AbsurdAnce!

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