Kolkata is an old, dirty and polluted city. But every day I find something or the other that endears me to this city even more. One day it was the old grandpa who was sitting outside his home, literally on his doorpost, at noon, trying to read a Bengali newspaper while dozing off every ten seconds. Another day, it is the uncle who sells vegetables, who painstakingly gets up from his perch to hang his weighing balance and weighs half a kg of potato for me. It is the grumpy uncle I see in the aisles of the British Library who moves around with his walking stick and carefully extracts books from shelves and pores over them in the hope of finding his next best read. Oh, how can I forget the taxi dada who came back to wait at the gate in the hopes that I will come running back to the same spot he dropped me to get my forgotten cell phone. (I did, but that's a whole story for another day) It is in the permeating fragrance of paalappookkal that covers the footpaths and makes me st
No, I am not talking about the second-row bench in the seventh standard classroom of my high school which I was made to climb for disturbing class decorum. That only taught me how to talk in class without getting caught. I am talking about the two benches that adorned either side of our huge dining table once upon a time. One was strong and sturdy. The other one was a tiny rickety bench on unsteady legs that played seesaw every time one of us placed our bottom on it. This is much before the time when dining benches became fashionable. Every furniture catalogue that I see nowadays has a dining set with one bench, mostly cushioned affairs. Dining benches, entryway benches, balcony benches are all back in vogue now. But we had plain and simple wooden benches who witnessed a lot in their long lives. Early mornings, you could find my drowsy-eyed, sleepy headed brother perched on one of its ends with a Cibaca toothbrush sticking out of his mouth, refusing to fully wake up.