Though the wrinkles on the skin of Ranen Pramanik added a few years to his age, he otherwise was nearing fifty. His wife collecting ‘meen,’ the shrimp seeds, during the ebbtide in the Sundarban delta was easy prey for the hungry tiger. With a few other men, he had spent days, trying to hunt the assailant, who remained a ghost.
Many rains came and went, the tides rose and ebbed almost in a clock-like precision. Ranen had only one goal, to educate his little girl and marry her far away from the marshy mangroves. Ranen ran a small eatery selling Biriyani and tea to the villagers and the visitors.
Today he was travelling in an open truck, carrying bamboos to Kolkata. They will be building a big pandal as the abode of Durga. He and a few other men in the next few hours removed the long bamboos, unloading them carefully and stacking them where told. He will ride back in the empty truck, returning to the village tired but had to wake up early to load another few hundred pieces and come to Kolkata. The hunger of the city for anything was great. It amazed the Ranen. That was the season for booking and accumulating the bamboos required in huge numbers for the pandals. Everyone hurried to grab the best and straight bamboos, which his village and vicinities could provide.
Covid was prevalent, and Ranen too was wearing a mask, though not a clean one, which he thought he could not afford, saving every paise for his daughter. A pandal official and a kind soul engaged with the man while supervising the work. He offered a stall to Ranen to trade some food items during the pujas. “How can I babu,” Ranen had almost declined, but for the coaxing of the other. “The profit could be in lakhs!”
Ranen was never greedy in his life, but he also knew Gods were too busy for people like him. Ordinarily, his daughter may be married in a poor family, and at best could get a maid’s job in some household. He had become poorer in the Amphan cyclone and had to rebuild his broken dwelling and shop and had exhausted all his savings. He could not borrow from his villagers, who were as much poor and had to rely on their daily income to support their lives. He met a lender, who readily gave the required sum, though large in any village context. Surely a puja food stall was a sure win for all.
The stall looked good. Ranen had even to fit CCTV cameras as mandated. The Rs. 600 per 5 kilos rice bag suitable for the Biriyani sold now for more than a thousand rupees, and so were all other ingredients. Ranen’s Biriyani was not a famous brand, but he cherished it. He would offer the best or nothing. The inputs were all in place; gas cylinders, large utensils, cut vegetables, cubed chicken et al. Ranen had hired a few helpers, cleaners as well to manage the rush. Ranen was himself a hired hand in one such stall the previous year and had seen the unending hungry crowds descending on the food stalls until the wee hours of each next morning.
The few hundred kilos of Biriyani would sell-off in the first two or three hours when he would prepare the second batch. The precooked rice was ready for the second batch and a third too.
Elsewhere, the court was busy hearing and finally decided that pandals be treated at par with contagion regions. Covid contagion had to be stopped and was more important than the festivities. No-entry boards and ropes came up everywhere. There were only policemen all around, in white, in khaki and few other colours, most identifiable either with a helmet or with a lathi. The pandal official was busy with his woes, and Ranen’s was only a small issue then. The court stood firm in its stand of making pandals a no-go zone for all outsiders.
The usual merriment went missing. The local trains did not run, severely restricting the arrival of millions into Kolkata city, hop from pandal to pandal and relish mouth-watering delicacies, including Ranen’s Biriyani.
Ranen sat like a statue, he tried even offering his Rs.100 a plate biriyani for Rs.25, but there had to be people, and there were none. The warm, humid climate rendered the hot steaming rice, laced with spices and chicken slowly putrid. His hired hands were all sleeping soundly. They had no plates to wash, no money to count and no work at all.
No truck will take him back to his village as the city went into a virtual no-ply zone. There were bamboos, hidden inside the façade of the sparkle of the pandals; there were bamboos as barricades and dividers. There were bamboos and only bamboos everywhere.
No media could connect the vast quantities of Biriyani dumped in the garbage vat near a Kolkata puja and a floating body near Pakhiralaya in Sundarban’s marshy mangroves.
P.S.: the death in the plot is imaginary, but the losses suffered by a man from Sundarban is for real. Such losses of assets or lives could be averted only when the authorities, the judiciary, the legislature and the executive work in tandem and well in advance!
Sampath Kumar
Intrépide Voix
