Fragments of an Unbroken Mirror: I. It’s Yesterday Once Again

In my solitude, I have clearly seen things that are not real.  – Antonio Machado

The nature of my work being what it is, I didn’t see the setting sun for quite some time. Until today.

This afternoon, when I left my workplace, the bloodless winter sun was hanging near the horizon behind a veil of fog and dust.  On the other side of the road, boys were playing cricket in the big park that’s called Park Circus Maidan. Dust kicked up by cricketers hung like an ochre blanket over the field, around which elderly trees stood like disinterested spectators. The trees, many of them barren, and all of them heavy with undisturbed dust of many rainless months, were desperately waiting for a shower.  

For some reasons, there were just a few people on the pavements and hardly any vehicles on the carriageway. The men with broken cheeks in shabby shirts and short dhotis selling bhelpuris and pani puris at the park entrance had no customers. … Although the city has changed inexorably over the past fifty years, neither the taste of pani puris, nor the look of the men who sell them has changed. 

My friend Jyoti lived near the Park Circus Maidan when we were in school. Jyoti and I spent many afternoons in this park, chatting and eyeing up girls, me smoking a secret cigarette and Jyoti – he had all the makings of the teetotaller he is today – looking at me disapprovingly. 

Today, a relentless winter breeze has been blowing since morning. A mild shiver passes through my spine as I wait at the bus stop.  Suddenly, I am gripped by a mildly intoxicating fear. The place is far too quiet, far too empty, it feels almost surreal.  And the city looks different in the magical yellow light of the setting sun. I stand flabbergasted on the eerily quiet road and try to figure out what has been happening. 

It is perhaps the perfect setting for a double-decker bus to arrive … the red Leyland double-decker with the proud head of a Royal Bengal tiger stencilled on its side … the double-decker that has been discarded long ago by administrators who has no sense of urban poetry … the double-decker without which the story of my childhood, which I am going to tell you in a moment, would be incomplete. 

And it must have been a special day for me, or the world. The front seats on the upper deck of the bus are unoccupied … I recall, there was a time when I would exchange anything for a front seat which allowed me a panoramic view of the road ahead. 

As our bus moves along, as buildings, trees, and lamp posts march backward, the roads become emptier and the evening light mellower. The two men who were arguing noisily behind me fall silent. 

A translucent canopy of stillness hangs over the world as we go along familiar roads past familiar structures like the new shopping mall on Amir Ali Avenue, the perpetually grey façade of the Modern High School, Calcutta Cricket and Football Club, and along familiar flyovers.  Yet, the sparse pedestrians seem far away and the place looks different from the humdrum metropolis I saw just hours earlier. It seems unreal, more like a faded sepia picture stuck with corner hinges in a photo album with thick black pages, an album that had been lost long ago. 

The bus goes on a journey more in time than space. The Kolkata of the twenty-first century fades away from before my believing eyes and a similar but very different conurbation from a different millennium takes its place.


It’s yesterday once again.

[This is the first chapter of my memoir Fragments of an Unbroken Mirror, which I dream will become a much-loved book.]