A trip to Paris... has to wait

'For Paris without the Notre-Dame will not be the same', says the author

My father’s library was an eclectic one, its shelves lined with everything from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (mandatory reading then for army officers) to literary classics that included Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Irving Stone’s Lust for Life. I am not sure he’d read them all — surprisingly, we never talked about books at home —but as a voracious reader, I would devour everything I could lay my hands on even if I did not then fully comprehend Dostoevsky or Camus. Yet, one book I never made headway with was Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, though not for lack of trying. With the stock of books exhausted, I’d poke around his study for anything at all to read, but Hugo’s love saga was heavy going. I never got past the first few pages, even if Paris was forever imprinted on my mind with the book’s lurid cover featuring the eponymous hunchback.

It was a chilly spring day dappled with sunshine some three decades ago that I visited the Notre-Dame. Even though it towered over the skyline, there was something bleak about it. Inside, it was dark and forbidding, and I remember little of its treasures apart from the stained glass. A narrow staircase took us to the cathedral’s parapets where, under the watchful eyes of stone gargoyles, the city, with the Seine threading through it, spread sunnily below. Someone amidst us had a camera, we posed for photographs against its ancient walls, the roll was given for developing in a local studio, and so it was, I returned from Paris clutching a handful of photographs. 
 

A little after, I found myself engaged. My fiancée lived in Calcutta (as it was then), telephone connections were few and far in between, and so, in the absence of email, we wrote in long hand to each other. Photographs were requested, and since I had a batch from the Notre-Dame, these were duly dispatched by registered post. I didn’t know then that these were shared with her family, who decided they were probably faux studio shots. How would a lowly hack all those years ago have earned the foreign exchange to make his way to the city of romance? Maybe I was a show-off (at best), or a charlatan (at worst). It took surreptitious investigation conducted with the help of the slow Indian Postal Service to establish that the Notre-Dame in the background was as real as the person posing in front of it. 

In due course, following our marriage, those photographs came back. “What was Paris like?” my wife asked. It had been a dream visit, and I was happy to share my memories of it with her, promising we would travel there together. “I want you to take pictures of me at the same spot,” she said. I acquiesced, the photographs were put away and never seen again, my wife and I, with or without our children, travelled to places around the world, but Paris never made it to our itinerary.

And now, the Notre-Dame has been scarred by fire, closed for inventorying and repairs, and will probably be shut for years. It has quickened our desire to go to Paris this summer, or perhaps we might wait. For Paris without the Notre-Dame will not be the same — at least (or even) for me.