The Inverted Ashvattha

Not so long ago, in a pretty little village quaintly nestled in the bosom of nature, occurred a phenomenon most extraordinaire. Back in the day, ‘Sonarpur,’ literally meaning the ‘land of gold,’ was just another unassuming farming coterie in the rural hinterlands of the South 24 Parganas district of the state of West Bengal in…

Haji Harry

In the 980th year of the 2nd millennium of the Anno Domini, the 80th year of the 20th century, the leap year of our Lord 1980, a frail and strange-looking tiny boy was born to a mentally unstable beggar lady in a flimsy cloth shanty beside the Belur Math Kali Temple on the banks of the…

Goddess Of Mud And Flesh

It was a cold and shivering night on the last day of December in Anno Domini 1980. A young and frail woman in tattered clothes stood at the edge of the water of the Kumortuli Bathing Ghat on the banks of the River Hooghly in India’s Calcutta city. Close to her tormented bosom, she held…

The Dom And The Goddess

In the year 1690 on the banks of the river Bhāgirathi-Hooghly locally known as the Kali-Ganga or Ganges in the ancient village of Sutanuti or India’s present-day Kolkata city stood a mesmerising idol of the Hindu Goddess Kali under the shade of a bowing colossal Neem tree. The appearance of the idol was simply bone-chilling. Her…

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…