No trip to Durgapur is ever complete without spending a few minutes with Utsab. He is the only son of Baisakhi – my friend from early school days. Baisakhi also has another connection with us thru my sister. She, her two twin siblings and my sister were/are all singers. In fact, they learnt music from the same teacher at one stage of their lives.

Utsab and I have the weirdest topics that we chat about. First and foremost there are the cars. He is an incredible walking and talking encyclopedia of cars. And I barely know which side of the car to sit in to drive it. But I am amazed by his understanding of the mechanical aspects of how an engine works, the differences between the types of cars and details that only an aficionado can master.

From there we move on to other topics. Last time I remember we had talked about his favorite subjects. Baisakhi was not at home. Utsab had not even gotten up from bed. He continued to lay in his bed and I sat next to him and kept chatting. This time the topic was about an animated Robotics game that he is coding. In fact he showed me some of his code on his computer.

I pulled together the sum total of programming knowledge I have gathered over the years and asked “Are there any bugs?” 🙂 It looked like a scripting language to me. He let me know that it was based on Java. This guy has just gotten into his teenage years only a couple of years back. And he is already doing computer programming. I have seen this in US too – kids coding at a very early age. At that age, if you had told me “Java”, the first thing I would have said is “motorcycle” (folks from my era will know what I am referring to).

As you can see from the picture, I responded with the one technology trick I know – how to control my phone camera from my watch. For all that, Baisakhi wrote back later saying “Utsab thinks you are a superhero”.

As long as he has no undue expectations that I will go around slaying villains wily nilly in the streets of Durgapur, I can live with it!!

Impressionable, young minds, I tell you.

I arrived in Bengal about a couple of days after the Kali Pujo festival. While in Durgapur, I realized that some of the festivities were still going on. That brought back nostalgic memories from three and a half decades back. Went to the old neighborhood I used to live in to see if any of the Pujos were still going on. I am glad I did. While all the local set ups were being brought down, the neighborhoods were all lit up still with all sorts of colorful lights. And there were those occasional firecrackers bursting from different houses which reminded me of what I used to enjoy most about Kali Pujo.

Met the only guy – about ten years my junior – who still lives in the neighborhood. And then decided to go to the house we used to live in. I got to know the folks who live there a few years back. They knew us though. Their two daughters – Antara and Sanchari – were both my mom’s students in the local elementary school. Also, I believe my brother taught Sanchari math in her high school days.

The best part was realizing that Antara was visiting her parents with her husband and her young kid – Chiku, I believe they call him (the kid, not the husband). When I walked in, while everybody was excited (at least they put a smile on), Chiku was in a cranky mood. He had just gotten up from afternoon nap and was still coming to terms with the new evening. After a few minutes of exchanging pleasantries among the adults and Chiku clinging on to his dad, I asked him “Wanna play ball?”

Something stirred in him. He stopped doing whatever it is that he was doing, kept looking at me as if he was trying to trigger some memories and then gave a smile and asked his grandmother to get him his ball. And then the two of us played together for some time. He would not even let me go. So I took him for a walk to the main road to check out all the bright lights.

Eventually, I had to take leave. You can see in the picture that he was the least interested in the picture. That was cutting in to his ball time.

Here is another of those “intersection point” stories. There was a reason Chiku remembered something when I said “Wanna play ball”. You see Antara – who moved into our neighborhood in Durgapur (in fact the same house as ours) about 25 years back – now lives in the US. Coincidentally, a few months back, she moved from North Carolina to Atlanta. In fact, her house is very close to where we live.

I had gone to visit her right after they moved in. That day too Chiku was cranky after getting up from his afternoon nap. I remember picking up a ball from the floor and asking him “Wanna play ball?”. For whatever reason, that earned his trust and we played ball for quite some time that afternoon. That is what he must have remembered!

I think his memory cells for ever will associate me with afternoon naps, crankiness and a ball!!

I guess it is my brother’s turn to teach him math now!!!

One of the common ways that I barge into a stranger’s house is “Masi, aapni amaay chinben na”. Meaning, Ma’m, you don’t know me. Not the most reassuring of getting oneself introduced to an elderly person. But a fifty three year old wearing shorts and with a shaved head usually evokes sentiments closer to mild laughter than of any fear.

This once though, the lady replied in Bengali – “You are Rajib Roy, right? My son has already told me about you.”.

This meeting has roots in another meeting about a couple of weeks back. I was in San Francisco and in between office meetings, managed to meet Debjit Sarkar. I almost did not meet him and if it were not for a much delayed flight, I would have surely not met him. We grabbed a coffee at a Starbucks that was very close to both our offices and then caught up .

“So, how exactly do I know you?”, I asked. You would think that when I have been greeting somebody happy birthday for years and have often talked about career choices and all that, I would remember how I know the person. I did not. That had never stopped me from having great conversations with Debjit over the phone though.

Turns out Debjit and I worked in the same company in Dallas. In fact, we lived not too far from each other. I could not recollect running into him but he remembered me. Found out a few more connections I had with him. He worked with another friend of mine – Sanjay – (who was in my school in elementary days and – again, in another coincidence – lived in Dallas for some time) in Delhi and in fact attended his wedding with Anita (both Sanjay and Anita knew Sharmila since they were all in the same engineering school).

We also found out that about ten years later, I used to go his office building in California when he worked in a bank. That bank was a big customer of mine (when I worked in a company in Atlanta) and all the time that I visited that office, never realized Debjit was there too!

As another point of connection, I also found out that Debjit grew up in the small town of Kalyani, where my parents live – as does my sister. In fact, his mom lives literally a few minutes walk from where my dad and sister lives. I had promised Debjit that I will go check in on his mom next time I was in Kalyani.

And that is how I met Mrs. Sarkar for the first time! Took my sister with me too. We were both impressed how fit and alert Mrs. Sarkar was for her age. In fact, she had just come back from a vacation trip to the other end of India a couple of days back. Unfortunately, I could not meet Debjit’s dad who left us last year. But I was happy to hear that Mrs. Sarkar might be visiting America soon. Would be great to catch up with her again!