Story of the Week

Past the tunnel
The Pullman stops dead on the track.

The train was about to arrive. I went to station bookstall looking for the day’s paper.
One hand clutching the daily, the other pulling a trolley, I sat on a bleacher with difficulty. There’s hardly any space anywhere, so crowded was the platform with people returning to Kolkata from Puri.

There were times when I booked a hotel room over the phone or through an agent only to regret it later. Not because there’s usually many a slip twixt the cup and the lip, but because of the fact that the room allotted to me could not offer a breathtaking view from the window or the balcony. But on occasions when the trip was taken on an impulse and I had to book it on the spot, I managed to get a room of my choice and came back home with memories to fall back on.
Let me briefly recount what happened at Kausani, a hill-station in Uttarakhand, and then at Manikaran in Himachal Pradesh. On reaching Kausani from Almora we tried a few hotels but somehow none of them could satisfy us in terms of the unobstructed view of the mountain ranges from the room itself.

Visiting a bookshop or a library always offered a surprise to me. l invariably came back home with some books that sought me out rather than my seeking them. A book tucked away on the far shelf, or a sight not exactly within visual range, can draw you to it taking you unawares.
For instance, one particular evening, quite by chance, you decide to take a different route back to your nest, and you get to see the pulsating path of magical silvery light cast by the just-risen full moon upon the river Ganges. On a couple of occasions, one in Coochbehar, and the other in Dehradun, while on the road, I distinctly felt someone invisible taking my hand and guiding me to a picture-postcard perfect setting.

The gardener was cleaning up piles of leaves and branches from the local park – previous night’s storm debris – when the eucalyptus tree fell on him. There’s no starch-or-cut on the body. Only he couldn’t wiggle his toes.

My visit to Mussoorie for the first time years ago was occasioned by a letter I received from Ruskin Bond (born 19 May 1934) in response to an article on his love stories which I did for the Amrita Bazar Patrika. By a happy coincidence Ruskin, commissioned by Penguin Publishers, was then doing an anthology of Indian love stories.
On receipt of my article Ruskin wrote: “it was very kind of you to send me your article on my love stories; otherwise I would probably have missed it. It’s a perceptive and finely-written piece. Thanks! Do send me your questionnaire; I’ll be out on a trek during the next two weeks, so end of June will be best. Can you recommend a love story by a Bengali writer (in English or English translation) which I could include in a Penguin India anthology of Indian love stories? Something written this century …”

She sits on a bench by a sleepy lane, her head teeming with wandering thoughts. Blank page is her only friend. She enters into dialogue with it when the silent storm rages all through night. But her only book so far remains relatively obscure.

I was at Café-Coffee-Day stewing in my own juices when I couldn’t help overhearing a conversation on weightier matters between two people.

When I called up a Guest House the day before our journey to Jhargram, the call of a rooster unimpeded by any noise came on the line before the owner could speak. It instantly cheered me up, for I could sense the surrounding silence out there. Little did I know then that I’d by sheer chance come across a sport that would haunt me for the rest of my life.
Out in a car travelling around this belt where nature is still so picturesque, also historically and culturally an important town that spawned many writers and artists, we heard calls of roosters mixed with murmurs of a crowd from far off. When I asked the driver if any festival was on, he informed us of the cockfight festival and took us to Tiakati village ground.

My maiden visit to Darjeeling planned diligently over a few weeks of frenzy, just after the first wave of pandemic eased a bit, started from the Gurudwara bus stop location in Kolkata, where we boarded a Volvo bus and reached Siliguri early next morning.
The car driver who took us to Darjeeling from Siliguri was very amiable. At my prodding he talked about interesting things hardly known to the tourists travelling the place for the first time. As we stopped at the roadside breakfast corner, he gave an account of the Cheetahs coming down from the hills and temporarily taking shelter in tea gardens for giving birth to their babies. He also told us, during the journey, as the hills and the tea estates came into view, about brow-antlered deer bred in Coochbehar, who are then released in forests around Darjeeling.