BRICK BY BRICK

Restoring the Red Bari

- Supriya Newar

Not too far from the revered Kali Mandir in Kalighat, in the heart of South Kolkata, stands a building that has been receiving favour and applause from bloggers, social media influencers, Instagrammers and city journalists, amongst many others. This almost hundred-year-old, three-storied tall building that now goes by the name of The Red Bari or the Red House, after its brick red façade, has acquired a new lease on life as it has been painstakingly restored to its new avatar by city girl, Avantika Jalan.

The thirty-six-year-old's journey of acquiring and restoring the house, which was owned for three generations by the Banerjee family, has not been a straight and easy one. She has traversed the tea gardens of Assam, woven her way through the cotton farms of Madhya Pradesh, waded through grassroots-level projects in Arunachal Pradesh and navigated classrooms at Carleton and Berkeley in the USA before serendipitously landing at The Red Bari in Kalighat.

Born in Assam but schooled in Loreto and CIS in Calcutta, Avantika hails from a family of tea garden owners in Assam. However, due to various family decisions, she saw her father running cotton mills in Madhya Pradesh and moving out of the tea business as she was growing up. A greenhorn back then, Avantika found herself drawn towards rural India and the cultivation of organic cotton in MP, but unfortunately the mills owned by her father became unviable, leading to the eventual shutdown of the business. Interested in the subjects of biology and neurology, she enrolled at Carleton in the USA for her undergrad, where she also teamed up with two of her college chums to float her company, Mana Organics. Her father’s work in the organic space had duly inspired her in that direction. The name was inspired by a Polynesian aboriginal word that symbolises the harmony of nature and man.