1974, north Calcutta. The city was trying to shake off the aftermath of the terrible days of the Naxalite uprising. You could hear boys playing football in the fields again. On the raised concrete porches attached to the houses on the side of the footpaths, the evening chat sessions have begun again. Kali-babu’s tea stall at the central crossing of the locality is buzzing. In that neighbourhood of the dimly-lit, narrowest alleys and houses with old, moth-eaten walls, of the low doors and the high stairs, Tanmay-da was an ideal young man for all of us. He came from a joint family in which his father and uncles lived under the same roof. Their three-storied, dilapidated rented house was always abuzz. On the ground floor, you could hear the third scion playing his Sitar, on the second story the fourth demanded that another cup of tea be served immediately while on the first story the eldest brother would take a few puffs at his country-made cigarette with a gentle yet mischievous smile on...

I met Navrang Patil in a BSF camp in North Bengal. “ Ehan baqaida achha khana banta hai,” (good food is made here following the rules of cooking ) quipped Patil as he took me into their make-shift thatched kitchen. His zest for life was infectious and the smell of fresh chapatis entered my nostrils and stirred up my appetite. Life at the camp was hard, as hard as the brown edges of the earthen oven. The hardened edges of the oven. The men were hardened too, living on the edge all the time. Patil showed me a ten-by-ten pit dug on earth and protected by another two-feet-deep moat. “We lie here at night when on duty,” he said. This was a device to keep the snakes away, I was told. But that Assistant Commandant of the BSF slogging away at the remote border outpost at Gobrabil must have been more interested in the stars last night while he lay on that square piece of earth. Snakes were far from his mind. The arrangement of the stars were like those cone-shaped pillars marking the border – ...

If you follow the narrow, crimson path off the state highway at Banspahari in Midnapore, if you cross the Dhenkia river and travel towards the sal and mahua forests, the serpentine path will ultimately take you to Dhenkia village at the foot of the hillocks. That path was once a concrete road — now so freckled with broken patches and potholes that for the entire stretch of your travel, it will appear as a huge red serpent in front of you, a snake that travels on its zigzag way into the forest. Near the hillocks is the Dhenkia village. Absolute silence reigns there. Silence and the sound of the wind and the dove’s call. On that footway as you approach the village, surely will you find Jamuna’s mother. The sickle in her hand shines as brightly as her teeth. She cuts babui grass and makes babui ropes. Now that the fields are bare, autumn’s basket is filled everywhere with keona flowers, the staple food of the villagers. You’ll have open fields here for as far as your eyes will travel — fi...