On the morning of my first CalWalks walk, the streets seemed transformed. As I made my way across the heart of the city I’d been living in for all the two decades of my life, I noted how I’d traversed roughly the same route a mere two months ago. It was a very chaotic day, and I had been hurrying along Dalhousie with a friend to reach the Railway Office on Strand Road. We had been accosted by street hawkers who wanted to sell us their various wares. I’d been very irritated by the crowds and the noise, and for the umpteenth time, overwhelmed by a feeling of great annoyance at the city at large. In all the bustle I remember noticing St. Andrew’s, wondering faintly about its history, admiring its austere beauty…a feeling that passed quickly at the fresh wave of irritation that gripped me at not being able to cross over to the sidewalk of the Writer’s Buildings. We hurried to our destination, leaving these silent markers in our wake, markers that I was to revisit sooner than I could have imagined.
On the morning of the Walk, the city was waking up, and I waited by the Great Eastern Hotel for CalWalks Explorer Manjit and whoever else was going on the walk. Soon enough, Manjit and our guest for the morning, Terri-Ann, joined us. As a trainee Explorer I had no idea how the walks were conducted and what I was supposed to know or talk about to the guests, so I was sent on the walk to observe Manjit at work and absorb whatever I could. Manjit was confident, at ease, cheerful. It was an attitude I had not adopted towards the city in a long time. It is an infectious attitude, and soon I began to relax, listening closely to Manjit expanding on the various histories of the silent markers I had hurried away from a mere two months ago. Terri-Ann was full of an energy I recognized, and longed for. She had the traveller’s spirit, the unique high that comes from being in a new place, discovering people and places and parts of yourself you’ve never seen before. This is the feeling that travelers reacquaint me with, the thrill and joy of being on the road.
We trailed through an incredible array of representative samples of often crumbling, still standing history, and that morning I actually stopped, and looked, and noticed. With Manjit’s involved and intense knowledge of why each marker was important, and the stories that unfolded from each stop, the city began to make sense in a new way, a way I’d not been able to see before. Our last stop was, ironically, a place I had written about six years ago as a student writer for a local newspaper: what many now call a dying paper in a dead city. As I revisited its familiar-strange interiors, with my old and new knowledge of its precious stories buzzing in my mind, my open eyes looked at the painting before me, and another piece of history fell into place. I realized that this dead piece of history had once been touched and created by warm, alive hands, painted with the pleasure and malice of an alive, creative mind. As the crowds and noise receded to the background, I took a moment alone to heed the ghosts of history gathered everywhere around me, whispering from behind old walls and the dust and dirt and alluvial care of an old city that has been home to them for years longer that we can comprehend, whispering in my ears.
– Shreya Sanghani aka Explorer Shreya
shreya@calcuttawalks.com