Here I come - Kolkata ..........(Entry dated 08/30/2008 )

So finally my father got his long yearned transfer out of troubled North East - towards the welcoming confines of his adopted city - Kolkata!!!! Well why do I say "troubled".??? Wasn't it all great, beautiful and happy as I have been telling you all over last few entries ???Well friends so far my memories have been meandering around the positives .....I have been showing you my days in Dimapur through rose-tinted glasses...........but is it only that.....

But there is something more.........which if I keep to myself, will leave my North East story incomplete.....Though it was peaceful on surface, and we all led normal lives - going to office, going to school, going to market etc etc just as we do today....but there used to be one big gap....Nobody could actually go out after 6 pm in the evening !!! We had to rush back home if we were out by any chance.....it was not considered safe by anyone....I was too young and dependent to really enquire and understand the reasons for it, or try to explore the consequence of trying to violate the same....These restrictions were more in effect in some parts of the town than other.....Though I don't remember having faced in any untoward incident at any point of time....but this was an accepted fact, and people accepted to live with it.....But those days were different, people were more accepting, more tolerant and more patient .....and were happy to live with only as much life would offer......

Another one - I told you all stories of how my father used to work in Geological Survey of India and he and his colleagues used to be away into interiors of the place - looking for minerals resources for the country.....So there have been many scary incidents with some of them during their sojourns.....There were anti-social elements or radical nationalists.......(who are universally termed as "terrorists" today) in those parts of the country...who had a peculiar misconception about geologists.....the general idea was these queer set of people who keep moving around rocky terrains with their hats on, steered on by compasses they used to carry, and hitting into rocks with their hammers, taking samples and noting down in their diary ....are into something suspicious!!!!!!! Their idea was these people have come to take away all the mineral resources of the region........or rather all the "gold" from the region.....Little did they know that that gold is found naturally at very few places in India, and North East is not one of them....

So, inspired by their illusionary ideas, at times these people were on track of the geologists tours....and at multiple times, geologists have been attacked, robbed of all their belongings, the camps going up in flames, and also the vehicles....only the life would be spared after much begging and persuasion....and these innocent geologist would be left to their fate on the tough, inhospitable hilly terrains....many a times rescued by army.....Quite a few of baba's colleagues have gone through this, and undeniably this experience has left them traumatised and scarred for ever ..........

Another experience to complete the threesome ...this one in Shillong......this is mostly learnt from my parents narration.......I absolutely have no personal memory of being part of this...IN one of my previous entries, I have talked about our impromptu visits to my mashi's place in Shillong....It was one of those visits from Dimapur....I think we took a bus to Shillong....and after reaching there, we found that there is trouble brewing in the city and there is a curfew.....There used to be ethnic clashed in Shillong those days........the typical locals vs settler story....which has been around for centuries and would be around for centuries to come ...So this day was one of those unfortunate occasions when tempers had risen to high on both sides and hence administration had to do a clampdown. So here we were, me - a 5 year old kid with a young couple - my parents, who were not locals - stranded in a alien city with no mode of transport and absolutely nowhere to look for support.....Hey what am I talking about.....what about cellphones....why couldn't we just call up my mashi to come and pick us up ????

Dears, let me remind you gently again, that I am talking of days long gone by....we were in AD 1980-81, and even a landline phone connection was a privilege....My mesho, as he was working in P&T ....for unenlightened ones who are cursing me for using obscure abbreviations...let me tell you that P&T means "Post and Telegraph" and this was the monolithic giant organization that later was broken up into Postal department, and BSNL and MTNL of today....So coming back to the point, mesho had a telephone connection, as it was required for him to run the telephone services in the region effectively So now you would say :OK fine, no mobile phones, but have you heard of something called a "phone booth". Why couldn't you have just made a call from there.....Well again to answer you I have to reply the same story on telephone availability and tele-density etc etc.....Telephone booths were also not a well known commodity those days....

So, without any mobile or any telephone booth anywhere, stuck up in the night in a lonely bus station, in a town in curfew.....can u imagine the situation....it is nothing less than SCARY....But then GOD does sends his angels when we are in distress ....Out of nowhere emerged a police jeep, with a senior officer, who saw us stranded and offered a lift....My ma still recalls his gentlemanly gesture with fondness.....He actually regretted that he could not allow my ma in front seat on the jeep as he was on duty !!!!!!! For ma and baba, the front seat was not something we could afford to worry on at that time, a lift in police vehicle was the best possible way to move in a curfew-bound city .......

A Deep Breath..........Another one ..........Another one.............

Back to Kolkata now See there are so many memories that crowd around me everytime I think I will move over now....There are still some images floating around which I could not tell you so far about....of those initial few years of my life.....I will share those as and when I find an opportunity as I move ahead in my journey to re-discovery.....

So one fine day we landed at Kolkata - Howrah Station to be precise....and headed towards "Khardah".....This place is among the northern suburbs of the great metropolis....and here is where baba spent part of his childhood, education and journey to adulthood...This is the place which gave refuge to baba's family - my dadu and his elder brother with their respective families, after they were uprooted abruptly from their motherland in noakhali district of then East Bengal, in the greatest tragedy of modern India - Partition........