The 4th Floor housed the engine, as well as, the nuts and bolts of J. Thomas & Co. Executives of varying seniority, sat in office rooms that indicated the pecking order.

Those who have worked in a Boxwalla company know how important seniority is!

The senior-most on the floor was Govind Jauhar (GKJ) who shared a room with Peter Naharwar, Prafull D. Goradia (PDG) and Norman Wilson were in another, while Harish Parekh (HMP), and Vijay Dudeja sat in a separate room. Any new guy joining the company was thrown in here to learn the ropes from the senior executives.

Prodosh K. Sen (PKS) and Ranabir Sen were on the 5th Floor next to the large Tea Tasting Room. Pradosh oversaw the sampling work in the warehouses and Ranabir had joined a month before me and had started his training at the ‘warehouses’ under Pradosh.

GKJ took me on a tour of the office. Introductions over, he deposited me in a chair next to the room’s air conditioner which was fixed below the window. Overwhelmed as I was I dared not move to another chair and in a couple of hours ended up with a frozen bum.

Fortunately, it was time for lunch. HMP invited me to join him. The Executive Lunch Room was adjacent to the Board Room on the 3rd Floor. Lunch was normally a 3 course affair, with place settings, nice crockery and cutlery. The founders would have turned in their graves if they saw people eating out of paper plates, with plastic forks and knives!! JT believed in maintaining traditions.

We all wore jackets and ties in the lunch room but the atmosphere was light and friendly and we were all on first name basis but kept a power distance from the Directors and seniors.

It was good training ground for table manners and proper use of cutlery and other tableware. The butlers wore starched white uniforms and a pugaree (turban). The menu favoured Indianized western food which was served individually, course by course. It was of a high standard but if we got bored with it we could ask one of the butlers to check out what was being served in the ‘staff’ dining room and get something from there – usually a nice dish of fish served Bengali style. 

I made friends with a butler named Suri. He would come and whisper if there was something interesting being served elsewhere.  

There was always Fruit at the end. I particularly remember Langda Mangoes and Lychees, when these were in season. They were to die for!  

After lunch we went back to our rooms but this time I made sure that I stayed far away from the air-conditioner! 

The office timings were 9 to 5. At 5:15 I glanced at my watch – no one had stirred. Every 15 minutes I would look around but no one showed any signs of leaving. At 6:30 pm someone looked out of the window and announced, “Burra Sahib is leaving!” The room came alive and everyone packed up to go. I learned a valuable lesson – you don’t leave till the Boss-man leaves! This is an army tradition which was practiced by companies that dated back to the Raj.  

Since I was new to Calcutta, I thought it was best to live in a central place, not far from the office at 11 R. N. Mukherjee Road. I was fortunate to find a room at the Central YMCA on Chowringhee Road, from where many prominent men in the city had started life.

Calcutta is a beguiling City. The East India Company had started here and so trade, education, culture (western) flourished here. Warren Hastings’ house, next door to the JT office, later became the office of Carritt Moran & Co., another Tea Broking company. 

Calcuttans prided themselves of their British heritage. An ‘Anglophile’, lives by the “trappings of British style and manners” and people of my generation took to it like duck to water once they joined a Boxwalla company. It took a couple of generations to weed that out!

Park Street was close to the YMCA. In a half mile radius there was an incredible number of restaurants and bars. Of these the more noteworthy ones were Trincas, Blue Fox, Sky Room, Moulin Rouge and Mocambo. Waldorf was an upmarket Chinese restaurant, a favourite with the mercantile crowd for lunch on Saturdays. Trincas was the fun place, Blue Fox was a pricey Night Club with a well known crooner, Sky Room had the best Western food I had eaten in India.

The Boxwalla seldom frequented restaurants as social life revolved around the many Clubs in the City. Food and liquor were much cheaper and we got to rub shoulders with our ‘type’ of people. Before anyone asked you your name they would ask, “Who are you with?”. If you said you were with Jardine Henderson, or James Finlay, or Gillanders Arbuthnot or J. Thomas and such, the next question would be Hello, what’s your name? Mine is Dev or whatever. I am with MacNeil & Barry!

If you said you were with Baburam & Co or some low-jat sounding name, he would say, Hello! And move on!!  I think you get my drift…

Calcutta did boast of some amazing Clubs, notable among them were the Bengal Club, The Calcutta Club, The Royal Golf Club, Tollygunge Club and so on.

When I visit Calcutta even now I try and stay a couple of nights at the Bengal Club! We should never fully come out of our fantasy world, should we?! 

In my next blog I will tell you what my early days at JT were like. 

I soon learned that my training had been put of fast-track. I was to get readied to be sent to Cochin where the Company had recently opened a branch office.

T.C. Satyanath (TCS) and John Jacques were already there trying to set up a Tea Broking operation amidst fierce competition from the existing Auctioneers!