35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

284
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
from concrete that was more like filo pastry than any building
material. Traffic jams started miles from the downtown area, an
angry honking chaos of lurching rusted steel. The humidity was
malarial, making me feel hot and cold at the same time. It penetrated
to my bones, where it clung like the clammy hand of death.
It must have taken courage to build a new five-star hotel in a city
closer to extinction than any I’ve seen, but the Taj Bengal had opened
anyway a few months before, the only new structure Calcutta had
seen in years. With its soaring five-story lobby and elegantly
ingenious employment of interior space, the place was not just a
marvel, but a refuge from the blasted decaying horror outside. Only
the thought of Lady Sinha’s house made me feel like leaving my
room, with its view over the Maidan and the Victoria Memorial –
the only building the city bothers to maintain at all now. Irony gets
tiresome, ironically.
The address was 7, Lord Sinha Road, which I assumed was what
it had been in 1974. I couldn’t remember. A dingy, narrow side
street untidy with street vendors and mounds of litter, it did not
look familiar as my car pulled off the main road and bumped over
potholes like tank traps. Nor did the festering three-storey edifice
whose drive we turned into, coming to a halt beneath a peeling,
sepulchral monsoon porch. An ancient marble plaque set into stone
the colour of old bloodstains bore the legend The Hon. S. P. Sinha.
Beyond rusted sliding concertina bars and through the massive
door was a gloomy, musty-smelling hall last decorated around the
coronation of King Edward VII. To one side, a smaller door bore a
crude sign announcing the offices of several doctors. An old man in
a crocheted Muslim cap had been watching rain fall into an ochre
puddle out on the porch when I arrived. Now he watched me with
the same diffident interest. ‘Lady Sinha?’ I inquired.
‘Ah! Top floor, top floor,’ he replied enthusiastically. ‘You will take
stairs please.’
Since scaling a drainpipe appeared to be the only alternative, I
gladly took his advice. Huge and hewn from dark oak, these stairs
must once have been grand; now they were forlorn, creaking in
protest at having to work at their age, the banisters sticky with decades
of sickly damp and poisonous mildews. I passed more officelike