Baghbazaar Days 01

I was born in a busy port city called Calcutta - some twenty seven years back. Was a calm and shy kid inept of interfacing with the world very much. Introvertish. Very. Even in school I was the quiet kind - thought a lot - daydreamed. Dont remember the dreams though - but teachers used to say so to my mom. During my early years was an easy target of bullies and I loved the strawberry ice-cream stick from the Kwality man who used to bring his cart inside my primary school in wood street and every evening before I got on to the school bus I would use a fifty paisa or a one rupee coin which I would steal from moms purse to buy myself churan. I swore by it.
Never a hotshot in anything, my primary days would pass by playing hand-cricket under the hot sun - that’s where I believe I really got my brown skin from :). I grew up in Baghbazaar, a busy little area in north Calcutta and used to live on top of a Press house. My granddad was at one point, the publisher of Anandabazar Patrika and Jugantar. They were reasonably well-read Bengali newspapers which were very active during our freedom movement and post independence era. My earliest memories of the Jugantar Press building were glorious. It was buzzing with people all the time and hundreds of cars parked in front of it - mostly white ambassadors. The Press house was some six stories high. The five floors below us worked like a machine all day and I would run down in my underwear to collect stamps from officers and clerks. I had favourites, who would intercept mails from all around the world and with immaculate perfection would separate the rarest of stamps for the then six year old me. Often they would give me some foreign stickers - those were my jackpot days. One of them actually gave me a Russian fairytale book once. It was the most prized possession I had for a long time. I would sit under the sun or a bulb for that matter and delve into those mysteriously illustrated pages for hours.