BETWEEN FOUR JUNCTIONS

the tram. This college, where my grandfather would later study engineering, was founded in 1817 by Raja Ram Mohan Roy, a revered Bengali Hindu reformist who died a long way from home, in Stapleton, Bristol, where I previously went to school. This further deepens my sense of connection to this place. I disembark from the tram to become a part of the crowd.

I cross the street and walk to the entrance of the college. I enter unchallenged, despite not moving with the same sense of purpose as the students nor dressing like them. I step out of the throng into a shaded colonnade bordered on one side by clean white, horizontally-ridged columns, and on the other by a wall with a series of tall, slatted wooden doors. I pause by one door to look at a noticeboard. This is where Charusasi would have published the exam results of his students, where they would have crowded round in anticipatory excitement.

After breathing his air for a while, I return to the entrance and head back onto College Street. What would he have done at lunch time, when he needed some space to regenerate after a challenging tutorial? I look around.

In this part of the city the stalls that line the roads are now predominantly occupied by secondhand booksellers, but they were more varied in the 1940s. There were more streetfood vendors feeding the locals and the influx of American and British troops with any number of deep-fried, golden snacks – singaras (known outside of Bengal as samosas), pakoras and kochuri.

As I think about men in uniform arriving in rickshaws, laughing and eating together in those moments away from the atrocities of war, my mind shifts and I look up into another part of my family tree. I wonder if my mother’s grandfather, Corporal Thomas Chellew, came here in search of food and distraction when, in the summers of 1942 and 1943, 607 Squadron was stationed not six miles away at Alipore airfield. He may have seen this part of the city from the sky, given the RAF’s role defending Howrah Bridge from Japanese Mitsubishi Ki-21 bombers just two miles east.

I had come here in search of one great grandfather, but found two. And before I know it, I am entertaining the possibility that they may have met, that their paths had crossed here over fifty years before their lines became entwined with the meeting of my parents on a different continent. What had started as a casual stroll into the previous century suddenly feels more urgent and compelling. I become aware that I might appear agitated, like I’m looking for someone I’ve lost in the crowds. My pulse is certainly raised, but only in excitement at the prospect of tuning in to their conversation. My eyes alight on a street sign for a side road off College Street. Bankim Chatterjee Street. That’s my grandfather’s name. My connection with this place deepens further and Bankim Chatterjee Street becomes my true north, the magnetic field around it drawing me in. At its epicentre is a coffee house. The Indian Coffee House has two large signs compensating for a small entrance below them nestled between two book stalls.

It transpires that it was established in 1942 and immediately became the “go to” place for staff and students of Presidency College. It was an adda – the Bengali word for a renowned meeting place where intellectuals debated the issues of the day and cultural history was made. Exactly the sort of place a Professor of Philosophy might go. But also the sort of place that welcomed a diversity of viewpoints and backgrounds, unlike the Indian Nationalist-only eateries of the time, which would have been far less welcoming to a British airman.

I take a deep breath, inhaling Charusasi’s persona, and enter. The Coffee House opens up into a wide hall full of small square tables, most of them occupied. The walls carry down-lit pictures of Bengali icons and cultural scenes. At one end two windows open out onto a small backstreet, allowing natural light to blend with the white haze around closed cubic lightshades. The shades hang from horizontal metal pipes that run across the hall, and also hold slowly-rotating ceiling fans. I look up and see that there are more seats upstairs on a balcony area that looks over the main atrium.

The spirit of debate is clearly alive, as the background noise drowns out my request for a table. A bespectacled waiter in a white uniform and turban, both with black sashes, leads me to a table for two in the corner nearest one of the windows, and I sit in a dark wood chair, with a woven wicker back, facing into the hall. The waiter takes my order and conveys it to a busy accounts desk and from there to the kitchen. Minutes later I have a black Darjeeling chai, a bowl of ghugni and a plate of parathas in front of me, all reassuringly steaming. As I close my eyes and wait for them to cool, I allow my imagination to cast back to 1942.

“Do you mind if I join you?” A nearby English accent penetrates the background Bengali murmur. Charusasi looks up over his reading glasses to see a man, probably in his early thirties, dressed in sharp-seamed khaki shorts, with shirt cuffs neatly folded above the elbow and a beret in his hands. He closes his book, pushes it to one side of the table and smiles as he gestures invitingly towards the chair opposite.