Room No 17 was always the Shashi Kapoor suite. There are far fancier hotels than the Fairlawn Hotel in Kolkata with its potted plants and cane chairs, but that’s where Shashi Kapoor stayed whenever he came to the city. In Room 17. That’s where he first fell in love with Jennifer Kendal. That’s where they had their honeymoon in 1958.

Now Shashi Kapoor and Jennifer are both gone. And the Fairlawn Hotel has been sold. With it, another scrap of Kolkata’s cosmopolitan history fades. This hotel was once run by Armenians who had fled their country to escape genocide. Violet Smith inherited it from her mother and lived on the premises, holding court there in full make-up until she died at 93 a few years ago. This is part of Kolkata’s vanishing Armenian story.

Growing up here, I always took it for granted that this was a Bengali city. Satyajit Ray. Rabindranath Tagore. Swami Vivekananda. Their very names made the city puff up with Bengali pride. Bengalis alone among Indians notoriously divide the world into Bengali vs non-Bengali.

Now, as I read about the old Fairlawn Hotel, I realise how much the “non-Bengalis” made Kolkata Calcutta. Pieces of that story linger on in street names and buildings. The Armenian Church. The Scottish Church College. The Greek Orthodox Church. The Parsi Fire Temple. The Sea Ip Chinese church. The Jewish Girls School (where no Jewish girls study any more).

Once the Portuguese outnumbered the English here. The Eurasians outnumbered the Portuguese. There were Malays and Burmese, Marwari traders and Chinese tanners. They changed Kolkata as much as Kolkata changed them. At my Jesuit school, the priests, in their white cassocks, spoke with thick Belgian accents. Close to the school was a leafy cemetery with the graves of the English who came to run India. I had no idea that not too far away was another cemetery just for the Scottish, now run-down, hemmed in by auto body shops, shaded by silk-cotton trees.

The cemetery is being slowly cleaned up now. As I wandered among the graves – some 1,800 of them, the ground still littered with broken crosses and headstones – I could glimpse a disappearing history of the city, of the doctors, jute merchants, engineers and missionaries, from cities like Dundee and Glasgow and Stranraer, who helped build it. They too made their fortunes here and went back as Scottish nabobs grown wealthy on Indian riches. But they also came with their own distinct baggage of history.

When I walked into the Scottish Church College, the principal proudly told me that Subhas Bose aka Netaji was a star student there. He was admitted when no other college would enrol him after he was expelled from Presidency College, for leading a group that assaulted an English professor who’d made racist remarks. The Scottish Church took him in. They were part of the Empire and yet at odds with it. London and Edinburgh had never had an easy relationship.

The trade winds of the Empire brought them all here at one time. The Armenian Holy Church is the oldest church in the city. Arathoon Stephen built the Grand Hotel, now the Oberoi Grand. The oldest Christian grave in the city belongs to an Armenian – Rezabeebeh Sookias – dating all the way back to 1630. Now, barely 100 Armenians remain. There’s nothing Armenian about Armenian Street with its congested wholesale market and warehouses.

Like much else in Kolkata, this is a story of attrition. The Parsee club was once so active, they used to have “heats” for the children to qualify for the final round of the elocution contests. Now they struggle to get enough children to even hold elocution contests. But the 110-year-old Parsi Amateur Dramatic Club still carries on. I found their harmonium and dilruba and props proudly displayed at an exhibit on Parsi history. A lady standing next to it said her husband’s great-grandfather was a man named JF Madan. At one time, they owned almost 150 movie theatres across the country. She remembered a family member was once trying to park on the crowded Madan Street. An angry local shouted, “Hey, is this your grandfather’s street?” He replied, “It is, sort of, actually.”

That was then. Once, there were at least three synagogues, two schools, a burial board, a ward in a hospital with a kosher kitchen and a sports club for the Jews of Kolkata. Now there are not enough Jews to have a service. The gates to the brick-red Maghen David synagogue are blocked by vendors selling plastic combs and bangles. When I went there with Flower Silliman, one of the last handful of elderly Jews left in the city, she scolded them. They made way with a shrug. They knew it was their street now.

Perhaps that’s inevitable. The city belongs to those who live in its present, not those who are nostalgic for its past. But the past that shaped it cannot be denied. It remains in a cheese samosa at the Jewish bakery or the roast pork sold early in the morning on the streets of the Chinese bazaar. And the Shashi Kapoor suite. That too will remain, for now, a reminder of the city’s cosmopolitan history. True, it’s saved as a tourist attraction – but in a world eager to raze down the old to build the new, that still counts for something.

Sandip Roy is the Kolkata-based writer of Don’t Let Him Know

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