Kanpur evam Cawnpore

I was 10 when I went to Kanpur for my school admission. My father took me and we stayed at the Inspection Bungalow at Armapore and all I remember is not combing my quite long hair for a few days. My mother and brother arrived later; my hair was firmly plaited and as ever a temporary home was set up replete with a big bowl of delicate blue larkspur and yellow dogflower.

A few months later we moved to a home in the city on the ground floor of a house that belonged to local merchants. It was damp and dark and when it rained green slime flowed out of the pipes and into the courtyard. We had a long commute to school on the Army bus. We had little connection with the deeply traditional, Punjabi joint family who owned the place. Or their dog who left little piles of runny shit all over the house. Life passed unhappily, languidly. Summer afternoons were the worst - hot, unbearably still. The only event that enlivened these days for us was pheriwalas selling cucumber slices (evocatively described as “Laila ki ungliyaan, Majnu ki pasliyan” in our school lesson) and watermelon. Living there my mother went a little mad. So did our dog who singlemindedly tore up all our linen. Finally my father was allotted a house and we moved to the cantonment.

The cantonments of India in the 70s and 80s were both isolated worlds and connected by some invisible bloodline to the cities they belonged to. Cawnpore (to use the anglicised version) cantonment had roads named after English governor-generals and colonial bungalows that lined the Ganga. Once in a while bodies lazily floated in the river, no one knew if death had come from natural causes or otherwise. Here and there were the remnants of history like Massacre Ghat and Bibigarh. Cawnpore Club was a mouldy old place where drinks were served at six by liveried bearers and dinner was served in courses. We lived opposite the club. At night the lanes were dark, the trees cast long shadows. Visiting relatives were spooked by the darkness and silence but we felt immense relief away from city lights.

Our school had been set up by missionaries. Legend had it that a local rich boy had been rejected by our school and so a new school was set up right across the railway tracks that ran alongside our school. Naturally we disdained the students of the other school. Our school offered a sound education and we even had a few American teachers, this felt quite exotic at the end of the 70s. It also offered a sound thrashing for misdemeanours in the old public school tradition. And demented teachers who talked to themselves, like our Sanskrit teacher.  As also Hindi teachers who ensured our Punjabi Hindi was  erased and replaced with a purer diction. It was quite an old school and for some reason its historical photographs have got embedded in my mind so I remember it as a place populated by Victorian schoolgirls rather than us modern Indians.

My mother’s mood improved in the cantonment. She had a social circle more to her liking and was soon immersed in Army life as we knew it. One month Shia-Sunni riots broke out in the city. At its height, my mother had a previously scheduled party for which a rice plate was deemed necessary. In the midst of a curfew mother and daughter sailed forth, found a willing rickshaw wallah and an open store in Navin Market and returned with ceramic plate in hand. Many months later we encountered Sanjay Gandhi, campaigning for an election at the end of the Emergency that the Congress lost. He had a lone driver and a local chap in attendance and waved to a few of us in that cantonment country lane. In retrospect, it is a touchingly innocent moment.

If the cantonment was a safe haven in which our lives were lived out undisturbed, nothing prevented us from enjoying the delights of the city. Shivala had tiny shops and giant mounds of glass bangles which everyone bought – no one even knew or cared that these were made by children under appalling conditions. We simply wanted a colour for every mood, every occasion. You could pick up leather chappals – also dangerously made in the city’s tanneries - for a pittance. And the alleyways were filled with food stalls, including those that made kulfi by rattling the metal cones in a pot filled with ice.

Kanpur had unmotorised rickshaws which depended on raw pedal power. There was no other way of getting around the city if you didn’t own a vehicle. It was always an unhappy ride, especially since most drivers were emaciated men with leg veins that stood out. Jostling for space with these rickshaws would be cows and elephants like some stereotype of India writ large. I think the Mall had a cow that never moved and traffic simply went around the animal. Further slowing matters were the numerous gumtis or railway crossings across the city.

And there were the ubiquitous servants since most Army houses came equipped with “servants quarters”. Of ours, one was a widow with young children, rather sad and outwardly colourless. The other was still young and  our playmate. They had resoundingly epic names like Urmila and Shakuntala. Many a solitary evening whilst my parents were out at a party, Shakuntala would play with us and our two dogs. The dogs buried and dug up bones in the garden, which made us feel like we were living in a proper Enid Blyton story.

Kanpur was a strange city; it had none of the glamour or culture of neighbouring Lucknow. It had a history but it was an industrial city above all, though its proximity to the river also made it a city where everything bloomed. Menace hung around, even in the cantonment. Tales of abduction, thefts, murders were rife all the while we lived there. In the end we were happy to leave and arrive in a city where people roamed freely at night. I am in no hurry to revisit Kanpur but all these years later the memory of the city is a surprisingly pleasant one.