MELANCHOLY BEAUTY

Lucknow: Ruins that bear record of the past and well-laid gardens that provide an oasis of calm

- PUJA AWASTHI

For many of us, it is a goosebump-inducing sight to drive by the gun-mounted jeep named after Param Vir Chakra awardee Abdul Hamid. The jeep was used by infantry troops to destroy the enemy’s Patton tanks in the 1965 India-Pakistan war. ‘Vir’, the sobriquet Hamid earned, destroyed eight of these.

It is equally pride-inducing to read the billboard about Lieutenant Premindra Singh Bhagat, the Victoria Cross recipient, named the ‘saviour of Lucknow’ for his brilliant plan to plunge boulder-laden trucks into the Gomti when it flooded in 1971, thus plugging a potential highly destructive breach.

The Lucknow Cantonment, which holds these and many other reminders of the country’s bravest and finest, is so located that no one en route to the airport (from most parts of the city) can miss it. The Lucknow Gazetteer puts the area of this settlement at 6,700 acres. Among its many distinctions is India’s longest racecourse (3.5km) and the Kothi Bibiapur (a country residence built by Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula), which has the country’s first serpentine wooden staircase. There are features it shares with other cities—such as the Top Khana (a place for storing artillery) bazaar and a quaint club named Mohammed Bagh, where little bells are still used to summon servers. It also includes some head scratchers—among them, a Gun Factory area, despite the fact that no such factory existed in the cantonment.