Three years back I came to Calcutta and three years back I fell in love with the city. It offered me the very thing I needed back then , my independence . It nurtured me ,it made me grow so I grew with the ever changing city itself. Calcutta has so much to offer and it is not biased . Its probably one of the very few cities that can provide joy to both the rich and the poor , probably that’s one of the million reasons its called The city of Joy.
Calcutta is ever changing ,ever growing .But a city is made by its people ,the inhabitants and Calcutta’s inhabitants are a perfect example of the very picture ,the very imagination of a typical ‘bangali babu moshai’ most of us have on our mind.
In the years that followed after I shifted here, I travelled, travelled a lot. On a few seemingly dull days I used to get on a bus going to some unknown place, an unexplored area, and it was fun, be it the joy in riding on a bus or be it roaming those streets unsure of what to do next apart from observing the people with absolutely no idea as to how to get back and that’s how those seemingly ‘dull days’ turned into the very days that I remember now ,the memories that brings a smile on my face.
One such memory is a visit to the Thakurbari, the ancestral home of Rabindranath Tagore. That was the first time I visited North Calcutta and it was love at first sight. I fell in love with the dilapidated buildings, I fell in love with the shabby streets and even to the hand pulled rickshaws. The north still retains a certain aristocracy of its glorious past. It’s as if every building ,every street is trying to speak out aloud and one can listen too, if only he tries. If one allows his imagination to run wild then one can still visualize the British India as it was back then,the same red old buildings, the same gas lamps.
This very morning I woke up to the faint sound of rain and to the fresh smell of earth that the wind carries with it, yes the Monsoons have arrived in Calcutta , the city has a special charm in this season ,whether you go to work outside or stay indoors ,one can always enjoy the rain. It may appear superfluous to many but the chai tastes different during the monsoon, its more appealing. And let’s admit it ,in no other city will you find chaiwallahs spanned in spitting distances.
The chai is probably one of the ever-present joys of Calcutta. The streets are paved with bhars of chai ,the fragments of which radiates an orange glow, certainly not a dent on the streets, getting crunched by passer-by ,collecting the rain waters . The reader may assume these to be the gibberish writings of a lunatic but many people before me have written greater things in more unintelligible ways. So with nothing to do as of now ,my mind has already started wandering the streets and it won’t be long before I embark on a journey to visit most of the chai stalls of Calcutta starting from munna da’s stall outside our varsity, sipping chai all day.
