 Getting lost in Calcutta
January 1973
 During training in the National Academy, Administrative officers are taken for Chandra Kanta Gariyali, IASBharat Darshan (IndiaTour) to one of the regions of India. Usually a batch of thirty officers accompanied by a faculty member goes for a month-long train journey. A first class compartment becomes their home which is attached to different trains from destination to destination. Once in a while, the monotony is broken by a stay in a guest house or a circuit house which may be available.
I chose to go to Orissa, Bihar and Bengal, about which I knew very little. We had gone for fifteen days civil defense training to Nagpur and accompanied by Mr. Joshi our Hindi tutor in the Academy, headed for Rourkela, on Bharat Dharshan, from there itself.
Somewhere in the middle of the tour we were to visit Calcutta. Calcutta being always overcrowded, the District Administration could not find us a guest house. We stayed for a week in our compartment, shunted to a godforsaken part of the railway yard. We used to bathe in railway rest rooms and then leave for our day’s work which included a visit to Shantiniketan, paying a visit to the Writers Building, calling on Mr. Siddharth Shankar Ray and having tea and rasagullas with the Governor. Our next destination was
Asansol.
On the last day, we had no official programme and we were to leave for Asansol by the five o’clock train, to which our compartment was to be attached. My friend and room-mate Sudha Sinha was engaged to be married to Flight Lieutenant Anchalia. She had been hoping to go to the famous Bada Bazar in Calcutta and buy her trousseau. She wanted me to accompany her. With much reluctance, Joshiji granted us permission on the condition that we bring him rasagullas and Calcutta pan from Kalighat (near the famous Kali Temple). I promised to return with everything by four o’clock.
Bada Bazar is the biggest textile market in Calcutta, entirely owned by Marwari merchants. We spent an enchanting day there looking at thousands of sarees which had fallen around us in great heaps. While we enjoyed the hospitality of the Calcutta shopkeepers with cardomom tea, samosas and pakodi, we did not realize how the time flew and at four o’clock we were still in Bada
Bazar.
Suddenly we woke up like Cinderellas from our dream and jumped into a taxi to reach the Howrah station. We could only inch forward having got into one of the worst Calcutta jams. We spent another hour crossing the Howrah Bridge looking at the station and the trains coming and going in the distance. At last we arrived at six o’clock. The train had already left with our dear compartment, all our belongings and all our dear friends. We did not know what to do and where to go. While we were tossing a coin to decide whether to run to the chief minister or the governor we saw two of our batch mates Naveen Bajpai and Satinder Singh emerging, like two angels, from the crowds.
They told us how Joshi was fretting and fuming and inspite of that how they had literally jumped out of the moving train to stay back and fetch us. We said a loud prayer to the Gods for giving us such dear chivalrous friends. They rushed us into a fast moving train to Asansol, that with luck would enable us catch up with the slow moving train, in which our group had departed. At ten in the night, we spotted the other train and quickly jumped the platforms to get into it.
Joshi was livid with anger and called us all kinds of names. We were incorrigible and irresponsible. We were saree-buying foolish women unfit to be officers. We were a slur on the name of the Indian Administrative Service and on and on he went. We heard everything with a deep sense of mock remorse and as soon as he finished, I passed him the box of rasagullas and the Calcutta pan and explained how we were delayed shopping for those. He promptly put a pan in his mouth and chewing at it with great relish said, "Don’t think I have forgiven you people. I will still report you to the Director.
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