Few people except the residents and businessmen may be aware of a place on the landscape of West Bengal called Haldia. It is a serene (or shall I say was!!) beautiful city on the banks of river- Haldi and has provided enough fodder- being a port city- towards the growth of the biggest industries in and around it. Then came the sharks to tap the educational potential (that the place was supposed to offer; being away from the City Pent) and behold; an engineering institute came up by the name Haldia Institute of Technology.
Like a chain reaction- it propelled small but sufficient and family-like shops to mushroom around it; each specializing in tea, omelette, maggi (bhaja maggi v1.0), parothas, etc., the staple diet of engineers.
I had left my job in September 2009 and was preparing for GATE ( graduate level examination for admission into PG programmes) while staying at my professor Dr. P.R.Purkait's residence in the college campus. I was a student of the institute from 2003 to 2007.
There was one such shop that bobbled very recently and to my greatest surprise it was selling "litti"- a kind of spherical or circular flour cakes filled with fried gram flour along with a host of spices, ginger, garlic, etc. and cooked either deep fried or over heated charcoal. This litti has its ardent base in the states of Bihar and UP. It is usually served with "chutney" (made up of fresh coriander leaves grinded with a pounder against a stone slab) or "chokha" (made from roasted brinjal/ potato/ tomato- all mashed together with a tinge of mustard oil, green chillies and salt to taste.
Now my college- in the vicinity of Bengal and away from the pompous and grand Kolkata (by a margin of 120 kms.)- did have a substantial population from those northern neighbors- and accordingly business acumen prevailed over simplicity. It was a kind of daily affair to have litti-chokha-chutney in the evening and tea to complement and savour the spicy taste. Moreover the taste of the above delicacies tend to reach pinnacle if its monsoon and rain gods have their supplies uninterrupted on a plain lucky day.
Most of the shop owners employed children from the nearby villages or children from their extended families so as not to create dependencies. In that litti shop worked an effervescent and garrulous kid named Bhola-ageing around 7 years. Bhola is the name of Lord Shiva and it also means simple. And he was the center of attraction and we used to pull his leg on the least of pretexts. But he took these in the best of the spirits and amused us beyond anger, surprise; and a healthy dose of entertainment was lined up in the evenings.
A recent study carried out by eminent scholars concluded that any two unknown persons in this world would be somehow connected by the seventh node i.e. one person would be related to another by a chain of other seven persons. On this note and out of curiosity and general inquisitiveness, I thought of knowing more about that little kid, so I placed a nugget, Who else is there in your family? And his stark reply swept me by surprise; more so as I never expected it to be so choking and full of a sense of lost childhood and brimming pathos (which that kid might not be fully aware of!!).
And his reply to who else is there in his family was Aamar keu nai!! (Nobody is there in my family).
Written on 24th May 2011.
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