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Phanindra Nath Seth, who was attempting to run a lozenge factory after his years in prison, found it difficult to make ends meet, and Jayanti watched the corpses pile up on the streets, as the hoarse pleas outside their gates went from begging for rice to begging for just the “ phyan” (starch). When the famine raged through Calcutta in the summer of 1943, Jayanti’s family, despite their desire to help those less fortunate, were unable to do much for the victims who trailed in from the outskirts. She was most excited to visit the United Nations Headquarters (left) in New York Jayanti took her first flight in the 1980s to see her daughter in America and then travel around the United States for a bit. Moments later the girls found themselves outside the schoolhouse as an earthquake alert was announced. When her desk wobbled and her handwriting turned into a scrawl, she picked a fight with the girl next to her, blaming her for deliberately upsetting the desk. Jayanti recalls the 1934 earthquake (which had devastating repercussions in Nepal and Bihar) causing a mere tremor when she was in school. Years later, her father’s experience with building crude guns would come in handy during The Great Calcutta Killings of 1946, when their house was under attack and he was able to keep the mob away by shooting from the second-floor window. “Being anti-government was not, in those days, a matter of pride,” she says, matter-of-factly. In fact, his reputation would prevent her from gaining admission into Bethune Collegiate School (near Hedua) until class six, despite her father applying every year. Jayanti would come to know only when she was older that her father’s role as a freedom fighter and his subsequent imprisonment would lead other members of the family to ostracise them. He was a serious khadi-clad member of the Swadeshi movement and later became the secretary of the Indian Decimal Society (Bharatiya Dashamik Samiti) which was led by Hiralal Roy, a pioneering professor of engineering at Jadavpur University.
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Jayanti’s father, Phanindra Nath Seth, had been involved in the freedom struggle since the first partition of Bengal in 1905. While the first eight years of her life in the North Calcutta house, with its lavish meals of loochi in the morning and maachher jhol in the afternoon, might have been the happiest, the years to follow would be marked with adventure and excitement. It was thrilling to be out on Park Street at night.' I saw Usha Uthup then, she was a teenager. After I got married, my brother-in-law took us out to Trincas one night. Jayanti Das sitting down to a lunch of dal-bhaat-lau-chingri, makes a quip about how simple home food can be found at high-end restaurants these days. It became the trigger for her father, uncle and widowed aunt to move to a smaller house in Maniktala when she was eight years old. Jayanti also remembers her grandmother as a fierce matriarch who was dead against her son (Jayanti’s uncle) marrying a Brahmo girl. He went on to study law but gave it up because it involved having to lie too much,” she says, with a chuckle. “My grandfather, Rajendranath Seth, was one of the first four to graduate with a Masters in English from Calcutta University. Her formative years are marked by the memory of joyrides in a horse-and-carriage which her uncle, a homoeopath, would use for house calls, as well as simply being wrapped in the warmth of various aunts and uncles. She remembers some of the happiest years of her life playing out in that house, even though she lost her mother to typhoid when she was only a three-month-old baby. Her name wasn’t always Jayanti it was Sita at the time of her birth, changed to Kamala later and only became Jayanti when she was ready to go to school. It was a quintessential joint family where at least 30 people lived under the same roof.
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Jayanti Das née Seth was born on in a rambling old home in North Calcutta, near Minerva Theatre. She’s 94 years old but her vibrance suggests an elephantine memory of days long gone. The high ceilings, window ventilators and the classic laal mati of the spacious rooms inside, are harbingers of the stories she’s about to narrate to me. The ornate balustrade and dusty red steps leading up to Jayanti Das’s Park Circus apartment are relics of a bygone era. You have to exercise kindness every day.' Photos: Ramona Sen But she also remembers the lessons she learnt along the way and the philosophies she’s left with – 'It’s not enough to just be born human. Jayanti Das in her house on Circus Avenue.