A Temporary GoodBye

I have to say goodbye to this city of mine for atleast the coming 6 months. In another 2 days I will be sitting on a plane "don't know when I will be back again". (But I will definetely be back)

It is with mixed feelings that I will be saying bye to the city. I will miss my people in the city. I think I will miss the city more than I can miss a person. For the last two weeks I am trying to get all of the city in me, from Chinese in Mandarin, to Arsalan's Biriyani, to VivekAnanda Park fuchka, from walks along DeshaPriya Park to long lazy walks around Park Street, from street shopping at Gariahat to hunting for bargains in New Market. I will even miss my one and a half hour journey to and from office. Specially the times when I would take an auto to Karunamoyee, then another to UltoDanga, then another to Shova Bazaar Metro and take a metro to TollyGunge tram depot (Uttam Kumar) and walk home. And to top it all Kolkata has decided to dawn the best weather possible right now. The light cool breeze keep on caressing me and bids me a long lingering loving goodbye.

I will be back soon my lovely. I will miss you.

TAXI DRIVER

• NAME :. P.N ROY
• AGE : 27
• PROFESSION : TAXI DRIVER
• LOCATION : Cab ride from Deshapriya Park to Tollygaunge
• ETHNICITY : U.P. 

Vote is over and Narendra Modi has been appointed our Hon'ble Prime Minister. Politics and vote fever seem to have died down from the papers but it is still quite fresh in my memory. Apart from the meetings and the morchas and the verbal fights on t.v. and every other vote centre the heated debates, one feature that marked this year votes for me is the acute lack of public transport. As it is the cab drivers in Kolkata derive some sort of a sarcastic pleasure in refusing passengers. And just before the vote even the few cabs which would have considered not refusing seemed to be all booked for vote duty.

One such harrowing hot and humid May late evening I got down at DeshaPriya Park hoping to catch an auto and could not find anything. I saw this cab coming towards me and although it had "ON VOTE DUTY" written on the front shield I hailed. I was tired and desperate. He told me he will only go if I am going towards Ranikuthi. I climbed in gratefully. For some reason he took a liking to me and started talking.

He is originally from U.P. and like million others heard that Kolkata would give him an opportunity to survive and came over to try his luck about 4 months back. He did not have a choice other than leaving U.P. because he fell in love with a girl there he was not supposed to and if he did not flee he would have been dead. As soon as he got this assignment of driving one of his boss's three cabs his cab got stamped for vote duty. So every morning at around 6 he has to go down to some government official's house in Alipore and has to mandatorily stay there till 6 PM. This particular official hardly ever gets out of the house. The cab is instead used by the wife and the teenage daughter as their personal car. The routine is that around noon everyday the wife and daughter goes out somewhere or the other and comes back home after 8 PM. That however does not mean that he can report late or he is getting paid more than his promised stripend. He was telling me that he knows that he is just starting and that he can barely afford his meals but at the end of the day he knows that he does his job well.I actually asked him why do you guys keep on refusing passengers.And he said that he never does. Only when he is really tired. He knows that other cab drivers do and he thinks no better of them than the government official to whom he is working for now. He made that very clear in quite expletive terms, because these cabbies give honest cab drivers like him a bad name, or that is what he feels.

It was a little difficult understanding his heavily accented Hindi, but it was nice and friendly contrary to most other cab rides where I always stay on the guard and keep a finger on speed dial.

After paying him and before getting down, I asked him if I could take his picture and told him I will share it on the internet. He was taken aback, but he was still talkative and then asked if he would become famous. I told him, I hardly think so.

And then I asked him what happened to the girl ? The one he was in love with. For the first time he went quiet and said "I hope to God, she killed herself." Then he drove away.

Basantika

Today is Poila Boisakh. The auspicious beginning of new year and the end of Bosonto.

I am not sure why I am writing this down today as this incident happened atleast a couple of weeks back. It happened in the middle of Bosanto. But it stayed with me.

My cousin RJ is a singer. She was performing in Deshapriyo Park as part of an annual concert "Basantika" arranged by her school of music. This was just a week after Holi. The weather was perfect with a cool breeze flowing. I made myself commfortable on the carpet with my mother and my aunt. There were all these lovely young(at heart definitely) men and women from the age of  4 to 60 dressed in the colours of Spring sitting around me with bright coloured Abir smeared quite artistically on their cheeks. There were dance recitals and songs and poetry recitals. There were artists painting large canvases with the hues of yellow and orange and red and green. There was this ambiance and energy of creativity and appreciation and everyone was enthralled, engrossed and enamoured by it.

And there were this group of girls between the age of 4 to 6. All dressed up in saris and jewelleries with flowers in their hair. They were playing among themselves, throwing flowers at each other(something very Shantiniketan about it) and then suddenly I noticed two street kids among them. The younger one was about three and the older one, perhaps four. At first they sat at quite a distance and  looked at the group of girls playing rathar tentatively. Then the younger one took a handful of flowers and threw at the nearest girl. The girl  threw it back at the child and slowly but steadily the two kids became a part of the group. Playing with them, laughing with them and enjoying with them. Then came the food packets. I actually instinctively found myself concentrating more on the kids than on the concert from that moment on. The little girls actually even shared their food with them. Like buddies. Eating from the same packet. I must admit. In my adult mind I was cringing thinking perhaps this is not the most hygenic thing to do. The little girls did not care or bother. As far as they were concerned they had made two new friends and they were sharing. And then suddenly a group of slightly older girls around the age of 10 to 12 came with their food packets. The older girls dissaproved of the situation visibly. One of the older girls gave the two kids a packet and a bottle of water and showed them the way out. I am sure that this is what is considered an act of kindness. But there was also this sense of demarcation in that act of kindness. Like the girls were in some sort of a higher position to feel sorry or pity for the two kids. They could show kindness to them but not consider them at par. Perhaps not even consider them human. The  way those little girls were behaving was much more humane, much more real. They were fighting about who gets the piece of cake like they would with friends, with equals.

I wonder when this sense that we are better, that we are privileged creeps inside us ? When does it become them and us? When do they cease to become perhaps even people ?

With the sun setting, sitting in the middle of this beautiful, cultural ambiance, I could not shake away the melancholy from my soul. Because I have myself grown up. I can never do what those little girls did.