They carried a carton wrapped in old newspaper, the dull thud of shoes on stone echoed in the narrow lane as the young couple and their teenage daughter climbed the stairs of their small rented room in the Bhowanipore area of Kolkata in 1990. Outside, the morning brooded with humidity, and the smell of damp…
Tag: bengali
Unseen Lines – The Haque and Bose Story
The monsoon had just lifted above the Calcutta sky of 1896, leaving behind a smell that was half ink, half sweat, and half the ghosts of mangoes gone to rot. Inside a narrow room of the Anthropometric Bureau, located in the British colonial Writer’s Building, ceiling fans creaked like lazy sentinels, and the light from…
Mardini
A flash of lightning revealed the silhouette of an eight-foot giant, standing like a mountain, unaffected by the thundering storm that lashed his unusual and coarse, dark-grey skin. He moved with unfathomable stealth, speed, and agility against the backdrop of flashing dark and silver streaks created by the light and shadow of the raging tempest….
The Harmonium’s Melody
It is 1980, a contrasting era of political turbulence and cultural vibrancy in the bustling city of Calcutta in the Indian subcontinent – a boiling cauldron of various races, religions, and philosophies. A twenty-year-old man with a pair of unusual light brown eyes peers down at a broken bellowed instrument through the murky glass of…
Bula’di
“Modern Indian women do not like to wear the saree Bula’di. It is 2011 and not 1971. We prefer jeans and a top. Further, the saree is neither sporty nor comfortable. It restricts one’s mobility,” smartly commented twelve-year-old Nehusta. “Stop calling your grandma Bula’di, child. Please call her granny. You address your elder sister as ‘Di’ and…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Weekend Stories by Trishikh 