Of Bicycles, Boulevards, and Freedom: Tales from Home

 The library shuts down at five on Fridays, and one is left with little to do for the rest of the evening. You could buy yourself a paper-bag-full of raw mango slices sprinkled with chilli powder and salt and watch the sunset from the banks of Khoai. Or you could bike your way across the length of the campus, the well-lit neighborhoods of Sreepally, and past the empty grounds of the madrasa to reach home before the first warnings of approaching sundown. 


One of my favorite lectures from our freshman year at University was on oral histories and the discursive construction of historical memory. It does make for a fascinating subject of study- the individual subjectivity of memory- how one remembers faces, instances and snatches of songs or dialogues from certain wholes. That particular lecture, and the many questions our professor brought up on the dialectics of memory keep coming back as I try to reflect on how I choose to remember my home. 


"Travelling" includes, for me, home-coming, a 3-hour-long affair across 170 kilometers of rail-road. And from each of these "trips" I manage to collect memories so fragmentary in nature, that they would converge to make only an incoherent muddle of nostalgia and gloom. 

The spectacle of memory brings back an assortment of faces and bodies- the warm smile of one running a moveable tea-shack outside sangeet-bhavana, the desperate hand gestures of a lady selling cane chairs outside Gate 1, and the shifting expressions of a scholar trying to decode an essay on 'myths' in the library. And the roads. At five thirty on a weekday morning, cyclists- school-goers, office-goers, and shifty flower-pickers- bike down the Santiniketan road in a manner that is hardly indicative of any urgency. Everyone seems cheerful, and the jubiliance is contagious. As if one of them bikers would just stop and pull out from their shirt-pockets bunches of bougainvillea to make you smile, like a friend from fifth-grade once did after a particularly depressing 'surprise test'.  



Perched on hard, wooden stools in a room bereft of any curtains, we savor mouthfuls of bread dipped in rich gravy. The windows overlook the dark highway, and far from where we live, across the fields and groves of Sal trees, is a town that shimmers like the solitary survivor of an apocalypse. Music from the huts of Bauls cease with approaching nightfall, and smoke rises from their humble little establishments. We collect our keys and step out of the house.


Like fleeing jailbirds embracing freedom, we race down the unlit lanes on our bikes.

Comparative Literature major, self-certified coffee connoisseur.

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