Like the hat, walking stick and chair of Sir Walter Scott, the walking stick, hat and pocket watch of Mr. Pereira have passed into local lore in old Pataudi House, Daryaganj.
The chair had a different identity; it did not belong to him but to Master Patterson. But it survives, along with the pocket watch. The sturdy chair was brought by Patterson to the house where he taught maths to three Indo-Armenian brothers. It was later used by Mian Makhmour Akbarabadi, the noted poet who coached the boys in Urdu. Now 87 years old, the chair, which lost its cane work over the decades, is backless, except for the frame, and has a wooden seat cover in its new home at Agra. Even to lift it requires some effort. That's how they made things long ago.
Now about the hat, walking stick and watch. The hat got spoilt because of mildew, the stick broke when someone struck a dog with it, but the pocket watch is in Australia, where the eldest son of the young man to whom it had been presented in 1927 has settled down. Pereira, its original owner, was quite a character. He died suddenly one afternoon and it was rumoured that he had been poisoned. Some blamed his wife, who was 20 years younger, but nothing was proved conclusively. His wife went back to Goa. But before she left she presented her husband's fancied pocket watch to his (and her) favourite Sunday companion. The heirloom still ticks in Melbourne and each second adds to is 110-year history.
Spartan chair
Somewhat less old than the Spartan chair was the dining table in the house of the D'Souzas in Christian Colony, Karol Bagh, when that locality had very few houses, including the cottage of the matriarchal Mrs. Massey, who was probably the first to move in there. Those days the area beyond Jhandewalan was still a sparsely populated one, for part of the Ridge was still intact. The place where now flatted factories have come up was a lake-like hollow in which municipal employees used to release rats from traps lent to Paharganj shopkeepers. Killing the rodents offended the sentiments of devotees of Lord Ganesh, hence the easy expedient of freeing them in open space, from where they slowly but surely returned to the shops.
Now back to the dining table made of Indian rose wood, tough as tough can be. Black, with exquisite legs, it could be used by 12 persons at breakfast, lunch or dinner. But on days when there were no guests the family preferred to eat at a smaller table with drawer in which the kids' stationery was kept. The big table, which once belonged to Sir George John, had been brought from Dehra Dun by a family member who had gone there in 1940 during World War II for temporary service at the camp for POWs, mostly Italians, among whom was the then noted footballer, Multido.
Since the table had to be transported by train and handled roughly by the “coolies”, one of its legs broke. However, it was fixed with some difficulty by a local carpenter who had declared that the table would last for generations. And that's what happened. But after many a memorable occasion till 2004, it had to be reluctantly sold to a marriage tent contractor. Its memory, however, survives in anecdotes, like the one when two tipsy foreign guests, unmindful of the empty dishes, slept the cold night through on its hard surface after a rave New Year's Eve party.
