The death of a playing field

ONE of my nicest early memories is of a large green playing field at the back of our ancestral home in Kolkata’s middle-class Bhawanipur neighbourhood. It made up the rear of the Calcutta Police hospital campus whose main buildings were quite far away, and so you got a sense of space.

From the upper-floor veranda, I would see children from the single-storeyed quarters of the Class-IV hospital staff play through the day, weather permitting. They apparently didn’t go to school. My friends and I joined them at play later in the afternoon.

Absolutely the nicest part of the year was the city’s mild winter when the green space played host to a seven-a-side football tournament of high school boys in colourful jerseys. The greatest day was of the final.

The game was a great one, no doubt, but the most dazzling part of the show was the Calcutta police band — like a typical British massed band complete with pipers, trumpeters and Gurkhas — giving a display during the interval and after the prize distribution function.

Sadly, as I grew up, I lost touch with my beloved playing field. My father’s transferrable job, and my own thereafter, took me all over the country. When I returned to our ancestral home after retirement, it was a shock to confront the decline in the playing field. It was half overgrown with weeds and only little bits of it were clear for children to play in. The football tournament too was gone.

Thereafter came Covid-19 and the hospital decided to locate an oxygen plant there. That meant building a brick-and-mortar foundation and an industrial structure atop. I felt sad that a part of my childhood was gone but reasoned that the oxygen plant was necessary to save lives.

But Covid was gone in a couple of years, and one day, I found the hospital people dismantling the oxygen plant. I hoped the playing field would be restored, but it was an idle dream.

Weeds and wild plants took over, making it a breeding ground for all kinds of insects, including mosquitoes. The speciality of the house earlier had been its airiness and now windows had to be shut at sundown to keep the mosquitoes out. The only redeeming feature was that it was still an open space which let the morning sun in early.

But even that was not to be. On my last couple of visits, I noticed a huge amount of construction activity. A massive foundation was being laid for what was certain to be a multi-storeyed structure. The playing field had died long ago. Now, it was being buried.