I was a village boy who grew up perhaps more privileged than others of his age, yet deprived in many ways that couldn’t be compensated for with the privileges I inherited. Lata was not a face you remembered in a crowd, nor a personality to stand out in a conversation. I had seen her grow up, from a shy, unsure child to a confident woman right before my eyes. How would I even remember the first day I met her? She had been in my life for as long as I could remember. How can I, at the sunset of my days, begin to write a love story? That too...my own? Don’t get me wrong, but unrealistic fiction like love stories is not my forte. The romance they describe, I find it hard to relate to. I prefer my writings to be raw, real and emotional. I am best known for my political and social writings.
For most of my preferred “good life”, I have been tucked in my little corner of this vast world, my comfort zone, without regrets about not knowing the world outside it. Our village “Punnya'' literally meaning virtue, was in a very isolated corner of Birbhum’s Labpur Upozilla, away from the hustle of the big cities, rising industrial hubs and the unrest of East Pakistan. The only “trouble” we encountered now and then was the Naxalites in the plateaus. The house, often called Bhattacharjee Bari, stood in the middle of a vast property till 1951, until our financial crisis prompted us to sell off parts of the land. New houses sprang up around ours. A new neighbourhood saw new faces, and village life also changed quite a bit. At least that’s what Thamma kept repeating anyway. Respected people from cities and other villages further east came seeking a place to be rooted in Punya because of the partition.
I was probably five when the Chattopadhyay family (called Chattuje in our village dialect) built their two-storey house across the street. They were from Chottogram, which was now further away in reality than in distance. The men had found work in the government refugee schemes. Their small, round white balcony overlooked our red-coloured Singhadwar. I remember sitting at my desk, looking through the window in my room, and getting irked by the dust, noise and dirt of construction. They had moved in soon after, a quiet family with nothing to tell them apart from the rest of the village. I don’t remember much of how we became close. Was it when we had our own tragedies? Or before that?
