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A flashback to Convent Road in the rain
Oct 11, 2004
Yesterday once more for all the old timers of Bangalore, who loved Convent Road and have fond memories 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.
The Thieves of Bagdad
Oct 3, 2004
Iraq has long been home to great ancient civilisations such as Mesopotamia, Sumer, Babylon and Persia - each of which boasted of a highly developed urban sophistication. A way of life that was ahead of its contemporary world. “It’s the cradle of civilisation,” affirms Prof. McGuire Gibson, head of Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Chicago, “It’s the place where we get the first cities, the first writing, the first thoughts about what’s man’s relationship to God. It’s the first sort of ideas about death. It’s the first recorded literature that we have.”
And yet this unique land though bounded by the two great rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, has for centuries been vulnerable to attacks and untold wrath of marauders. Periodic invasions and depredation by barbaric elements for more than 5,000 years have led to waste many of mankind’s legacies of monuments, sites, antiquities, and cultural institutions. What remains of this heritage are some historical fortress cities such as the stunning Haatra of the Parthian Empire, artifacts, museums, monuments and about 100,000 archeological digs including the spectacular one in the 1933-34 expedition at Khorsabad where King Sargon II sculptures and the Human-headed Winged Bull were excavated. The latter can be seen, now restored, at the Oriental Museum, Chicago.
Excavations in the 1950s resulted in the discovery of at least twelve further temples and since then restoration work has been underway to preserve these priceless structures. Most structures are built in an eclectic mix of Assyrian, Hellenistic, Parthian and Roman styles and date back to between the first century BC and the second century AD. The ruins of these cities are spread across much of present day Iraq. UNESCO has made a fervent appeal for safeguarding this cultural heritage. The difficult task of making an elaborate inventory of architectural and urban heritage is still on in that ill-fated land.
This appeal assumes significance in the light of the happenings in the area. The Iraqi heritage site has been seriously threatened by the recent spate of wars in the region - particularly with the land and aerial forces using weaponry that can do incalculable damage. “In the 1991 Gulf War, the massive 4,000-year-old temple pyramid Ziggurat at Ur in southern Iraq, was hit by at least 400 shells that took out ‘big chunks’ from the structure,” points out Prof Gibson.
Besides destruction, a war-ravaged country is also an easy target for art foragers and thieves - both from inside and outside. In this situation, priceless pieces from the nation’s vaults and museums are endangered. One widely reported story (which this writer happened to come across while in the US) from the present Iraq conflict relates to the large scale plunder of the country’s timeless cultural assets. It began almost immediately following the war.
While the shock and awe numbed the citizens around the world, in Iraq unscrupulous elements were pre-occupied with other activities. Many escaped into the night with wealth lifted from banks, palaces and old mansions, museums and universities, ancient temples and tombs and cemeteries. With these raids went some of the country’s - and the world’s - most precious treasures.
Security at Iraq’s exit points, rather than encountering people on the wanted list, had to contend with an unfamiliar problem: dealing with large hauls of cargo - all manner of strange artifacts and such. But obviously precious items. The item that everyone at the post could immediately tell, of course, was the glittering metal. In bars. Plenty of them.
With the war at its peak, such cargo became familiar at checkpoints such as those near Kirkuk, Iraq - close to the Syrian border. As familiar to the soldiers as the sounds of the night. Gunfire in the distance. Aircraft droning. And the straining sounds of old overloaded two-ton Mercedes trucks wheezing their way up the bomb-cratered hilly road.
As per media reports, on the midnight of June 24, 2003, soldiers at the post stopped a Merc. It was one of the many carrying bullion: a cache of 4,100 gold ingots. Closer examination revealed that the gold was hurriedly melted in any old way. Its value, later estimated by experts, was put at anywhere between $700 million to 1billion. There were other items in the catch - age-old artifacts and other antiques whose value could not be as easily ascertained.
When news of this precious cargo moving out of the country spread, it spawned a host of conflicting rumours. More than any other item, the gold caches let loose much speculation. For, it was well known that Iraq had little or no major gold reserves. In wartime Baghdad not many talked of such matters. Circumstances not too difficult to understand considering the reality on the ground.
So where did the bullion come from and where was it headed? Could this loot come from another loot in the 1980s, during the Iraq-Iran war? Are these caches part of that seized in Kuwait during the Iraqi invasion? Was this gold brought in to ‘buy’out Iraqi military officers? Are these gold ingots put together by smelting age-old artifacts and jewellry from museum collections? The answer lies somewhere between all these possibilities and more.
Consider the gold put together during the Baath party’s collection drive. Prior to the coalition attack, the Baathists starved of funds and aid for years because of sanctions, went public appealing to citizens to give generously for homeland defense. Appeals that were made regularly on TV amidst patriotic songs. The spokespersons urged citizens to save the country, and contribute generously to the defense effort.
Help poured in. Cash, a variety of goods including expensive Persian carpets, antiques, gems and jewellry were given to the soldiers who went home to home making the collection.
People on the streets parted with their watches, bracelets, necklaces and such personal effects. The reluctant givers were persuaded by harsher measures.
The collections were taken away in trucks to undisclosed destinations. The gold items - jewellry, utensils and artifacts - were hastily melted and made into ingots at secret smelters in the countryside.
When the drivers of the gold trucks do talk, perhaps it will give some clues to this tantalizing mystery. Perhaps we will then know how many trucks got away for every one seized. For the moment, the gold seized is being flown to Kuwait for safekeeping. Eventually it is planned to return the ingots when normalcy returns to Iraq.
As the truth behind the gold trucks is awaited, one can’t help wondering how many more, irreplaceable assets of one of our earliest civilisations, will be lost forever.
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