Calcutta- A Culinary Experience

Even today, before I leave home to return to Calcutta, my mother will ask me what food I will carry with me to eat on the train. I wouldn’t dare compare her culinary skills with that of those who serve plastic-ky somethings on India’s trains. But then every time this exchange takes place between mother and son, I am reminded of the relatively regal days at home that are to last no more. Alas! No more ready-made breakfast, no more nagging to eat lunch, and no unlimited snacks in the evening to go with a mug of coffee. Leaving home is depressing indeed!

I want to warn those who might be reading this that being a personal note and me not being much of a socialite, my experiences are mostly limited to the areas around where I’ve stayed and as a hosteler, highly constrained by finances.

I remember the desperation and purposelessness of the early days at Hindu Hostel, when every morning and every day would bring with it the renewed realisation of my distance from those I know and love. Despite the high of staying alone, I was the outsider among familiars, and the outsider among outsiders. I have vague remembrances of those days, and nothing exceptional. Every two weeks, my pockets would have enough for a meal at The Royal Indian Hotel on Rabindra Sarani. The menu card informed me the first time I went there regarding the history of the biryani.

Kuchh Khayaal Aise

Khwahishein kiye the kitni

aur kab tha socha ki munasib

samjhi jayegi woh aarzoo

aur na bhi yeh

ke aahista se pal guzrenge

aur mukammal hogi woh justuju.

In Memory of my Sirius

Often, my thoughts wander. Thoughts after all. They are given to wandering. But often, my mind in a fit of chronic idleness, decides to wander simultaneously into seemingly unconnected realms. I have always had a gut feeling that thoughts have a mind of their own. It’s like, it’s not your mind doing the thinking, instead it’s the thinking that’s got the mind. Like now, when I don’t really know what I am talking about! And just like that, you click back into consciousness and wonder how absurd your thoughts just were.

A convenient setting for such purposeless wanderings of the mind is a train ride. Especially if you are travelling alone through the night. In our country, we are fortunate to have a tremendously well-connected railway network. And despite all the cribbing we have about an occasional disdain towards punctuality and efficiency in service, for majority of Indians who are given to frequent travelling, there isn’t a better alternative to the rail.

Spending my childhood in a hill station, the only memories of trains I have as a child are the stationery locals near Gauhati station that a grand-uncle of mine would occasionally lift me onto. It goes without saying that I was terrified the machine would suddenly come to life and carry me away to an unknown land far away where I would have to live the remainder of my life in utter misery. I was a bit of a nervous wreck as a child.

However, over the last three years, I have been an incessant traveller, going up and down the length of Bengal between what is now Guwahati and Calcutta. My last such journey, on 29th February-1st March once again led to that hijacking of the mind by that which it creates, or so I’m told.

The initial journey was tedious; a wait at the station that included some delicious dosas, idlis and sambars and a lazy ride west through the district towns of Asom.

It was only after nightfall and after the customary switching off of lights at 9 o’ clock by people who don’t otherwise sleep before midnight, that the journey took a turn to the eerily beautiful. Travelling air-conditioned after a welcome bit of generosity from my mother, I settled into the blanket provided and peered past the window into the moonlit night outside.

To say that it was a sight to behold would be an understatement as well as an unnecessary romanticisation of events. As if we do not have enough of it anyway.

What struck me on that night was this feeling of otherness and alienation from all that lies around us, either rushing closer or getting away. It was hard in such a scene of apparent haughtiness to not think of Death. Or rather, it was hard not to let your thoughts wander in that cold direction. For I have always thought of Death as a curtain. A curtain that one day embraces you and tricking you after a lifetime of efforts, throws you down into that chasm of Nothingness. Certainly the death of Sirius Black in Harry Potter had a huge impact on me, humble teenaged reader then. He was one of my favourite characters. And growing up without a father, it wasn’t hard to imagine him as your own.

The view from the window seemed allegorical to me. Anything and everything is so close to one, and yet so far away. It is unlikely that I will ever go to all the places I see through that window. They will remain views from the window, at best. And in that vast countryside expanse in front of me, lit by nothing but the virgin light of the moon, I can’t but help imagining there to be multitudes of those who have crossed the curtain. Mocking us, for being so close and yet so ignorant and afar.

Forgive me if your imagination brings to you images of zombies and ghosts from popular culture. It’s not a sight, not a revelation, just a feeling I talk about, no, not even spirits. Something that is very much in my head, and most probably has absolutely nothing to do with those innocent fields.

Death is indeed a cunning customer, keeping the living at bay from those who are not, and doing that with a fickle curtain, at that. I am not the first and won’t be the last one wishing to tear that curtain apart and create a unity of the world and the nothingness beyond. Someday, I will know, the cunning of Death. Which side of the curtain I will be on, is anybody’s guess. But for all that I know and believe in, it feels good to think that as I stare into those empty fields, those who are gone are staring back at me.

R.I.P. Shejo Mama. Love you wherever you are. You were no less than a Sirius Black to me.