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…
Tag: west bengal
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Weekend Stories by Trishikh 