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Mainstream, Vol XLV, No 46

My Earliest Recollections

Saturday 3 November 2007, by Nikhil Chakravartty

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What’s the earliest memory I have about myself? I have tried to look back to catch a glimpse of what could possibly be the earliest scene I can remember about my life.

I don’t remember anything about my birth and infancy, about the place where I was born. That was in a winter morning in November 1913 at a town in Assam called Silchar where my mother’s uncle was a prison doctor. My mother told me later that I was born early morning at about 5. I don’t know who were all there to receive me into the world, but I was told later that the arrival was smooth, without a hitch. My complexion was slightly dark—certainly darker than my mother’s and my father’s both of whom were fair. So I was called ‘Kanu’—the pet name of Krishna. One of my uncles was an admirer of a great Bengal scholar of those days and after him, I was named ‘Nikhil Nath’. That was perhaps all that I could gather about my first hours in this world.

My mother used to say that as a baby, I used to be quite a problem at night as I could cry for milk at the middle of the night and my full-throated angry howl would wake up the neighbours. And a relation who was rather obsequious to the Raj, would remark that it was good we were not living in sahib-para—the locality of the sahibs—as they would not tolerate this nightly howl by the Bengalee baby. My mother used to recall another incident about my full-throated bellowing. The family had gone to the Tagore mansion at Jorasanko to watch Rabindranath’s Valmiki Pratibha in which the poet himself took part. As soon as the curtain was up and the bearded old man appeared on the stage, I roared sitting on the lap of my mother who had to rush out of the hall and had difficulty getting back home all by herself carrying the baby, as my father and my aunt stayed behind as they were ardent votaries of Tagore.

Otherwise I was a healthy normal baby with a large head and bristling hair. No problem about food as I was and have continued to be fond of milk. Every afternoon, I used to have long outings in the pram with Jagabhai who was the all-purpose factotum in our cosy little home.

My earliest recollections centre round the small house at Amherst Street in Central Calcutta. You had to reach from the main road by a winding brick-laid lane through which no carriage could pass, only rickshaws could enter. The room in front was my father’s study-cum-sitting room. Behind it was a narrow open space and you reached the two dingy rooms and a narrow verandah which served as the dining place with small wooden stools and the meal laid out on the floor. By the staircase was the tiny little kitchen where my mother prepared all our meals. Upstairs there were two rooms, one with my father’s bed and the other belonged to my mother, where my aunts whenever they would come could park themselves. Any other guest would be sleeping in my father’s study downstairs. Next to us was the playing field of St. Paul’s College, where students would be playing. One would notice a dark-skinned young man would be playing with the boys as if he was one of them. Years later, he turned out to be my teacher in Presidency College—Kuruvilla Zachariah, a shy person with big eyes and ears, a bachelor at that time who became a real guru to me.

It was war-time (1914-1918) when I was growing up to be a boy. Khaki uniforms were popular, with a Union Jack stitched on the shoulder, and I remember I got a boy howitzer. A nursery book of alphabets all dealing with the great war that the British were supposed to be winning—D stood for Dreadnought, J for Jellico, U for U-boat, Z for Zeppelin etc.

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