CityScapes: Convent Road

A flashback to Convent Road in the rain
Deccan Herald

Yesterday once more for all the old timers of Bangalore, who loved Convent Road and have fond memories of of the quiet little street it once was.

Yesterday, by chance, I got stuck in a traffic jam off Richmond Road, on Convent Road – in my childhood neighborhood. A bus blocked traffic. The school was over. Cars, autos, two-wheelers and irate commuters swore. Trapped in this chaos, I sat staring blindly over the steering wheel.

The rain continued and thunder rumbled around overhead. Suddenly an electric crack sharp as a rifle shot split the air. This brought back fond memories and I enjoyed a few moments’ reflection of another day. Of remembered rain before getting on with the rest of the afternoon. As if the bolt of lightening had gone through me and activated some long dormant thread of memory, I saw my early school days. Then, my heart always beat faster when I walked on Convent Road. For an entirely different reason from today’s.

Then it was quiet, a sepulchre-like silence hung heavy in the air on wintry evenings. Convent Road led to the old entrance of the Good Shepherd Convent and the Sacred Hearts nunnery. At the southern end was Richmond Road and at the other, the Italian Guest House (now WQ Judge Press) and Residency Road. Between the kilometer-long distance were the residents mostly teachers Miss Mortimer, Mrs Chowriappa, and Mrs Hanney. Then there were the Kings, the Millets, the Rai’s…All together not more than 40 residents including domestic help. Compare that with the hundreds of people living in flats and vehicles that ply on the road today.

When the huge steel gates of St Antony's School closed, the road became dead. By evening it was taken over by strange eerie sounds, bats and other creatures of the night! The bright orange-yellow glow cast by goose-neck street lamps created a Van Gogh-ish effect. Dogs howled or let out hair-raising deep-guttural sounds. Alsatians in the nunnery, Great Danes in the RMDC house (now the Mysore Tobacco office). To us petrified kids it was like being transported to the bogs of Arthur Conan Doyle!

At that time at the top of Convent Road, Bangalore’s first pizzeria was operating. It was run by our friend, Maxie's mother Mrs D'Costa. It was a drolly called the Italian ‘Guest’ House! In the 40s some of Mussolini's soldiers captured in the WWII were lodged there!

Old timers remember the steamy ambience there. Of pasta cooking - spaghetti and meat-balls, and fettuccini in thick red garlic sauce and other dishes and sauces from southern Italy. “A sense of joie de vivre filled the place,” Father would say. The Italian prisoners were put to work – carpentry, masonry, book-binding, painting the chapel at St Joseph’s and so on. Though far removed from home and loved ones, they continued to celebrate life. They worked hard work, played soccer, and sang. “Funiculli-funiculla, Cia Ciao Bambino, O Sole mio! They’d sing all this and more if you bought them a drink!”

As we listened to Father reminiscing, we’d hear the pitter-patter of rain on the monkey tops, and on the Mayflower tree, or our neighbour’s laughter and music. The tinkling of the ivories was all pervasive. You’d hear Gershwin, Mozart, Chopin, Que sera sera, Game of Love, Jamaican Farewell…. Our neighbour, the reigning teenage beauty queen, Sylvia Stevens at the piano livened up things with Chopsticks or Rock ‘n’ Roll pieces for her Sacred Heart school friends. In the Lopes' house next door we'd hear someone practicing the violin.

On Sunday mornings, the famous bandleader Fred Hitchcock, in the house opposite St Anthony's, would rehearse to play at the Bangalore Club. On the lawns the musicians played Chattanooga Choo Choo!, In the Mood, Magic is the Moonlight, Perfidia, Brazil .... An appreciative audience cheered, and asked for more as the routine rehearsal turned into a rousing high-spirited party. People downed chilled beer, pink gins and energetic old couples jived! An unforgettably Monet-like setting emerged on those sunny afternoons under the dappled shade of trees.

Quite different to the cacophony around me as I sat in the car. As another bolt hit the skies, I was brought rudely to the present, to the syncopation of the wiper blades. Convent Road is not what it used to be. But then didn’t some wit say nostalgia is not what it used to be! Traffic cleared. It was time to move on.