V. Shoba : ALLAHABAD.
Under the vaulted ceiling of the Public Library, with sunlight filtering into the neo-Gothic hall through stained glass windows, I carefully turn the crumbling pages of The Pioneer in search of the appearance in the city of Samuel L. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. Sure enough, a notice enthuses about the first “at home” lecture by “the greatest humorist of the age, author of The Innocents Abroad” on February 3, 1896. A ticket to the Monday evening talk at the Railway Theatre cost a princely Rs 2 or Rs 4, and Twain, who was on an inter-continental spin to settle his debts, lectured to a full house. A review that appeared in the daily two days later was congratulatory: “The charm of his delivery is so delightful that no one who hears him could wish to have been content with a report.”
The whereabouts of the hall are lost in time. Located near the railway station, it now goes by the name of Coral Club. The logo of the East Indian Railway adorns the slightly decrepit portico where, a century ago, Englishmen disembarked from their private carriages driven by white-turbaned locals. “The vicinity of a lecture-hall looks like a snowstorm—and makes the lecturer feel like an opera,” Twain wrote in Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Nothing could have prepared me for the ‘renovation work’—the doors are painted a greasy blue and the pillars sport white ceramic tiles. Railway employees lounge on plastic chairs, playing cards. They admit, “The wood flooring was auctioned off three-four years back.” Without much ado, I am shown around: a primary school occupies one wing of the building; rainwater has seeped into the indoor swimming pool. Coral Club General Secretary J.P. Yadav says, “In British times, the hall was off-bounds to Indians. Now we let it out for marriages at a daily rent of Rs 5,000.”
On my way back to the hotel in Civil Lines—the part of the city established by the English after the sepoy mutiny of 1857—workers are pulling down the last vestiges of what must have been a grand old colonial dwelling. Clay tiles that kept the sahibs cool in the summer months lie in a heap; a lone litchi tree clings to life amid the rubble; the boundaries that dissect the grounds into rude little plots mark the end of an era of “noble distances”. Only a handful...
