram towards Bagbazar, knowing that this line has operated for over a century but suspecting that the trams probably have a little more glass, angles and pace now. We pass the Writers Building with its Greco-Roman features, striking white pillars against red brick. As we travel through BBD Bagh Square I am returned to an earlier time, when this place was known as Dalhousie Square. It was renamed to celebrate three young fighters for Indian independence who assassinated a notoriously cruel and oppressive Inspector General of Police in 1930.

We hastily depart from the architectural legacies of the British Raj but not before passing the high-domed roof and Ionic-Corinthian pillars of the General Post Office. The next landmark, the Mughal-influenced Nakhoda Mosque, is equally impressive. As we head into a part of the city characterised by its smaller temples, public buildings and residential blocks, the tram gets busier.

Soon I’m riding down College Street, nearing the beginning of the story. As I gaze out of the window, I transport myself back to the last years of British rule in India. The streets are almost as busy, but instead of suited businessmen, tee-shirted tourists and women in kaleidoscopic saris crowding the pavements, men clad in white dhotis try and over-take each other by side-stepping on to the tramtracks with little regard for their personal safety. Students are late for lectures, cycling erratically to avoid stray dogs and begging children.

Back in the 1940s, my father’s grandfather would have been giving those lectures. As a Professor of Philosophy in the Government’s education service, Charusasi Chatterjee moved between colleges, but spent much of the latter part of his career at Presidency College, which is now clearly visible from