Cal Calling...

I want to go to a place where sunlight literally chases me out of bed at five. It swarms in through the windows and I can't help but wake up and welcome the morning.

I want to go to a place where I can wake up to my granny's warm and slighty sweetened light tea which is served in the most adorable looking china and veiled in a tea cosy that was made by hand for her by her cousin many many years back.

I want to go to a place where I can walk to the riverside early in the morning when the city's just waking up, sit there awhile...maybe buy jalebis packed in leaves and tied with string on my way back home.

I want to go to a place where I can see the past making it's way to the present...not like a thorn in the eye of "modernity" but as a part of the past which has been allowed to seep into the present and still elicits longing smiles. I love the way the house that belonged to Girish Ghosh is preserved in a way that the traffic moves for him and not the other way round. And the old homes you come across in the little lanes...a lot of brown bricks and spurts of green. Achingly beautiful.

I want to go to a place where the attention of the whole household surrounds me for the few days that I'm there...where cousins get back from work and make impromptu plans and everyone gets into the car and rushes to the nearest mishti store where you get the loveliest sandesh and radha ballobis.

I want to go to a place where beds are made impeccably. Maybe it's the bed-specific brooms or something they use but the beds are made the best in Cal. White or light bedcovers, stretched and taut and clean and nice with little side pillows and frilled pillowcases...makes you want to just leap onto the bed and lie there.

I want to go to a place where the windowsills project inwards into the rooms like railway berths upon which one can sit...sit and be a part of and apart from the ongoing conversation...where one can feel the wind coming from outside, gaze at the mango tree in the bagaan, touch the light crochet curtains some aunt would've made years back and occasionally have a say in the noisy Bong conversations where everyone's saying all they have to say at the same time.

I want to go to a place where the yummy smell of potol posto and shukto emanate from kitchen...where meals are cooked amidst stories of weddings that took place in the 1940s...who made a tail and attached it to the groom's kurta...who ate 27 rossogollas at one wedding...whose dhoti came loose...whose benarasi was woven with real gold... I could spend hours soaking all that in.

I want to go to Calcutta. If you haven't already guessed. I've been there just twice in my twenty years and the eighteen years that I didn't get to go there are starting to seem a little wasted to me now.

P.S.

And the words that I began to italicise halfway through the post are not just italicised because they're too Bong for some of you to figure out but also because they have to serve as a reminder to a certain someone of his much needed aid when I'm attempting something like this with my limited knowledge of Bangla converted to English spellings. Hmpf! Always missing :( I know you're having pav bhajis with extra buttered extra pavs which will all add to ahem a certain roundness somewhere.
Jokes apart, I hope you will read this. Hugs :)

your ideals lie glistening
priceless
mine lie in a beggar's bent bowl
small change
your gods bask in glory that's
illimitable
and mine walk around for they're
my people
you have just one life to
live
i could disappear i could die
many times over
but for luck someone wise says all lies
in the minds
then why must your ideals cost me
my ordinary happiness