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Spy To Lhasa
Snow Leopard crouched and huddled himself shivering in the piercing cold winds that danced all around him and the glowing woodfire that did its best to give a little warmth in the dead of night at an altitude of seventeen thousand feet close to the Lanak La mountain pass in the Himalayan region. His mission…
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Doctor Train
Srikant anxiously glanced at the time displayed on the HMT Sona strapped on top of a sweaty handkerchief wrapped around his left wrist. People all around him squeezed and pushed each other in a pile of obnoxious human fumes, sweat, and breadth. Beads of perspiration trickled down his forehead and nostrils falling on the shoulder…
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Tarok
The unbearable cries of men being force-fed through rubber tubes inserted in their throats surpassed the sounds of the roaring waves of the mighty Bay of Bengal lashing on the rocky northern shores of Port Blair, the capital city of Andaman and Nicobar Islands on a summer night in 1933. The screams came from within…
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The Palanquin
“Hun Huna re, Hun Huna… Hun Huna re, Hun Huna… Palki choooleyyy gogon toooleeeyyy (The Palanquin mooovesss under the skkkyyy),” rhythmically chanted the fast-moving group of twelve. A torchbearer bearer in front and one in the back provided the only lights casting dancing shadows of the men and a swinging wooden box amidst them on the…
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Brihospoti’s Clock
In the year 1582 AD the Italian astronomer, physicist, engineer, and polymath, from Pisa, Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de’ Galilei discovered that time could be calculated using a pendulum. He inked the blueprint of a wound-up device, which could measure time and changed the history of Christendom. Using his designs, seventy-four years later in 1656,…
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The Ancient Guards of Pancharatna
In the year 1980, a 17th-century cryptic temple lay hidden deep in the Joypur forest of Bishnupur subdivision in the Bankura district of India’s West Bengal state. This archaic monument was stone-built, unlike the other commonly found historical structures of terracotta in the region. The jungle had completely engulfed the structure, and ancient trees and…
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Masala Tea
As the clock struck four in the twilight hours every morning, as the slumbering postcolonial Indian city of Kolkata slowly woke up to face another day, Shibnath Sammadar or SS would get busy opening his 150-year-old tea-shanty. Located diagonally opposite the main gate of Scottish Church College, on the north-eastern wall corner of the Hedua…
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Children Of The Moon
Dawa moved slowly across the cold desert surface. The sun was bleak, and the land was dry. The wind blew mercilessly stinging on the little exposed skin of the old man’s face with fine particles of needle-like sand. The chill in the air made everything bow in its path. The landscape was sad, stretching flat…
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Maratha Ditch
Savitri hummed the ancient Bengali lullaby – “Khoka ghumalo, para juralo, Bargi elo deshe. Bulbulite dhan kheyechhe, khazna debo kishe? (My boy has fallen asleep, silence has set in the locality, the Bargis have come to our state. Passerine songbirds have eaten the rice grains, how shall I pay my taxes?) She was trying to make…
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Gopi And The Tank
Gopi Chand emerged from the pitch dark bowels of one of the four compartments of the world’s largest elevated steel drinking water tank, at a height of 110 feet from the ground level. His livelihood could be easily featured in the ‘World’s scariest jobs’ list, however, hardly any of the 10.5 million people whose lives…
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House Of The Living Dolls
There is a house near the Shovabazar jetty on the banks of the mighty river Ganges, in the postcolonial city of Kolkata in India’s West Bengal state. Once it was a beauty to behold, a mansion of breathtaking artistry, a marvellous reflection of the Roman architectural style. A spectacle of wealth and power of the…
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Bridge On The River Kopai
A strong and assertive old-man stood on the edge of the Khoai, a canyon of purple geological rock formation naturally created by millions of years of effect of wind and water erosion on red laterite soil rich in iron oxide commonly found in the region. From, top of the purple hill the greybeard looked at the…
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Leopard On The Terrace
At 3:00 AM every morning Gopal Gaitonde would diligently answer to natures call. He believed the nocturnal hour was the ultimate to empty one’s internals of faecal waste. On missing this specific moment, his bowels would go bonkers for the rest of the day. Failing the sacred potty hour meant a day of total commotion…
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Across The Valley Through The Air
Taibok hung dangerously from the edge of the forest a thousand feet above the raging mountain river that flowed at the bottom of the cliff, on whose edge stood his small and obscure village. The hamlet lay in India’s northeastern state of Meghalaya, in the interiors of the dense East Khasi Hills near the modern-day…
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The Lighthouse
Khurram Kha anxiously glimpsed at the trickling sand in the hourglass. Glanced up towards the night sky, and then gazed at the frothy ivory waves lit up by the moonlight, lashing on the ancient and rugged rocky cliff-shore, on which stood his lighthouse, and finally looked at his daughter standing on the edge of the…
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Haunting Howls of Hanabari
About forty-kilometres north of the city of Kolkata on the west bank of the two-hundred-sixty-kilometres-long river Bhāgirathi-Hooghly, a distributary of the mighty Ganges in the state of West Bengal in India lies a once important port town during the pre-colonial times, the ancient borough of Hooghly-Chinsurah city. Hooghly was founded right after the decline of…
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Donali – The Shotgun Of Haider Ali
In 1904 in the city of Defiance in the state of Ohio in the East North Central region of the Midwestern United States, Daniel Myron Lefever and his sons Charles, Frank, and George crafted some of the best shotguns ever made. Almost one-hundred years later in the year 2000, one of those original guns, a…
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Poetay
At four every morning the severely annoying sound of a gradually intensifying, prolonged and near-deafening yawn would obliterate the tranquillity of a sleepy northern neighbourhood slowly waking up to face another day in the cosmopolitan city of Kolkata in the eastern armpit of the Indian subcontinent. A solid ten minute of thunderous “Hh uuu aaaa wwwww…
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The Blue Indians
The year is 3,300 BC, Bronze Age begins in the Near East. The passage tomb of Newgrange is built on the north side of the River Boyne in Ireland. The Ness of Brodgar is built in the Heart of Neolithic Orkney in Scotland. The Harappan Civilisation of the Indus Valley dawns in the Punjab province…
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Bandook Gali – Gun Lane
Fourteen-year-old Abadan finds a one-hundred-year-old Mauser Construktion 96 semi-automatic broom-handle pistol encased in its legendary walnut holster cum detachable shoulder-butt, wrapped in a disintegrating rag with the faded tag – Messrs Rodda & Company, buried under a rock in the garden inside the Zoroastrian fire temple of Anjuman Atash Adran. The year was 2014, and the…
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The Crossing
A sudden burst of wind revealed the silhouette of a man lying huddled and hidden under the silver desert sand. Visible by the light of a million dotted stars and the enchanting midnight moon magnified in the backdrop of the nomadic night sky painted in hues of lilac, turquoise and electric blue. A night in…
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Midnight Swimmers
On the eve of Christmas in 1892, a young monk from Kolkata jumped into the shark-infested waters of the Indian Ocean off the shores of Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu at the southernmost tip of the Indian peninsula. He swam across to a rock perched in the middle of the rough waters, but what did he…
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Ramkingkong
Standing seven and a half feet tall and carrying a weight of one hundred and fifty-seven kilograms, eighty-two-year-old Ramkingkong was not your average Homosapien. He was more like an ancient Nephilim out of the book of Genesis from the Bible – a giant offspring of the sons of God and daughters of men. The old…
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Rooftop Ruffians
At about the same time that David Belle was inventing the acrobatic training discipline of Parkour in France in 1988, a much cruder and somewhat hilarious version of the same was emerging on the rooftops of closely stacked houses in the northern crannies of the port city of Kolkata. Similar to the Yamakasi – the nine founding…
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Mudskippers
Brothers Kada and Mati were abandoned as babies on the muddy banks of the river Ganges in the Shovabazar area of nostalgic North Kolkata. While some thought them to be the unwanted seeds of a prostitute from neighbouring Shonagachi, Asia’s largest flesh-market, others believed them to be Demigods, sons of the Goddess Ganges herself. It was a wet and cold August night in 1980. Chandrabhanu Pal, a…
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Derinchi
Derinchi was your everyday midget – the but-end of ‘short’ jokes. A daily dose of entertainment for the village bullies. Growing up with short stature, the dwarf had learnt to live a life of indifference and mockery. Take his name for instance – Der-inchi, which meant one-and-a-half-inch in the native tongue, was enough to add fuel to the…
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Fish n Rice
Bipin Bihari Choudharee belonged to a very particular breed of endangered Bengalis. A dying pedigree reminiscent of the bygone days of the Zamindars and ‘babu-culture’. A typical Bong in many ways and unique in some very distinctive traits. Residing in his ancestral home – a dying palatial facade in Goabagan, north Kolkata, Bipin had never left the ‘City of Joy’. The septuagenarian…
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Weekend Stories by Trishikh 