An alien city, coping with DTC buses and Dilliwallas, lecherous men, unbearable heat, college life, snooty local class mates, trying out things which you are not supposed to, Chacha’s chole bhature for lunch, evening walks in Gulabi Bagh, taking turns to cook dinner, the horror of fat aunties who don’t bother to cover up, the life long bonds that were formed and so much more! All those wonderful memories are rushing back to me as I contemplate to write about Kamrupa Hostel as one of its first three residents. Yes, Panchalee Thakur, Sabina Zeenat and yours truly were the first three hostellers of Kamrupa Hostel in Delhi. For the uninitiated, it’s a hostel for girl students from Assam started in 1991 in Delhi. I am not aware if similar hostel facilities are provided to the girls by the other State Governments of India in Delhi.
The time frame - summer of 1990. A small town girl from Assam lands up in Delhi like countless others of her ilk to pursue her higher studies. She is all of 18 years but with so much dreams and aspirations in her heart, just like so many others like her. Unfortunately for her, when she arrives here, there’s no place for her to stay. The college and hostel admissions in Delhi University (DU) are already over when HSSLC results were declared in Assam back then. As it is, hostel seats are quite limited in DU. So where do all the hapless boys and girls from Assam who aspire to study in Delhi University go? Especially the girls...? After all, Delhi was never a safe city for women and it still isn’t.
Fortunately for me, I managed to get admission in both Lady Shri Ram College and Miranda House but chose to opt for Miranda because of the charms of North Campus attached to it as an added bonus. However, the options for accommodations in and around North Campus in Delhi University were either PG or some seedy girls’ hostels where the sole purpose of the landlords was and still is to fleece the girls in return for some very basic amenities. The Assam House dormitory could not be a permanent solution as it was meant only for transit. Panchalee, Sabina and I, all of us from Miranda House, got together out of sheer necessity for a roof over our head and found ourselves residence in a nearby locality called Gulabi Bagh, a few kms away from our college. Our ‘exclusive’ pad was a single room with a tiny kitchenette and a tiny bathroom confined within the same space. Yet, our landlady was not happy with just three girls in that room and wanted to earn some more money with the addition of one more bed and one more girl in it. Fortunately for us, along came a non-Assamese saviour in the form of Anuja Pande from Meerut, a class-mate of mine, who happily joined us. We were now a foursome and how!
The memories of that summer are still so fresh. We cooked, learnt quick and simple recipes from our local guardian’s families, cleaned, washed, chatted non-stop, listened to music and cheated oh-so-gloriously when our turns for cooking came! We did everything else but study!!! It almost seemed that we had forgotten the original purpose for which our parents had sent us to Delhi. Meanwhile, in the University and in all of Delhi it was utter mayhem as riots and protests against the Mandal Commission’s Recommendations broke out. We didn’t have classes and even Miranda House canteen food as an option for lunch had to be ruled out. That meant even more cooking to feed ourselves! Gosh! Good food, whenever and wherever available, cooked by somebody else became highlights of our life. Sabina’s uncle’s place on top of Assam Emporium in Connaught Place was a haven of such defining moments!
The need for a hostel for the girls was felt more than ever. How we longed not to worry about where the next meal was coming from, not to worry about cooking and cleaning! Mamoni Baideu (Dr. Indira Goswami) taught me Assamese (as MIL) which was a subsidiary subject during my 1st year of graduation. She was aware of our predicament. In fact, not just us but any Assamese student anywhere in Delhi would go to her when faced with a problem. She had earlier informed us that a girls’ hostel was being proposed by the Govt. of Assam in Delhi especially for the girl students. It was literally like a silver lining on some very dark clouds in our life. She had initiated the proposal and kept pushing for it with the powers that be. And did we stop pestering her for updates on the same? NO! The Resident Commissioner of Assam Bhawan at that time was Mr. Agya Pal Singh who officially coordinated for the same with the Govt. of Assam. We got to know that the proposal had got the approval and the house hunt for a suitable place had begun. We were delighted but kept hoping that it will be located in North Campus and not in South Campus as all of us were students in the North Campus.
Summer had turned to winter. Our first winter in Delhi and what a winter! We were just not prepared for the bitterness of Delhi cold. But along came the long-awaited good news. At last! A house had been found that could accommodate up to 30 girls, located in Janakpuri in West Delhi; of all the places! It was nowhere near North Campus or even South for that matter. Disheartened and full of apprehensions about moving to a new locality in Delhi, we prepared to bid adieu to our pad in Gulabi Bagh and our dear friend Anuja. Oh! How we wished we could take her along with us...!
We moved lock, stock and barrel to Kamrupa Hostel at B-2/3, Janakpuri in the first week of January ’91 and thus became the first three residents of it. The name Kamrupa was Mamoni Baideu’s idea too. It looked like any other regular Delhi house with 2 or 3 bedrooms and a big hall in each floor. We had the basement, ground and first floor. It was a rented property and the house belonged to Anand Uncle whose family lived on the top floor. There was a school bang opposite our hostel called Happy Model School. Aah! Happy memories of the innumerable photo shoots on its lawns. And the B 1 Block Market of Janakpuri was located right next door for everything we ever required; from a tailor to photo studio, chemist, post office, cobbler, banks, chaatwala etc.
Anand Uncle had hastily done everything he could conceive of to turn his house into a ‘girls’ hostel’. Make-shift additional bathrooms were one such element. Some decent furniture to furnish the hostel was the other. Each girl had a proper box bed with a head rest (not just a charpai which we were so used to in our pad earlier), a very distinctive looking study table and one half of a cupboard to keep her princely belongings.
The most important bit of information for us was that we also had a cook, Kanak and his assistant, Robin. Kanak was a simpleton and Robin was the smart aleck and both were from Nalbari, if I am not mistaken. Boy, we felt like princesses amidst such luxury. Just the three of us rolling around in such a big house and we had two ‘butlers’ at our service 24x7 to order around and dictate what we felt like having for breakfast, lunch or dinner. The Govt. of Assam was paying their salaries, the rent of the house etc. Our fees were yet to be formalized. We were on top of the world; and we could finally start focusing on our studies as our first year final exams were fast approaching.
We even had a formal inauguration of the hostel with all the right ingredients in place. Marigold garlands, tent, hired potted plants, blotchy carpets, red ribbon and a pair of a scissor (which I had kept as a souvenir for quite some time), Assamese dignitaries in Delhi, Mamoni Baideu, officials of Assam Bhawan, Govt. of Assam, followed by long speeches and interesting refreshments at the end of it all! Late D D Thakur, who was the Governor of Assam at that time, was the Chief Guest who came to do the necessary needful. We were dressed in our best mekhela chador and felt important. There was a sprinkling of press as well. After all, the word had to be spread in Assam. It was an important bit of news for all those parents and their daughters who aspired to come to Delhi for their higher studies.
House problem was solved for sure and we felt secure for the next two and a half years of our graduation. But no self-respecting girls’ hostel could be called a hostel without a warden. And where were we going to get a warden from on such short notice? Being always the enterprising self that I am, it struck me why not Panchalee’s Pehi (paternal aunt) Dr. Taruna Thakur? She is a noted educationist and a social worker from Jorhat and being a spinster in her fifties in those days, she fitted the bill perfectly of a warden. Besides, Pehi and Panchalee who are very fond of each other would get to be together. It was a win-win situation for all. So after about two weeks of us moving into Kamrupa hostel, Pehi arrived.
In the first five/six months of Kamrupa’s existence we had a few girls trickling in slowly. I had two new roommates Sabita Tamuli and Jhimli (Dipannita Choudhury). Eventually, Moka joined too as an additional hostel Staff to assist Kanak and Robin. But all the remaining seats got filled up promptly in the next summer as the new session began in DU. Kamrupa had come a full circle and was buzzing with girls, laughter, music, intense midnight discussions on boy friends, silly arguments, party plans and birthday bashes, shopping plans, you name it.
Life in Kamrupa was like life in any other hostel except that here we had a more homogenous group. We had it all, fun and the bickerings outside the bathrooms in the mornings, cursing those girls who would keep the landline (we just had one phone line) occupied for hours while they chatted with their boy friends in hushed tones (us being the pre-cell phone generation who still wrote letters home and waited for phone calls at designated hours!), aloo pitika, masor jhol and khaar for lunch after we got back from college etc. If Kanak’s cooking went beyond the tolerable level, we even took matters literally into our own hands and cook! The bottom line was that we were all from Assam, spoke in our mother-tongue and it felt like home away from home.
A few other things must be mentioned here. We had a mini bus which was part of the hostel deal with Anand Uncle to ease off our commuting burden. It used to take us to and fro North Campus only, as the maximum numbers of students were all students of various DU colleges in North Campus. As I look back, I feel it was a very lopsided arrangement as there were other students pursuing various other courses as well and had to commute to different parts of Delhi but they had to fend for themselves. I still remember the picnic organized by our juniors to Kalindi Kunj and what a blast it was! Whether it was ASAD’s freshers’ party at Assam Bhawan, picnic or college, the bus was always there for us. Anand Uncle’s US returned elder son Raju’s wedding was another highlight of our stay for a very simple reason. We had tons of good Punjabi food to dig in. My contemporaries would perhaps even remember the cases of thefts that occurred. There was a kleptomaniac as well amongst us! In between Pehi (Dr. Taruna Thakur) left and we had a new hostel warden Bijumoni Bora.
So here’s to Panchalee, Sabina, Jhimli, Sabita, Nini, Vaijayanti, Sumita, Bhaswati, Gargi, Tina, Romila, Gitanjali, Ranjana, Jyotisikha, Jenny, Shibani, Sangeeta Goswami and Sangeeta Sinha, Rinku, Maitreyee, Poonum, Atreyee, Indrani Dasgupta, Usha and so many more...! This one is for all of you out there who I am quite sure, still reminisce about Kamrupa Hostel fondly! As do I...!
[P.S.- I left Kamrupa in 1993 on completion of my graduation and two years later, Kamrupa Hostel shifted out of Janakpuri to its new location in Shakti Nagar near North Campus, where it still continues, albeit as a private venture now.]
Barnali Das, New Delhi
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