Stray Thoughts

After more than 30 years I spent 17th September or Biswakarma Puja in Kolkata. Ever since I came to Kolkata as a nine-year old this day has been a red-letter day for me. I had fallen in love with kites in Delhi but as a kid most of my efforts at that age nose-dived into the ground. In Kolkata I had first tried to fly kites from the balcony of our flat on the third floor. My mother worried that I would tip over gave me permission to go to the roof above the fourth floor, and it was like being in a child’s heaven. Getting the kite to soar up with the lightest lift or ‘dharai’ from my brother was easy. I learnt how to balance the two wings by adding a small twist paper to one or bending the bow stretched across so that the kite wouldn’t tilt and loop. The other important skill that I quickly picked up was to repair kites with paper and rice, since we were still novices and would damage many kites.  We had come to Kolkata in June, if I remember correctly and September came swiftly. I v...

After twenty long years we spent the monsoon in the hills. In the last twenty years we have visited the Himalayas either to escape from the burning heat of the plains or to enjoy the view of the magnificent snow peaks. We had usually avoided the period between mid-June to early October and I remember one time when we managed to leave just before the flash floods and landslides hit the region. This time we were finally able to reach our home in Uttarakhand, after the lockdown after the second wave was relaxed, and it was already June. Technically monsoon was still some days away, but it started raining from the day we arrived. The area had been starved of rain for nine months, but the villagers felt this was untimely rain. The potato crop was nearly ready for harvest, and a few more days of sun would have been perfect for the potato to mature. It rained incessantly for about the week and fearing that the potato would start rotting in the fields the villagers started digging it up. Unfor...