The Gypsy Life - 1

The suburbs of Calcutta – in between there are a few years in Sibpur, Delhi, Helsinki, Colorado Springs, Silver Spring-Gaithersburg, and then Newcastle Upon Tyne – this is the path I have covered so far. The cycle will complete some day when I’ll be back in those suburbs of Calcutta once more…

It wasn’t Calcutta when I was a kid – it was Purba Putiary (East Putiary), South 24 Parganas. I vaguely remember the open pastures around our house, only three houses nearby including ours – miles of open space, the bamboo plants in front of our house where foxes wandered as the evening came. The nearest bus-route was about twenty minutes walk from our home. Power-cut was a regular feature those days, and then we (me, my sister, my mother, father and my grandmother) would sit in the open courtyard lit up by the dim light of a kerosene lamp…We had lots of ponds around, a little distance from our house lived Laxmi Aunty, where I used to spend most of the day – my grandfather was terribly ill during those days, even my grandmother wasn’t fully fit, and mother wasn’t able to cope up with everything – Laxmi Aunty used to take me to her place everyday. She taught me how to swim – I was only two years old then…the day my grandfather died, she took me out for a walk, and when I came back I cried – “Where’s grandfather?”

I come across a lot of stories about the bloody seventies – vaguely remember some incidents…a loud bang on the other side of the bamboo plantation, and soon after the shaking figure of a blood-soaked man coming out from there. Cops came one day, to search our home – they forcefully unloaded some old packing boxes from the loft, and accidentally broke the swallow nests…I remember the terrible noise by the baby swallows, the bigger ones swarming the house…the cops though apologized and left only after cleaning up the mess…

Twenty-four years in this place – regular twenty minutes walking to catch the school bus, later the bicycle became my friend when I joined Jadavpur University…the house became two-storied, the open spaces slowly filled up with new houses, the solitary Aurobindo Park became more like bustling Netajinagar…the ponds were gone, filled up to make space for new houses, the bamboo plantation was gone too, new faces were being seen…now I don’t even know all of them…don’t know where good old Laxmi Aunty is…it became more like a busy Housing Society where no one knew their neighbour…South 24 Parganas metamorphosed into Calcutta, with a new pin code – 700093…

Only the bus-route is still at the same place…