I am sure there is a “tell-tale” story behind why my brother in law was trying to “shoot an apple”, but I do not believe I will ever know!

After the big gathering of cousins from dad side, my brother-in-law’s (Sharmila’s brother) family showed up. My sister and other brother-in-law hung around for a little while and left. I did not get a chance to take a picture of all of us together before they left.

This is from my dad’s side. Three surviving first cousins and five first cousins, once removed.

Some of them I am seeing for the first time, some for the second time and most after many decades. In fact, I am sure that the last time the first cousins and my own siblings and I sat down at a table together had to be back in our paternal village.

The best part was getting to know my first cousins, once removed. Always impressed by the new generation!

As I have noted before, this trip to India in the post-parent era is focused on catching up with as many relatives as I can – the families of my father’s and mother’s siblings.

I hit a high note right in the beginning when, before I could meet any relatives, the moment I stepped out of the elevator, I ran into my old friend Tathagata and his daughter Tia from Dallas days!! Apparently, there are here to meet family too!!

I have fourteen first cousins in all. They all live within about 80 miles of each other – other than the eldest one, who is no more. I am fairly close to all of them. Except one! Who I had not met in my entire life!! Till today!! Two decades my junior, I am not sure I have talked to her much ever by phone either. This time, over Whatsapp, we had arranged for me to meet her first among all my first cousins!

Going by some of the pictures below, you would not have realized that we do not get to see each other much!! Most of the laughter was around remembering stories of my parents’ siblings!!

Much like in the South (of USA), where we take something as healthy as a green tomato and then proceed to fry it, if there is a singular purpose Bengali food stands to serve, it has to be to scoff at your best cholesterol limiting medicines. You can name any food – let’s say “aloo” (potato) or “maach” (fish) or “dim” (egg) or go to more esoteric “uchhey” (bitter gourd), “kumro” (simple gourd), “begun” (egg plant), “potol” (need to find the English word)… You just throw in a suffix “-bhaja” at the end and yep! you have gotten yourself a delicious Bengali dish.

Add a healthy dose of white rice, your expertise in mixing that with the “bhajas” like an expert masseur’s bare fingers kneading thru your tight muscles and you have successfully created the first course of a Bengali meal. The last course is usually an antacid. For every Bengali meal worth writing home about is bookended by a loud burp first and then an “ombol” – acid induced indigestion – a couple of hours later.

You will get an idea about how frying is deeply embedded in our psyche when I tell you how many of our idioms involve frying. You are just being lazy? That is frying “bheranda”. Because we tend to be very lazy (but intellectually sharp), we have another one to separate the degrees of laziness – frying “khoi”. Want to prove innocence? You do not know how to turn your fried “maach” over to eat it. And so on and so forth…

After finishing up with DN, I went down to see if I could get myself a light dinner. There is nothing light about the full spread of a JW Marriott dinner. By the time I am done surveying what is on display, I usually forget what I had seen in the first half. So, to narrow my scope, I went straight to the Bengali corner.

Not to be disappointed, you can see (the picture is a little indistinct) your familiar – “jhuri aloo-bhaja”, “potol-bhaja”, “begun-bhaja”, “corola-bhaja”, “eta-bhaja”, “seta-bhaja” … and then the rice!!

Somehow felt very comforted that I am back to my roots!!!

You may remember DN from an old post. He started as an assigned driver from the hotel I was staying in 1998 and today he and his family are intricately tied to my family, my brother’s family and with my parents when they were alive.

Brother was in Guwahati. So, DN was there at the airport to pick me up. As always, we were talking about his family on our drive to the hotel and he was asking after mine. At some point, I mentioned how Sharmila and I were enjoying our retired, empty nesting lives. I asked him what will he do when he retires and all kids are gone.

He said he will go back to Bihar (where he is from). I cast some doubts on his plans. Wouldn’t all his friends be here? Wouldn’t medical facilities be better here?

He felt that he was very close to his relatives in his village and other villagers in general. And that, somehow, people there respect him. That is where he wants to die.

Around that time – about 4:45PM, when he had started talking about his plans after his last daughter gets married, we arrived at our hotel. I had my evening free (I had kept it that way expecting jet lag to hit me hard) and my brother was still half a day away from meeting me.

“Aap shaam ko kya kar raha hai?” I asked (What are you doing this evening?)

“Kuch nahi. Aap kahin jaayenge?” (Nothing really. Do you want to go somewhere?)

“Nahi. Aaj to tired hoon. Aap gaari park karke lobby mein aa jaayie. Main check in kar leta hoon. Phir aap ke saath chai piyenge”

I asked him to park the car and come to the lobby. I will finish my checking in and join him for tea.

In reality, I did not even have to do that. Indrani (duty manager in the hotel) was ready with my keys and she sent the luggage straight to my room. I grabbed DN and went to the top floor to have some tea with him in the exec lounge. If you did not know this, Indian hotels, especially the big ones, are a consummate meeting points for smartly dressed folks who gather there just to hang around and enjoy all the facilities of a hotel – not to speak of the air conditioning in this oppressive hot and humid weather. And taking a lot of selfies of course. If those pictures did not go to social media, it is like that event had never even happened. So, the lobbies tend to be very crowded.

The lounge upstairs gave us a quiet refuge where we could sit and talk for a long time.

Which we did. For four straight hours!! Needless to say, I avoided the whole hysteresis curve of having coffee to wake up only to have wine and feel sleepy later. So, went for the Old Fashioned straight!!

However, in those four hours, I heard about DN’s post retirement dream. He took me thru his entire family chain starting from his grandfather and how his land was divided between his dad and his uncle and then how those have been further subdivided among their sons. (The daughters always get married off and they do not get any land).

He took me thru how he has divided his dad’s property between his younger brother, half-brother and himself. And his plans of building a house in his side of the land. At some point we were deep in Google Maps looking for Dharampur Asli in Bihar and then looked up his plot of land thru satellite pictures.

We were so engrossed in the story that we had some paper, pen and a pad brought up to sketch the whole plan of how the land has been divided in the family and where he was going to build his house after retirement.

By 9, I was too tired and he needed to go back home to his family.

While DN is no stranger to me, it felt enriching to talk to him about a part of his life that I was not exposed to at all!!!

And I did not even get to fly from here!!

Chennai was the first airport I got to visit. This was way back in 1988. Predictably, it looked nothing like the swanky look today of. Nonetheless, I remember it as a very imposing structure and I was mesmerised by the fact that the whole building was air conditioned. Funny thing is that I was not going to fly. In fact, I would not be taking the first flight of my life for another 3 years when I turned 25. I was there due to a mishap and one stranger’s incredible kindness.

Let me spool this back.

One afternoon around lunch time in college, I received a telegram. That simply said that my friend Pratyush’s dad had passed away and I was to send him home post haste. Pratyush is my dear friend from Durgapur and he was studying in HIET college in Guindy not too far from my college. His brother – Debatosh – had sent the message to me.

A bit rattled, I dressed up, went to the bank, withdrew some money and took one of those green PTC buses to head towards him. All the time thinking thru how was I going to give him the bad news. And I could not get over the fact that Mr. Paul who had passed away was actually with Pratyush and me in Chennai barely 48 hours back!! We had seen him off the previous day on the 8AM Coromandel Express!! Apparently he had died from a massive cardiac arrest after reaching home in Durgapur.

Anyways, I located Pratyush in his class, interrupted the professor and explained to him the situation, and brought back Pratyush to his room. I was helping him pack his suitcase as he continued to fight his tears back in a state of shock. All this time, I was thinking thru which train might get him home fastest. I was targeting Howrah Mail that night.

After getting all his things in order, he and I set out to go to the train station. A couple of his friends joined us to help me. There we were – standing at the bus stop – waiting for a bus to take us to Guindy station (from where we would proceed to Madras Central station). I was running thru in my mind Plan A, Plan B, Plan C and all that. We were unlikely to get a reservation. Should I send him by RAC? Put him on Waiting List? Go by next morning’s Coromandel? May be I can show the telegram to the train guard and get him to help us? This was going to be a 33 hour train ride after all!!

I had stepped into the road, impatiently looking at the direction of the bus when a cruising car came by. There was a young gentleman driving it. He seemed to have taken the car out to go for a nice drive. He was not in a hurry. He was by himself.

I stepped back on the pavement to give the car the right of the way. The car, for whatever reason, stopped next to us. There were nobody else near us. I figured he needed some directions. Instead, he asked us where were we going. I told him about Pratyush’s plight and that we needed to get to Guindy station quickly. Going out on a limb, I asked if he would be so kind as to drop us at the station – which would have been a 6 minute drive, tops.

He said sure. We all jumped in. I sat next to him. He asked me about what was going on. I gave him a lot more details – that Pratyush actually had to get to Durgapur. First stop would be Kolkata and that before all that I had to get him a ticket.

“Maybe I can drop you folks at Central Station, if you want?”

“No, no, we can manage by train,” I quickly replied. I was struck by his kindness and empathy. Just to be sure, I also knew it was five of us – so we were not likely to get into any danger.

“Okay”.

And he kept driving. Then he asked – “He has to reach as soon as possible, right?”

“Yes. I am not sure how long they will keep the body before cremating it.”

“Have you thought of flying him?”

“Well, no. I have no idea about airplanes. I do not even know how to buy a ticket. Let alone the price.”

“It will be about Rs 3000. You want to think about it?”

I looked around to the four others. Among the five of us, we did have that much cash.

“Let’s do it.”

There is one side story here. Pratyush and Debotosh always trusted my judgment and sense of responsibility. None of that was deserved, I am sure. But then, it was what it was. That is why it was I who had received the telegram and also why Pratyush had left me to make all the decisions.

With that firm decision, the gentleman turned around the car and sped towards the airport.

It was a very different feeling. I did not know what an airport looked like much less a flight ticket.

Presently, we pulled up to this big building and the gentleman parked the car right next to it. He took us to the ticketing counter and stepped back as I finished the transaction. I was impressed with a five page leaflet I got. There were three carbon copies of the ticket details in that booklet neatly bound together with two staples.

The gentleman offered to drop the rest of us back. We said we would hang around with Pratyush since he was not in a good mental state.

“That makes sense,” he said and went away. We waved at him as long as we could see the car.

Inside the airport – and in those days, it did not have all the strict security of today, I roamed around in complete amazement. Like I had mentioned, the air conditioning, the long glass walls, the smartly dressed people, the authoritative announcements, the no-nonsense CISF security – it was something that had me spellbound. But it was too expensive for me to try out in the near future.

As Sridhar dropped me at the airport today, I looked it up and down and took quite a few pictures musing to myself that this is exactly where I had seen my first airport and wished that someday I would be able to afford to fly!! Very out of the world feeling.

Incidentally, we never saw the gentleman again. Later, we had taken many a walk along the road hoping to spot a light blue Premier Padmini. Never did. That is a shame. We never got a chance to say Thank You properly to the stranger!