This bustling city of about 5 million people has tiny pockets that are insulated not just from the noise but also time, the South Park Street Cemetery being one of them.
While Muslim women raise angry slogans against the new citizenship law at the nearby Park Circus Maidan, here young lovers and curious students — cut off from the chants of the protesters — stroll 200 years back in time, sometimes admiring the monuments and sometimes seeking privacy in their shadows.
The cemetery could well belong to 18th-century London, but inscriptions on certain tombstones nudge you to the fact that this is Kolkata, because those who lie buried under them are a part of Indian history: Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Sir William Jones, Col. Robert Kyd, Lt. Col. Colin Mackenzie, Maj. Gen. Charles Stuart and so forth.
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Most lovers visiting the cemetery are perhaps oblivious to the love story behind one of the graves — that of Rose Whitworth Aylmer. The story contributed to English literature in more ways than one. Rose was only 17 when, in 1797, she happened to meet poet-writer Walter Savage Landor, then 22, in Wales. Together they would take long walks on the hills. Rose’s family, not very happy with this budding relationship, packed her off to stay with an aunt in Calcutta. She died in 1800, almost immediately after arrival in India, at the age of 20.
Landor went on to write a poem in her memory, Rose Aylmer — one of his best known works — and the lines were subsequently inscribed on the gravestone:
‘Ah, what avails the sceptred race,
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Ah, what the form divine!
What, every virtue, every grace!
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
May weep but never see
A night of memories and sighs
I consecrate to thee.’
Landor earned critical acclaim but not the public fame he deserved, but he had friends who went on to become household names. One of them was Robert Browning, who was deeply influenced by Landor, and another was Charles Dickens, who named his second son after Landor in honour of their friendship.
And by a strange coincidence, the mortal remains of that son of Dickens — Walter Landor Dickens — today lie buried in the same cemetery. They were shifted here from the Bhawanipore cemetery in 1987.
The cemetery was opened in 1767 and closed in 1790, only to be reopened again and it remained in use until the 1830s. It is run by the Christian Burial Board but its caretaker is a Hindu — Bijay Singh from Odisha, who inherited the job from his father — and people responsible for its upkeep are Muslims.
“Do you have any ghost stories?”
‘Ghosts?’ Mr. Singh laughs. “200 years is a long time for the ghosts to be loitering around. By now those buried here would have been reborn several times.”