Sometimes when all modern technologies like social media, Google maps and GPS fail, you resort to manual labor. Had a surprising outcome today trying to do that.

Having failed to track down Anindya – my friend from my very early childhood days, today I went to the house that he used to live in the mid seventies (that I could best recollect).

A middle aged person came out, rather amused by my look (clean shaven heads are not that common in North Avenue of Durgapur). “Kaakey chai”? (“Who are you looking for”?)

I tried my best to explain the situation – “Dekhoon, prai chollis bochor aage, ei baaritey Babu boley ekta chhele thakto. Bhalo naam Anindya Sarkar. Kothay ekhon thakey jaanen? Ba ke boltey paarbey jaanen”?. (“You see, forty years back, there used to be a friend of mine called Babu who lived in this house. Also called Anindya Sarkar. Would you know where he is now? Or would you know who might know his whereabouts”?

You can only imagine my reaction when the gentleman replied “Aarey Bachchu, amakey chintey paarli na? Babuda rey!!! (“Bachchu, can you not recognize me? I AM that Babuda”)

He has lived in the same house for nearly fifty years. And I had been looking for him all over social media!!!!

Thanks to modern technologies like FB and GPS and not so modern technologies like stopping a pedestrian and asking for directions, my brother and I last evening traced down another friend of mine from the early eighties – Kaushik Chatterjee!! I was fortunate to meet his parents as well as his sister who was visiting him. (His sister was all of five or six years when I left town).

Again, so many memorable moments of yesteryears were remembered in one evening that I cannot possibly jot them down.

However, the most enjoyed one was not about all those soccer games, cricket games, “pochisey boisakh” street drama events but a really hapless, sick streetdog was called “Tilka”. Kind of half adopted by a few neighbors – and by that, I mean the neighbors would yell for Tilka from the streets to eat some leftover food from lunch and dinner – this mutt was a common feature on the field during our games. And every winter around this time, she would have a litter of puppies that we – at that age – used to find to be the cutest thing ever!! Kaushik’s mom used to be very supportive of those puppies – offering rags, milk etc etc.

Speaking of playing cricket, uncle (Kaushik’s dad) had taken great sympathy towards us watching us play cricket with a bat that had outlived itself by a thousand years (those days parents buying us a bat was a rare luxury – there were way too many family priorities at every house before we could buy a bat) and unbelievably enough had actually carved a bat and three stumps out of a block of wood.
That “segun gaachher kaather” bat outlasted us and the next generation of kids from my neighborhood.

Thirty two years later, I am mature enough to understand his depths of empathy to prioritize our needs in the field over so many other things he had to do. Thirty two years later I got a chance to meet him face to face and thank him. I let him know I still think of that event as an example if why I should step back and create some enriching experience for kids!!!

Reignited one more “intersection point”. This time it was “Noton” – Debashish Chakraborty – my next door neighbor in our second house in Durgapur. Our houses were separated by a fence – part of it was concrete and part of it was wired.

Having known Noton during an impressionable part of my childhood – grades seven thru tenth (and then I left home for a residential school), I have some of the best memories of times spent together. Today, we laughed non stop for over an hour remembering some of the old incidents…

One of them was a project we did during a summer vacation. During a long day that summer, we hatched a plan – almost like Phineas and Ferb – on how to communicate with each other without meeting face to face. Not that in of itself, communication was an issue. I could yell out his name from my bedroom and he could hear me from his bedroom – the houses were barely 10 feet away. And in India, we always kept our doors and windows open. But it was about doing something nobody else had.

Also, it is important to remember that modern amenities like landline phones had not yet penetrated our town yet and mobile phones were yet to be discovered. In the end, after great trials and tribulations, we came up with a rather simple – yet what we thought in those days to be very elegant – solution. We tied a long nylon rope (that I had to get my mom to give me 50 paisa for to buy from Jhilmil – but that was the entire capital expenditure we had 🙂 ) around two closest windows – one theirs and one ours. And in between, we had tied an ordinary match box.

The idea being, anytime we wanted to communicate, we would just keep pulling the rope on one side and the matchbox – with our missives put inside it – would gently make its way to the other house. Pretty much like how we pulled water from well – except we had a “closed loop” here.

That is not to say that it did not have its own engineering difficulties. For one, the closest line between the windows went over that part of our fence that was concrete. And the height was higher than the window points. This vexed us no end – since we often broke the match box as we tried to cajole it to jump the fence. Eventually, we ran out of our cumulative engineering prowess and called in “Tutu” (Dipten Sarkar – by the way, whatever happened to him??) – who lived a few houses down, was two years my junior and a genius at mechanical problems. Of course, genius as decided by seventh graders and fifth graders.

Tutu, true to his reputation, surveyed the situation and came up with a sophisticated solution. He put in an anchor point with a bent nail hanging upside down on a nearby tree branch and had one of the loops of the string run thru it. Brilliant!! Noton and I scratched our heads that whole afternoon why we could not solve it ourselves.

Then our next problem was how to notify that the other person was ready to communicate. We had to come up with essentially our version of a “telephone ring”. The ingenuity of our solution was exceeded only by our pride in the ingenuity of our solution. We took two empty small aluminum tins (empty Shalimar coconut oil tins – if anybody remembers them) and then tied them to the two windows – one each. And we had a segment of a new piece of nylone rope tied to one of them and ran it to the other window with a free end. So, all I had to do was write a message, put it in the matchbox, pull it till it reached the other window and then keep tugging at the other rope. That would get the tin on his side to repeatedly hit the window grill and create a ruckus worthy of calling a Roman gathering at the marketplace! In any case, a return clanging back would signify “Over and out”! (more like.. “message received loud and clear. more loud than clear” 🙂 )

For all the breakthroughs in remote communication we achieved, our messages were particularly uninspiring and outright boring. “Ki korchhis” (“what are you doing”) would be the common message. We could have easily achieved that by take a couple of steps to our fence and yelling out each other’s names and asking that question. Or send some silly hand drawn pictures – an early harbinger of Instagram or Snapchat, perhaps. But it was not about the message ever!!

Soon, that contraption’s news spread far and wide. And by that I mean about six houses down on either side. There were more ambitious projects that we thought about – for example: going across from one side of the street to the other – but we were very afraid of the live open electric wires that ran on the interfering poles.

By now, you are probably wondering whatever happened to that invention of ours. Ah! well, we could not bask in our glory for too long. For every ingenious invention, there is an obvious blindspot that unwinds it.

You see, by inventing the “telephone-ring-by-a-tin-can”, we also unwittingly invented “highly-unwanted-calls-announced-by-a-tin-can”. Or the equivalent of those modern irritating marketing calls.

What I have been remiss in mentioning is that the window on Noton’s side was in his dad’s bedroom. That summer month, one afternoon, I sent a message (I forget the contents since the subsequent events overshadowed the message) in the afternoon at a very ill considered hour. Well, ill considered if you factor in that his dad was sleeping at that time 🙁

While all that tin clanging did not get the Romans to file into the marketplace, it certainly set in motion a set of events that had Noton filing into his irate and rudely awakened dad’s presence. Let me just say that that evening, after a sombre tete-e-tete, we both agreed that we had compelling reasons to believe that our inventions were way ahead of our times.

And the next morning, we decommissoned and deconstructed our project for that summer.

Simple times. Simple pleasures.