Howrah

There was a town, a city and a district all by the same name. Howrah. I was never sure whether I lived in the city or the town of Howrah. Or whether the city was in the town or the town in the city. My Dad didn’t know either, neither did my grandmother. She had lived her maiden life in the very happening high brow hub of Calcutta- the College Street- and although she had spent more than 63 years now in the rather non-happening factory splattered dingy Howrah, she always kind of lived and identified with the place where she had spent the first 22 years of her life. She wasn’t really bothered or keen about anything related to Howrah. On my way to tuitions when I sped along at full speed on my bicycle on the drainage canal road that skirted the Stadium, I wondered whether this was where the town and the city of Howrah ended and the rest of the district began. Here you could see stray isolated huts made of finely sliced bamboo tiles that sold tea and sweets and small random knickknacks. There were huge water pipes lying on one side of the road where old men and little children, young mothers and middle aged women gathered during the happy noisy hour of fading afternoons.

I always kind of thought that once our streets would be smooth and clean, all our problems would be solved. Foreign countries, as we thought of the developed world, had great roads. All Hollywood films we saw in the VCR at my brother’s place bore testimony to that. Our streets were what we named as Uday Shankar roads. Angular bricks and granite chips stuck out all over them. The cycle rickshaws which were the chief means of transport in the myriad of narrow streets and lanes and bylanes, would jerk up and down and down and up and make the ceaseless ghatang ghatang noise as we clutched onto the bamboo overhead cover and prepared our bodies for the everlasting unpredictable jerks.

The first time I remember our lane was repaired was soon after I had my first bad fall that left a circular dark patch on my knee for the next 20 years or so. Since then I had dreaded dettol whenever I had a cut. I think I was in kindergarten then and thought jumping on the road back home from school was as good a way of coming home as walking. That same road would see the next repair some decade or so later. We would be insanely happy when a road would be repaired. And then someone would take a telephone line, the telephone company guys would come and dig up a narrow stretch of the road to put in the underground cable and leave after roughly filling up the ditch. They weren’t the municipality, so they had no truck to hold with repairing roads after they messed it up. And then there would come the months of the dark, cloudy, mysterious and wet monsoons and the road would be in a mess ever since.  I felt very attracted to the hot molten charred smelling black tar in huge drums that were kept on roadsides with a fire underneath when the roads were made. If your feet got stuck on a little bit of hot tar you would pull and pull and it wouldn’t come off. There was a little bit of me that wished to climb on the gigantic Roller and drive it on the road. The man sat so contentedly so high up and could roll over and smoothen whole stretches of the ECG like roads.

I couldn’t think what problems would remain in our world once all roads all over the place felt grey black and newly made with the pressed out soot and tar and small chips making the uneven lines next to the cemented drains. I never thought drains looked ugly or that we needed to do away with them and make them underground like in Calcutta. The ducks, the crows and the dogs always drank water there and you could float paper boats when the water rushed down the gutters and watch till they disappeared. The bylane that went past our house into the interior of the para was what we called kacha or raw- meaning it was never made. It was probably made at some prehistoric time but all the stone chips and tar and long been buried under the earth. It was a muddy one and grass grew on both sides and on holidays when I lay stretched across the bed on our first floor room and looked out of the window, I could see little yellow butterflies fluttering on the grass. The skies would be all of light blue with floating white clouds and the sunshine would be leisurely and comfortably happy. The house next door to us was one storeyed, so there was nothing to block the view from my window. I tossed and turned and hugged the side pillow and looked out at the expanse of sky blue. They had a tall palm tree whose hard dry leaves rustled to make the swishing sound whenever there was a little breeze. If I craned my neck I could see the lower edge of the pointed leaves. Most other houses in our by lane had a coconut tree. E had a wavy neem tree in the back garden outside this window. And a guava tree. Sometimes we had banana trees there too. The neem tree spread its branches far and wide till you could touch them just outside the window. I would break off little branches and lightly draw them over my body when I was recovering from chicken pox in class 2. And then one day they wanted to make our back garden into a garage for the second hand ambassador we had bought and chopped off the neem tree. I had cried myself hoarse and my Dad actually thought of chipping off the wall to make room for the car and spare the tree. But everyone else said that would weaken the house and so the tree was cut. I cursed and cursed the white car. Maybe, the curse had some effect. The car was with us only for a few years and then we had to sell it off. By then I was kind of fond of it. We called it Badalbabu, because it rained so heavily the day we bought it. It was an old petrol model of the WME series.

(contd...)

The story of a story in the making

This could be the story of a story in the making. That is if the other story ever got made. The story of the adventures of Blackboots. And tagging along would be the story of Pothead. If Blackboots is never made, neither will Pothead be. And there are chances that Blackboots will exist and Pothead still might not. But that is another story.

The trouble starts at the start. Because, where exactly does it start? And anyway it always seems to get so boring after about 3 paragraphs dedicated to flashback.

There were 2 mails from BB. A word doc and a blog link. It was about Saleha. The girl who sits next to him in office, and of whom he’s terrified of thinking too much, because “A man is a happy man as long as he is not in love.” The blog was a bore. All you got from it was that it was written by a guy who was going gaga over a girl. :P. I called him up. He was in the bus with the said girl looking out of the window. She was looking out of the window I mean. He was reading a book- that is supposedly :P.

Phone. 20 mins. And now I have lost track of what I was thinking. Just started reading an e-copy of Kipling’s “Under Deodars”. Sent it to BB after reading out the first two paras to him. And I read the word doc about Saleha. I LIKED IT (To which BB exclaimed delightedly” I am proud of you” :P and then corrected it by saying..”Are na, I mean I am proud of me :D”). And the part about her ideas on marriage was the best! What a pity guys from good families do not want to run away from home these days!!!  So we kept talking and talking about writing and about ideas. And by now I’m bored and want to read Under Deodars.

Notable points from today’s conversation:

1)      Boys are stupid about girls. I mean just think, BB writes about Saleha’s beauty parlour visits as expressions of her personality or independence or some such rot! Garrrrr……..how can boys be so dumb as not to realize that girls go to beauty parlours simply for the reasons that beauty parlours exist- and that is to look prettier and pamper themselves.

2)      By some inexplicable misfortune I’m being charged Rs 1.50 per minute instead of the 25 paisa per minute I was getting accustomed to.

3)      In the last four years, that is since I came to Bombay, me and BB have met once for about 10 minutes…or maybe 15, when he came to visit me at the hospital last year. That was when both of us had been in Kolkata at the same time..

5)      Oscar Wilde was a homosexual and had to toil in prison for that.

6)      I am to be courageous. Though what that implies I am not sure. And that I am wicked- supposedly because I am intelligent enough to “think”. (Wow! No one’s explicitly told me that I am wicked before :P)

7)      How am I ever going to be a writer if I get bored with what I write in less than 10 minutes time? I’ll probably end up being acknowledged by BB (if he ever becomes famous that is) as the girl who painstakingly went through all his writings correcting the style and the grammar and the spellings! (Phewwwwwwww). And BB is happy about my being just that, because in case I become a better writer than he is, I’ll stop liking his stories :-/.

8)      The name of his first volume of works might be “Workaholic”.

9)      And finally, I can never be a good writer because I can never seem to get totally “honest” (as BB puts it) when I am writing.  I have realized the pretences I live in my life, but can’t seem to think clearly enough to accept them to the extent of baring it all on paper. I mean, look at me, I can see the pretence glaring out through the words I write. Not that I’m writing dishonestly—but I can see it all there. The fact that I don’t accept my feelings and keep it for private vision and private smiles (How on earth did BB know that? He must be even more “wicked” than I am, which he probably is) is proof enough that I am not comfortable with what I am. But then, who is?

Victimhood

F**k!

Pothead heard something which sounded like breaking glass. The bowl of veggies in the microwave had broken into two. The veggies were charred. The timer was set to 100 mins. And Blackboots had forgotten all about it. He was washing dishes, making pasta, frying chicken, microwaving vegetables and lecturing Pothead over skype. Now that definitely is something a man must avoid, thought Ph. They’ll never get their act together without breaking every piece of crockery in the kitchen. But he was lecturing her on how it was a man’s world. Men made religion. That was why Mary Magdalene was written off as a whore. Oh no-dismissed Ph-that was a play of power politics. But a feminist wouldn’t think that way, said BB. She would see it more as a suppression of the female voice by man!

As BB prattled on making terrific noises with his crockery making it sound he was breaking  them all, her thoughts drifted. The assumption that men were somehow greater, bigger, somehow “more”, made him actually more responsible. He would accept he had more responsibility and willingly take it. He wouldn’t tell on a woman. He would accept being beaten by a girl because he prided himself on being able to take it-he was the stronger one. He had to take it in. And he did not feel victimized.

She thought of the guy who was kissed by a girl he wasn’t really into. They had all laughed and made fun of him. No one thought he was a victim. Was it also due to our inherent acceptance as the receiving end which made us more socially conscious of the victimhood?

Random

I was dividing my time between watching “Dus” and the first Harry Potter book and squeezing in facebook-checking every 10 minutes to see what people thought of my last rather witty (or so I thought) status. Results were not very encouraging, though, and facebook wouldn’t oblige me with any magical increment in people’s appreciation of my trying to entertain them. So, as with each new checking the number of likes still remained the same at a pathetic five, I stared up at the ceiling, thought about the fleeting unreality of fame and got back to watching Dus. When that movie became too much for my senses to handle, I read about Harry.

Pothead, meanwhile, was working on one of her unification of mythology theories. She didn’t have very much to go on, but had decided on her book title already. She would name it, “Our myths, their myths.” She was making a list of all the Greek gods in a hardbound ruled extra large notebook and writing down the possible parallel gods from the Indian myth section. There was a third column to fill in the Persian equivalents. Whenever her ideas overflowed she had to interrupt her work and detail it out to me, irrespective of what I was doing or whether I heard. She didn’t get offended at a slight and that made it worse. There are people who do not recognize a “no”, and she was one of them. So, my watching Sanjay Dutt and Shilpa Shetty in anti-terrorism activities was sprinkled generously with how the principal Greek Gods and Indian gods bore uncanny resemblances.

Frankly, I did not have an opinion on this. Whether these cultures with shared myths originated at one point and then spread, whether Aryans did invade the subcontinent, or whether they just trickled in, or whether nobody came from anywhere at all and just appeared here-I didn’t know. Everything seemed plausible, and how could you really tell?

Silence

Sometimes silence feels so complete that somehow you are scared to speak. As if it would break the spell. As if the way your thoughts have been creating someone would tear apart when that person spoke in real. It would be like bringing everything to the realm of the packed buses of office hours and the shabby chaos of the morning vegetable market. That rhythm which your inside seems to have deciphered in both your beings, that fleeting connection between two beings that your thoughts give a knowing nod to, as if that will be broken, ruptured, never to be captured again. It is akin to the fear on an early winter morning, when the lukewarm sunlight making its way through the thin veil of a misty fog brushes against your cheek and brings that smile of contentment. And you want that slice of time to last. But the you hear the clang of buckets, the honk of rickshaws, the urgent bells of the bicycles, the vroom of the bikes, the loud careless dropping of last night’s unwashed utensils near the tap outside as the morning municipal tap water time starts. You know your daily aunty would soon come up to the terrace carrying washed clothes to spread on the line, to start mopping the rooms and give you a basic first news of the locality before the morning paper. The sun would shine brighter, the foggy white mist will disappear into nothingness, the real world would start. It is at that moment that you want to hold on to the fleeting dreaminess of the early winter morning ensconced in white mist and a kind of pure silence which somehow seems almost holy, almost divine.

The Gujarat connection

And then, out of the blue, Pothead told me, “Did you know Jinnah was trying to be an actor on the London stage?”

I did not. I seriously don’t know how Pothead comes up with these absolutely random stories from nowhere.

“He was looking forward to playing Romeo”, she chuckled.

“OMG!”

“Seems he didn’t make it in acting, came back, became this hard headed shrewd barrister and later devised his ingenuous plan of breaking up the country.”

I had been reading the Pakistani defence forum pretty much for sometime, so I said, “That is exactly how Pakistanis would NOT describe him. So your rant leaves a lot to be desired.”

“I don’t care,” she yawned. “Heartbroken Romeo breaks heart,” she found it very funny and kept muttering nonsense to that effect.

I was trying to get back to Akki movies, when she broke in again. Apparently whenever her random connections in thoughts yielded an even more random pattern, she had to say it out loud.

“What is it with these Gujrati guys making these hugely populist leaders for this country? Look, here’s Gandhi, Jinnah and now Modi. All of them enjoyed a hold on the nation. The masses just kind of believe in whatever ideology they are selling them. We have lapped it up before, we are lapping it up now. Never mind the reality or fate of those ideologies. And, although all three of them have had significant bitter opposition from a large section of the populace too, they have managed to pretty much hold their own and get their way. “

I had never thought of the Gujrat connection before. Atleast not for Gandhi and Jinnah, both becoming a father figure for two nations. Their visions were riddled with glaring flaws, their arguments, if seen sanely, were more hole ridden than Kolkata roads, yet, and yet, they successfully sold their ideas to tens of millions of people. That made me think how Modi was doing the same thing. We hardly new what exactly was the Gujrat development model. We hardly saw a beautiful Gujarat, lush and green and inductrially robust with healthy citizens. But we kind of hoped it was going the right way. Maybe it wasn’t? Maybe. That same model, whatever it was, applied to the rest of the country would spell disaster! Why then did we vote him to power? Simply because the opposition had Rahul Gandhi. Our beloved Pappu, who had learnt that he had to answer the following for any questions that came his way:

a) Youth empowerment

b) RTI

c) Women empowerment

So, anyone would seem better in comparison. In effect, Modi used a power vacuum to come to power with huge mass support. That seemed very much like how Gandhi rose to become the undisputed leader. Or, how Jinnah became the sole voice for Muslims in the subcontinent. Acute power vacuum.

And then, I grew scared. What if…..history repeated itself?

Chupi Char

About 120 Kms from Howrah is a village called Purbasthali. On the Howrah-Katwa line, there is Nabadwip, then Bishnupriya and then comes Purbasthali. It takes about 3 hours, including delay, from Howrah. A portion of the meandering Ganga got cut off here and formed a huge oxbow lake. This place has become a haven for birds-migratory and resident-alike. You get down at Purbasthali station and take a Toto for 20 Rupees per head and ask him to take you to Kashashali Picnic Spot (15 minutes). The local administration has done a rather good job with the place. There is a website with all the particulars and you have to book ahead if you are staying overnight. Staying overnight is recommended. That way you can get both the late afternoon and early morning views.There are four little cottages in a lovely garden, just next to the lake. The 10 am train from Howrah reaches Purbasthali at around 1 pm and it takes another 15 minutes ride in a Toto to reach the spot. Have lunch, take a little rest and then hire a boat. there are boats galore, charging 150 rupees per hour. It is a lovely lovely view from the boat. There's this never ending expanse of clear water- clear enough so that you can see the green weeds and plants beneath, and flocks of birds all around. November to February is the time for migratory birds, especially the Red Pochard. There are the egrets-great and little, and herons-purple and pond, the bronze winged jacana, pheasant tailed jacana, kingfishers-white breasted, common and pied, the ducks- red crested ochard and cotton pygmy goose, long tailed shrike, drongo, stork, purple swamphen, black headed Ibis,little cormorants, red wattled lapwing, sand plover, citrine wagtail, greater coucal, grebes, coots and hordes of barn swallows. They fly all around you at such terrific speed that you get frustrated at being unable to capture them on camera. By the time you are through with two and a half to three hours boat ride, the light falls and you have to return. We did spot an overenthusiastic group though, with a guy using flash to shoot birds in the failing light :D. Coming back to the cottages, there's tea and hot pakoras waiting. There's nothing much to do in the evening, except have an early dinner and fall asleep quickly to wake up early the next morning. Between 6:30 and 7, hire a boat again and set off down the lake. This is the best time for bird watching. The birds are still sleepy and you can spot them resting. The downside of sitting cross legged on the boat planks for hours on end is that your leg might start paining. Remove a couple of planks and put your feet down into the hold of the boat if you want to avoid cramps later. Since Nabadwip is so close, there's the 24 hour Naam-sankirtan going on- Hare Krishna- in a loop. You fall into the rhythm and start chanting unawares, though you keep wishing that they employed people with better vocals, if they are at it all day and night. The checkout time officially being 11 am, we were forced to return back before reaching the island here. Still we had clocked in 4 hours of boating. A late breakfast awaits you at the cottage. Then take a tour of the mustard fields in the countryside if you so wish, for the next train is at 1:30 pm. We took longer and took the 3:19 train. It is important to book a Toto ahead, as there aren't any waiting at the spot. The cottages, newly built, are good. Nothing fancy, just neat and clean and comfortable, with good bathrooms (so important, that it makes all the difference between a good stay and a bad one). The property is well maintained and the locals take a pride in it. Week ends can be extremely difficult to book, so either book ahead or take a couple of days off during the week and come down here. If you are looking for birds to watch or photograph, in a village retreat, with fresh hot home cooked food and a leisurely stroll thrown in, Purbasthali won't disappoint you.
Caretaker: Abhijit 7908061487
Our boatman- Bashir Biswas
website: http://purbasthali.com/

Land of the wooden dolls

Around 170 kms from Howrah, along the Howrah-Katwa line, is a village called Agradwip. A 10 minutes diesel auto ride from the station takes you to a very tiny village called Natungram. The painted wooden dolls we had as children, the Gour-Nitai, the kathputli bride, the raja-rani-bought at fairs and which endured our childish mishandling till their colours disappeared- these dolls are made by the 50 odd families of this village. We got down at Gour Sutradhar's house. The families here mostly bear the surname sutradhar-the story tellers. For, these dolls were used as props to tell stories once upon a time. Folk stories of Radha-Krishna, of Gouranga, of kings and queens, of Ma Lokkhi and her eponymous mount- the Owl. The owl features most prominently in the wooden sculptures here. Colourful figures, in white and red and black and yellow-with large round eyes and a hooked beak- the owl comes in all sizes, from as tiny as 2 inches to huge ones. So sought after is this owl motif, that it has made its way into a myriad different forms, from adorning the stands of little stools to acting as borders for bedroom mirrors to being placed as screens for bedside table doors. The owl, literally, is all over the place. For there are no boundaries where the craft is made. Right from the narrow village road that leads to the government workshop, to the open kitchen and verandah, to the inside of the little damp rooms- the craft is scattered all over. It forms their lives. There's no separate work life and life after work. It is all intertwined. "See how hard we work all day," says Gour Sutradhar's wife to us, busy applying a mixture of Khari-mati, flour and water on the wooden owls to smoothen their surface. To see the process from the start, we go to the workshop which also houses a four room guesthouse on the upper floor. Felled trees are brought here to be cut and chopped in machines into strips and blocks. The wood of the pinkish red p(n)eo, gamhar, neem, shimul, shegun are used prominently in the sculptures. P(n)eo is especially good as it will never crack. The blocks are then given a crude primary shape by a small handheld instrument. These are done by the men. The women then take over. First the smoothing mixture is applied and the crude dolls are left in a basket to dry. Then a white primer is applied and the figures are spread out to dry. Once dry, women or young boys take up the task of painting them with acrylic colours or oil paints. Vibrant as the figures may be, I was a tad bit disappointed to see that the painting lacked finesse. Maybe if the market is more evolved and demand for better quality goods spring up, they will consider spending more time on each figure, making the effort to paint them with care. But my slight disappointment vanished on seeing the carved neem wooden idols. From a single block of wood, like all the other figures, these are chiselled to make the forms of Ma Durga, Ganesh and the like. Using simply chisels of two different sizes, the idols are carved to perfection. Gour sutradhar added the finishing touches to the one we bought right before us. After the chiselling is over, these are sand papered and rubbed with powdered "gala" in water. You can opt for lacquer, but we decided to stick to the basic. Having seen the whole process of wooden doll making, we called the auto driver who had dropped us to this place, for there are no vehicles to take from the village. It is thus imperative that you take down the number of the driver and arrange with him to meet you later on to take you back to the station. We had come by the 8:00 am Howra-Katwa local and we would leave by the 3 pm one. You can also opt to stay overnight at the guest house, which charges Rs. 650 per person per day, meals included. All you need to do is call up someone at the village, and they will arrange for the rest. There is a Kathia baba's ashram nearby which you can visit or even go to Purbasthali Pakhiralay, just a few stations away. The artisans here also regularly take orders for interior decorations of homes and pandal making during the pujas. I am adding some of their numbers below:

Gour Sutradhar : 8145283862
Uttam Bhaskar : 9732908249
Dilip Sutradhar : 9333386501

1) The wood

2) The wood is taken to the workshop for splicing

3) Spliced wood

4) Chopped blocks of wood.

5) Smoothing mixture applied to the crudely shaped wooden blocks. The mixture is composed of Khari mati(soil), flour, water and adhesive.

6) White coating applied

7) After application of the white coating, these are left in the sun to dry.

8) Colouring begins

9) Finished dolls

10) Besides these colourful dolls, there are chiselled figures. These are a beauty.

11) The polishing mixture is applied on these chiseled dolls instead of colour.

12) There are other figures and wooden structures like the ones shown below