As soon as news that the Victorian Gothic and Art Deco ensemble had won the prestigious UNESCO World Heritage Site tag became a talking point on our timeline a few weeks back, celebratory messages, particularly from heritage buffs and pakka Bombaywallahs began to pour in not just from the city but beyond. One such message was from Jael Silliman, a Jewish scholar and author who was working on a digital archive about Calcutta's (sorry, we prefer the old name) Jews and its long, rich legacy in the city. She was elated and buoyed by the fact that a citizen's movement in Bombay had steered the dossier for 14 long years, and had won.

We had met Silliman last December in her home city, where she gave us a crash course as well as a guided tour of this legacy that we had until then only heard of but had never experienced despite our many visits. The Jews form a minuscule community - only 20 of them live in Calcutta - and yet, like the Parsis here - they have created an indelible impression on the character of the original city. Their contributions are everywhere - across its educational institutions, its infrastructure and streetscapes. But what blew our mind the most was our visit to the three synagogues that stood bang in the middle of some of the oldest parts of the city where we could literally smell the days of the Raj and sort of imagine what life must have been like in the early 1900s.