I have asked around and discovered that the local name for the tree is Tamal Bou (bahu) - as if it is a young bride called Tamal. It has obviously got its name from the fact that before chemical dyes came, the red fruits were crushed to extract a natural dye that went into the making of sindoor. As if this was not enough, a little apart from the Tamal Bou is a Gulmohar, now in the last stages of its yearly bloom. These make up a dense green patch that was what the whole area was until the dense brick and mortar that surround it now came along.
When we moved into our apartment a few years ago I tried to band together some of the fellow residents of the development to sign a petition to the municipal corporation requesting that the remaining green be made into a public park. But those who were on the know were reluctant. A prominent land shark and tough of the area, who had bought out many of the original allottees of the plots (it was all government land), was engaged in a court battle over title. Best not to get involved.
The brick and mortar bear testimony to the development and gentrification going on in the wider area along the axis created by the nearby "connector" that links Kolkata's Eastern Metropolitan Bypass to the city proper, which in turn links the city to the airport.
Over the last few years, the connector has become a fabulous food street. First came speciality restaurants like Harvey's that served continental cuisine and then more recently the affordable places. Prominent among them is Thali, a low-cost diner serving wholesome Bengali meals, run by the iconic 6 Ballygunge Place. Also present now is a branch of the well-known mughlai chain Lazeez and most recently Wah Momo that serves more kinds of momo than you can think of. But my favourite remains a well-laid out branch of the legendary Balaram and Radharaman Mullick shop, whose tag line "Mishti Magic Since 1885" says it all. With so much of good food around, it is thoughtful of the city's leading pharmacy chain Frank Ross, too, to have come to the street.
While all this is commerce-driven, development of the state-driven kind has also been moving forward. A long-running project to bring piped drinking water from the Ganga to those along the lower reaches of the bypass has just been completed before the municipal elections. Till now, the areas were served by foul ground water, feared to contain arsenic, brought up by deep tubewells.
But there is a catch. Single homes have got connected to the mains bringing the Ganga water, but not those of us living in gated communities. The water had to be metered and charged, ruled the multilateral agency that funded the project. No, said the chief minister with her well-known aversion to levying user charges or raising railway fares. Eventually, a compromise was reached. The single-home owners would be spared; the better off like us, living behind boundary walls and security at the gates, would have to pay. So now that the elections are over, we are waiting breathlessly for the meters and the water connections.
The elections have also brought along other changes. The open drains in the neighbourhood have got covered and pavements created. Hawkers who have been encroaching where pavements should have been have had to push back a little. Equally dramatic, the connector that was quite bumpy with patchwork repairs is being entirely resurfaced.
But big-ticket change was on the way even before the elections came. The bypass has been selected for a bus rapid transit (BRT) project funded under the Centre's urban renewal programme. So the wide bypass is being widened even more, by cutting down the green cover on either side of it.
When the BRT is up and running, hopefully jams along the bypass will ease as some taking their cars to the information technology hub in adjoining Salt Lake will stop doing so. The air-conditioned buses currently serving the airport are already full of young techies. But I am pessimistic for the long run as I have discovered a new Parkinson's Law: the number of cars rises to fill up the additional road space available.
Thus, it is that the fringe of a notoriously unplanned city is getting developed, one halting step at a time with the usual clash between legitimate stakeholder interests and rent seekers (parks versus land sharks). The sharks will win, the green patch ahead of my verandah will go and the doves who come in twos in the morning to sit on the verandah railing will go elsewhere.
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