Durgapur & the Age of Innocence

I grew up in a small town called Durgapur - around 150 km away from Kolkata. in those days we didn't really know about classifications of cities such as SEC A, B etc, so I'm not very sure about Durgapur's (or DGP) socio-economic category in those days. Instead, it was categorised as an industrial town and even sometimes (a bit exaggeratedly) called the Ruhr of India. Some of my father's colleagues who had visited Germany even imagined that the lights of Durgapur Steel Plant which glimmered like fairy lights when the train approached DGP from Kolkata reminded them of the Ruhr Valley in Germany with its heavy concentration of steel plants. Whether that was really the case or not - the lights definitely rang an alarm bell for us passengers in the train because we had to be ready to move to the door all set to alight. After all DGP was a tiny railway station where most trains stopped only for 2 minutes!

But the steel plant is not DGP's only industry - there's Phillips Carbon Black (of the Goenka group), Damodar Valley Corporation the power generating PSU, Fertiliser Corporation of India, Mining & ALlied Machinery Corporation - a PSU where various experts from the erstwhile Soviet countries often came to work. In fact my close friend in school Joanna Hornik was Polish and lived in MAMC. Her father was a mining expert from Poland while her mother was German. The list of industries in Durgapur could go on and on - but ACC Babcock Limited where my father worked was a company that manufactured industrial boilers and pressure vessels. We lived in small townships attached to the industries and probably ingested a lot of industrial pollution through the water we drank and air we breathed. Our childhood however was simple and unstressed. In fact, our smart cousins who grew up in the metros of Kolkata and Chennai often teased us about our naivete. But life in DGP was simple and without the upheavals of metro life. We went to school in a bus provided by my father's company and timed ourselves by the morning news on the local radio station. Evenings were a time for outdoor activities from paying catch n' catch to badminton, cycling and later swimming. By sundown all the kids were home and had to get down to serious studies and we had early dinners are were sent of to bed early. Our parents too followed a similar lifestyle - only sometimes they went for a late movie or a few drinks at the local club, leaving us behind with the domestic helpers. Drinks were probably restricted to the men folk while women chatted over colas. Those were pre-TV and pre-computer days and hence we lived with and for our books, our friends, our games and our lives at school.

Recently when Anup Singh (Munna) - who lived at the Steel township and mentored younger boys and girls to take up sports activities - called to invite me to a meeting of DORA (Durgapur Old Residents Association) in Delhi, I went on a pleasant trip down memory lane. Anup had actually mentored a girl called Anupama to take on my sister Deborani in the Durgapur Club annual swimming championship. My sister, of course, was a champ in her own rights and was a winner of swimmimng competitions at the state and district levels. And she had a strategy of her own to take on Anup's protege. The race was a marathon of a considerable number of laps. My sister allowed Anupama to take an early lead and in the very last lap overtook her to win the gold medal in a nail-biting finish. Of course, she was later reprimanded by our swimming coach from the MAMC Swimming Club - Kanti Dutta - who was also a national diving champion, for taking such a big risk with her competition. While my mother was a teacher for more than two decades at St Xavier's School, the boys' school in Durgapur, my sister and me went to Carmel Convent - which was the best known girls school. My mother walked across to her school through a copse of deciduous sal trees even as the bell rang announcing the start of classes. My father was the last to leave home for office. I suddenly chanced upon a website of St Xaviers Durgapur created by a group of ex-students. Photographs of the huge grounds, the auditorium and the buildings brought back memories of times when I went with my mother to fill in a leave vacancy at St Xaviers during college vacations.

The ABL township where we lived all our childhood years had large British style bunglows and was surrounded by deciduous woods. Among the local places of interest was the Bhabani Pathak's Tila or mound. It was a tiny hillock on top of which was a broken down stone wall like structure. DGP-lore had it that this was the headquarters of a gang of Robin Hood style dacoits of yore and the mound was connected to the Damodar river nearby through an underground tunnel. Needless to say that none of us had ever encountered any tunnel. However, we had pleasant outings to the hillock including a nocturnal moonlit picnic when we had trekked there with a group of friends from ABL - which was about 8 km away. My parents were always very adventurous and had once trekked to Santiniketan which was about 50 km away with their friend Debashish Sengupta. That was the mid-1970s probably and the trio had followed a rural route along the Ajay river. They had spent one night at a forest bunglow enroute and reached Santiniketan the next evening - proving to everyone that Snatiniketan, which was also my grandparents' home - was actually walking distance from DGP. Later, Baba and Ma with Debashish and his wife Sumita Sengupta and two other friends Jawahar Pillay and R.Kumar had gone on an arduous, off-season trek to the hill shrine of Amarnath in the Kashmir Valley. So while life was simple and uneventful - it had its share of adventure too.

We had our unconventional birthday parties - meticulously planned out by Baba. The memorable ones are one when Baba drove us with a bunch of friends to the breath-taking rose garden around his office in the evening and the second when he and Ma organised a bonfire and bar-b-que for our friends on a November evening. We had collected autumnal leaves for weeks before that to stoke our bonfire and the party was a roaring success. We had annual picnics, festival dinners, badminton and cricket tournaments and Holi revelries. Most of these events are well documented through photographs taken by my father. In fact, those sepia toned memories are about all that remains of life in DGP - as my childhood friend Nilanjan, who's now a very successful professional in America, says: "Durgapur is indeed a time capsule more than a physical location - a grimy, boring metaphor for our lost youth." He hasn't been back since 1983. And I probably went to DGP for the last time even before 1983. I don't have much clarity on what plans the West Bengal government has for Durgapur - if any. All I know is that most of us who spent our childhood in that city still think of our lives there and have many pleasant memories. I've been part of a school alumni meet at Silicon Valley - when my classmate Kalapi - a computer scientist at Intel - rallied all our other batchmates from Carmel Convent Class of 1981 together for a lunch about six years ago. We spent the whole afternoon at her house in Cupertino, talking about little apart from our school days and life in DGP. Then there's Neema Kudva, a professor of city planning at Cornell, whose garden and house in DGP were happy hunting grounds for many of us on summer evenings. We climbed trees, plucked fruits, played hide & seek or just sat around and talked books.In fact, if Durgapur was about the outdoor experience - it was also about reading lots of books and creative writing and literary discussions.

Two of my friends with who I shared my love for reading and writing were, of course, Neema and Nilanjan. A memorable experience was a play directed by Nilanjan's mother Mrs Sarbani Sen - a very talented individual - who had got together a motley crowd of school kids like us and some of my father's enterprising colleagues to put up Agatha Christie's A Murder is Announced. The challenges for her ranged from dealing with strange regional accents and ensuring that people had learnt their lines before they came for rehearsals to finding an empty bunglow for the rehearsals and chastising the boys in the cast - who often disappeared for a game of cricket instead of practising - and then finding the right costume for Mrs Marple. Needless to say that the production set in a small village in England created quite a stir in our own provincial small town lives in DGP. It was undoubtedly the highlight of that season! There were the muscial programmes too of song and dance that had a great deal of involvement of both my sister and mother. Rehearsals for those went on for weeks and even months and the final evening was always of very high quality performances. The rigourous rehearsals brought out the best of talent and team work in various people including homemakers who usually maintained a low profile at other times. Those were occasions that we looked forward to and which helped us to communicate with others around us and do creative things together.

I'm not quite sure if such a lifestyle exists now, even in DGP. Besides, I'm not even sure if there were not issues that needed to be addressed way back in our childhood such as more global exposure etc. In fact, life in a small town setting where everyone worked at the same office or went to the same schools had its flipside too. For lots of people, malicious gossiping sessions provided the only leisure activity and many of them were trapped in the little comforts that came with the small town lifestyle. Perhaps a lot of talent went undiscovered and many people found their spirit of adventure harnessed by the ordinary routine existence. However, my own world that was essentially created by my parents and my sister was totally nurturing and DGP gave me all the values that have been with me after I left it behind. The two and a half hour journey from Durgapur to Kolkata by Bidhan Express that I always longed to make was more than a grimy train ride. It will always remain for me a metaphor of growing up and transcending the limits of a small town existence. It was a journey that had to be made, even though what one was leaving behind was precious - the age of innocence.