Before 1940

Before 1940

The house was newly built with 2 large rooms on the ground floor and 2 on the first floor with good size verandahs for each room. There were lean-tos on both sides for garage, staircase, storerooms kitchen dining etc. The walls were of burnt brick with lime mortar. The 1^st floor was made with wooden beams and rafters with tiles on them. The roof was the same except with slope and parapet, with a wooden stair to go up.

There was a pond, which was muddy but clean, with all sorts of fish like rohi, bhakuda and small prawns, a well, which had water full of calcium and servant quarters on the periphery. On the SW corner of the plot, now known as College Square the graves of my grandfather, grandmother and their guru. It was the custom that when you become a sanyasi you are to change your name with a surname like saraswati, bharati etc, and they are to be buried and not cremated.

The plot was of 5 acres and plantains, sajana, mango, pears, guavas and what not were planted everywhere. Then there were cowsheds, grain stores on stilts and the whole area was filled with rats and rat holes.

It is said that as a child I spoke very late and when I spoke it was full sentences and not ma, ba. Then from sleeping position to walking without the transition of crawling and I remember nothing about my walking and swimming, which I must have done by 2 years of age.

My father purchased a new Austin sedan 8 HP from Calcutta and brought by road. When it arrived on the porch of the house, I was the first one to see, and there was a table fan in the dickey. The front of the house had a madhumalati creeper and a circular driveway, and the car was standing majestically. This was in ’39 after the promotion of my father as Chief Medical Officer. This was the year when WW II started, and all the gold and silver of the house were buried under floors to avoid enemies detecting them.

I was not going to any school, but there was a resident teacher cum gumasta for my elder brothers, from whom I might have learnt something. There was a book known as trivasi in which oriya, bengali and hindi alphabets were written one bellow the other from which I must have learnt the alphabets. The multiplication tables up to 10 x 10, I seem to remember but not beyond that. English alphabets and the picture books lying around the house was my other learning process. To be brief no formal teacher or classroom was there for lower primary stage.