The unchanging Delhi Press Club

It had been over 10 years since the waiter and I last set eyes on each other, and both of us had aged considerably. Yet neither had any difficulty in recognising a face from the past. As soon as he spotted me, he broke into a broad smile and came up to exchange pleasantries and take my order.

Those over, he was embarrassed he could not remember my membership number. And when I helped him out, his instant reply was, "It is so rarely that we get a do hazari (2,000) these days." Time, to him, was measured both by the regular calendar and membership numbers. Today's greenhorns at Delhi Press Club carry tags pushing 7,000; those like me are almost at the other end of the numerical spectrum, in the low thousands.

I looked around to find that the halls remained easily recognisable, despite the leftovers of periodic failed attempts at redoing and renovation. What had sadly changed was that the lawn outside was gone, giving way to a paved terrace. Our daughter, now pursuing her MA in Delhi and there with her two flatmates (the wife and I had taken them out for a treat), hit the right nostalgic note when she mused, "This place even smells the same!"

My mood, already set by the smiles of recognition exchanged with more than one ageing waiter, turned mellower at the thought of what the Press Club had meant to our family. It was part of our memory of Delhi, where our children had grown up and been through most of their schooling.

It was Delhi's only club that would have me and which I could afford, and the children looked forward to that one Saturday in a month when we would all bundle into our Maruti 800 and spend the evening letting our hair down in our own different ways.

The children loved it because it was the antithesis of having to stay at home and study. Not only was the place quite noisy, lively and full of people, it was very easy-going, too, and they were free to roam in between mouthfuls.

As for mouthfuls, the best part of the unchanging Press Club is its food. Not only has it retained its good wholesome north Indian character, some of its speciality items have not changed in what must now be more than two decades. The absolutely incomparable bum shami is still there, a souped up version of the more well-known shami kabab.

So is the "egg on toast", pieces the size of cocktail snacks - a misnomer, because it is truly soft, scrambled egg on not toasted but deep-fried bread. In both, north Indian hedonism (the more spicy and fried, the better) defeated a pedigreed lightness of flavour. In an age in which brands have to be refurbished and reinvented to remain alive, here what was simply good food has endured unchanged.

After the dinner was long over, I wondered why it had felt so good to revisit. I could not argue with contemporaries who said the club was tacky. The regulars were not often at the top of their profession. Real media events such as press conferences with the dramatis personae of the public controversy of the day were too few and far between. There were too many of the fixers-at-the-edge-of-PR type around.

What redeemed the place was that, apart from being unpretentious if loud - louder as the evening wore on - it was also a corner where the misfit who had found a bit of space in a corner of journalism came to unwind with a peg or two (closer to four or five, to be honest). The habitues couldn't care less how they dressed, unlike the successful upwardly mobile content managers of today, who are indistinguishable from corporate executives.

Was I romanticising a type who drank too much and read too little and who was thankfully an endangered species, I asked myself. Why were all the egghead celebrities to be seen at the India International Centre and not the Press Club?

Then a scene from the past came back to me. One early evening, the iconic Satyajit Ray heroine Madhabi Mukherjee dropped by with some friends. Slowly heads began to turn. You didn't often see such beauty and grace amid those liquor-soaked tables. A few minutes later, the secretary general of the time came up with a bouquet of flowers, thanked her for gracing the club, the briefest round of applause followed and everyone went back to their own devices, not invading her privacy at all. That's the club at its best, dignified and not going overboard with celebrities.

subirkroy@gmail.com