Shubho Basak
Chapter 1: Before the Sun Rises
The house was still half-asleep when the alarm rang at 4:30 a.m. The only things fully awake were the bags waiting by the door, the thermos of tea mom had packed the night before, and my younger brother’s overexcited energy that somehow ignored the hour. Outside, the world wore a blanket of mist, soft and shivering, like it didn’t want to be disturbed. But we were already up, wide-eyed and ready to chase a road that didn’t yet have a name.
This wasn’t our first trip as a family, but it was the first without a destination. Dad had declared it over dinner two weeks ago: “Let’s not plan. Let’s just drive. Take the side roads, stop when we want, see what we find.” Mom had raised an eyebrow, unsure, but the idea had slowly wrapped around her too. Now, she stood in her sari and shawl, double-knotting the lunch box into a red checkered cloth, sealing the smell of paratha and aloo bhaji with quiet love.
We piled into the car just as the first strokes of pink touched the eastern sky. Dad at the wheel, as always, humming an old Kishore Kumar tune; Ma beside him, checking her bag thrice for essentials she already knew were there; my brother Rohan bouncing between the backseat windows; and me, stuck between wanting to sleep and not wanting to miss a single second.
We left our housing complex with barely a sound. The security guard gave a lazy salute, still fighting off sleep. The streets were empty, glowing yellow under tired sodium lights. Kolkata doesn’t fully wake until after 7, and this in-between hour made the city feel like it belonged just to us.
As we crossed Ballygunge and merged onto the highway, Rohan spotted a monkey on a divider and shouted with joy. Ma scolded him softly, “Don’t wake the whole street,” but she was smiling too. There’s a magic in early morning departures—like a secret ritual that promises adventure.
We took NH2, the route we’d usually use for visiting relatives in Bardhaman. But today, about 40 kilometers in, Dad took an unexpected left. No signs. No logic. Just instinct. The road narrowed instantly, with fields stretching out on both sides. It was the kind of road you don’t see on Google Maps until you zoom in all the way. Bumpy, yes. But the kind that made your bones feel the land beneath them.
For a while, we just drove.
Silence held us gently. The countryside slowly peeled open—mustard fields blinking yellow under the now-rising sun, ponds covered with hyacinths, a solitary man cycling with a milk can tied to his carrier. At one point, we passed a cluster of village children brushing their teeth by a tube well, giggling when Rohan waved. Somewhere, a koel called out, and I realized I hadn’t heard one in months.
Breakfast happened under a peepal tree. Dad parked near a broken milestone, and Ma unpacked the foil-wrapped parathas. The tea was lukewarm, but in that moment, it tasted like something holy. We sat cross-legged on a rug Ma had insisted we carry, brushing off dry leaves and sipping in silence. Rohan tried to feed a squirrel that was far more interested in the crumbs than him. I took out my notebook and scribbled three words: morning, mustard, miracle.
When the food was done, we repacked and cleaned up like campers, Ma collecting the smallest bits of litter with her handkerchief. “No one else may care,” she said, “but we will.” And that was Ma—always teaching in gestures, never lectures.
As we resumed the drive, I asked Dad how he’d known which road to take. He shrugged. “Didn’t. Just felt right.” That answer somehow felt enough. Maybe not knowing was the real plan. Maybe not planning was the way to find something new.
Around noon, we crossed a railway track where an old man in a white dhoti waved us down. “Don’t go fast, road ahead’s broken near the canal,” he warned. We thanked him and slowed. Sure enough, a few hundred metres later, the road dipped dangerously where water had eroded the soil. Dad steered carefully, Ma clutching her seatbelt. It was a small scare, but also a strange thrill. A reminder that real journeys come with bumps.
By the time we stopped again, it was for mangoes at a roadside stall. The vendor, skin leathery from the sun, offered a deal on “just-ripe ones.” Ma picked three, squeezed them slightly, and said, “These will be our dessert.” We ate them straight from the skin, juice running down our hands, laughing like kids in a summer camp.
Evening approached by the time we reached a fork in the road where the sun was directly in front of us, casting a golden halo across a small pond. A group of boys were playing cricket, the ball occasionally landing near a cow that looked supremely uninterested. We watched for a bit—no hurry, no need to reach anywhere.
“We’ll stop in the next village,” Dad said. “Maybe there’ll be a homestay or someone willing to rent a room.” Ma nodded, and I could see she had fully given in to the idea now. Not planning had turned into a kind of freedom. Rohan asked if he could sleep on the car roof if it wasn’t raining. Ma rolled her eyes. “You’ll get eaten by mosquitoes.” But we all laughed.
As night fell and the car crept into a small village lane lit by fairy lights from a temple festival, I realized something simple yet profound. Sometimes, it isn’t about going somewhere. It’s about how you go. Who you go with. What you notice when you don’t rush.
And just like that, our journey had begun—not with a destinati
on, but with a decision to drift.
Chapter 2: Sitapur and the River That Listens
Sitapur wasn’t on the map. Not the one Google trusted, anyway. But we found it—or rather, it found us—just as the sun melted into orange behind the trees and the road narrowed into a trail flanked by neem and eucalyptus. Dad pulled up beside a tea stall where the signboard swung lazily in the evening breeze: “Chaudhuri Cha Dokan — since 1979.” Below it, an old man stirred a pot of milk tea, as if he’d been waiting for us his whole life.
We stepped out, stretching our backs and cracking stiff knees. The day’s drive had been long, but none of us were complaining. Rohan immediately ran toward a group of local boys who were playing something between cricket and kabaddi. I sat on a wooden bench, sipping the best cardamom tea I’d had in years.
“You’re not from around here,” the tea seller said with a toothless smile.
“No,” Dad replied. “Just wandering.”
The old man nodded. “Wanderers are welcome. The river’s waiting.”
At first, we thought he was being poetic. But ten minutes later, a teenage boy named Jiten, whom Dad had befriended over tea, offered to show us a “quiet spot.” We followed him through a dusty path that cut through rows of cornfields and under bamboo groves. Ma was hesitant, but curiosity had taken over fear.
When we reached the riverbank, the silence hit us like cool wind on sweaty skin. The Ajuri River, Jiten told us. Small, forgotten, but sacred to the village. It didn’t roar or rush. It whispered. Water flowed so gently it seemed to pause between ripples. A row of women were washing clothes on the opposite bank, their colorful saris reflecting like liquid art.
Rohan immediately flung off his slippers and stepped in. “It’s cold!” he squealed. Ma made him roll his pants up. Dad sat on a rock and leaned back, eyes closed. I took a walk down the river’s edge, letting the sound of water and insects mix into a low lullaby. The muddy banks bore footprints of cows, children, and birds. Life had passed through here gently.
Jiten sat beside me. “We come here when we want to be quiet,” he said. “The river listens. Doesn’t judge.”
I nodded. I believed him.
As twilight deepened, fireflies emerged—at first a few, then an army of blinking lights above the grass. It felt like nature was applauding quietly. We watched in awe. Ma took out a pack of muri and peanuts and shared it with Jiten. “You ever travel, beta?” she asked.
“Once to Bolpur,” he said. “But I always come back here. I don’t know why.”
“Because roots matter,” Dad added softly.
We sat like that for almost an hour, saying little, breathing together in the kind of silence that cities don’t allow. When we finally turned to leave, the moon had begun its climb—half round and haloed by haze.
Jiten led us back to the main road, where an elderly woman stood beside her gate, a kerosene lamp in hand. “You’re the ones from the city?” she asked.
“Yes,” Ma smiled.
“You can stay in my extra room if you want. No rent. Just company.”
Dad hesitated. “We couldn’t impose—”
She waved him off. “Nonsense. I’ve got no grandchildren. Let the boy play with the kittens.”
That night, we stayed in Shibani Boudi’s home—a small mud-and-brick structure with terracotta floor tiles and a verandah full of plants. Her two cats, Ram and Sita, watched us suspiciously but later curled up near Rohan’s feet.
Dinner was simple but magical—hot rice, masoor dal, pumpkin curry, and fried eggplant slices. The kind of meal that tasted like warmth. Shibani Boudi told us stories of her late husband, who used to fish by the Ajuri every morning. “He used to say the river healed his anger. Made him less sharp.”
I wondered if I had any anger in me. Or maybe, like most people, I just hadn’t made time to listen to it yet.
We slept that night on straw mats and under mosquito nets, the ceiling fan creaking above like an old storyteller. Through the slats of the wooden window, I could see the moonlight glinting off the river in the distance. It didn’t look like a body of water. It looked like a path made of silver silk.
Ma whispered before we fell asleep, “Sometimes, a place finds you.”
I whispered back, “We needed to be found.”
Chapter 3: Where the Map Ends
Morning came with the sounds of a rooster and a brass bell from the local temple. The smell of freshly boiled milk drifted through the house, mixing with incense and something faintly earthy—like rain on dry soil, though there had been no rain. We had all slept surprisingly well. Maybe it was the quiet. Or maybe it was the way nothing in Sitapur asked anything of us.
Shibani Boudi greeted us with warm milk tea and a soft smile. “You city people are heavy sleepers,” she joked, gently nudging Rohan awake with her toe. He grumbled and curled further into the mat. Ma had already folded up the mosquito net and was brushing her hair on the verandah, eyes fixed on the trees swaying in the morning breeze.
We left Sitapur with many thank-yous and an offer from Boudi to visit again “when the mangoes ripen.” As the car rolled away, she stood by her gate waving, her cats perched on the windowsill like guardians of memory.
Soon we were back on the road, but it didn’t feel the same. Something about Sitapur had slowed us down—not just our speed, but the way we looked at things. We didn’t talk much. Even Rohan seemed contemplative, leaning against the window and watching the trees pass like pages in a book.
About an hour later, the GPS stopped working.
At first, we thought it was the signal. But it stayed stuck on a blank screen, blinking as if unsure of its own location. Dad tapped the screen, restarted the phone, tried an offline map—all to no avail.
“Looks like we’re on our own now,” he said, strangely cheerful.
Ma, not so much. “What if we get lost?”
Dad grinned. “That’s the point, remember?”
We kept driving. The road grew narrower and bumpier. It twisted through rice fields and bamboo clusters. Occasionally, we passed small hamlets with a few thatched houses and kids playing with bicycle rims. No boards. No directions. Just life, unfolding.
It was mid-afternoon when we reached a clearing. A wide, open field stretched out to the left, and a large banyan tree shaded a tiny pond. Beside it stood a structure—part temple, part ruin, completely out of time. Red and white paint flaked off the walls. Moss clung to the corners. And over the years, roots from the banyan had swallowed parts of the roof.
We stopped the car.
There was something magnetic about the place. Not eerie—just ancient, wise, and watching. Rohan ran ahead, of course. “Is it haunted?” he yelled, with the enthusiasm only a ten-year-old could muster.
“No ghosts here,” came a voice, making us all turn.
A man, dressed in ochre robes and holding a brass water pot, appeared from behind the temple. He looked to be in his late sixties, with eyes that had seen both storms and silence. “Only memories,” he added, “and stories waiting to be heard.”
His name was Sadhu Ram. He didn’t live in the temple, he said, but visited often. “I walk,” he told us. “From village to village, just to listen and remember.”
He invited us to sit on a stone bench shaded by the banyan. We did. He poured us water from a metal jug, adding a few drops of tulsi extract. It tasted of earth and something else—something green and alive.
“Who built this temple?” Ma asked.
“No one knows,” he said. “People say it was always here. Some say it was for Shiva. Others think it was for a local goddess who guarded the river crossings. But the river’s dried up now. Still, the temple remains.”
I noticed a carving on the wall—faded, but still visible. A woman with flowing hair, holding a conch shell and a sickle. “She doesn’t look like Durga,” I whispered.
“She isn’t,” Sadhu Ram replied. “That’s Akhini Devi. Protector of forgotten paths. Not in the scriptures. But in our hearts.”
Something about that stirred me. Forgotten paths. Forgotten gods. What else had we lost by sticking only to the main roads, to mapped destinations?
We stayed there longer than we meant to. Ma offered Sadhu Ram some biscuits from our stash. He accepted two, then handed one back to Rohan. “For the cats,” he said.
“There are cats here?” Rohan’s eyes lit up.
“They come at dusk.”
Before we left, Sadhu Ram touched our foreheads with a pinch of vibhuti. “Not for blessing,” he said, “but for memory. So you’ll remember the places the maps forget.”
Back in the car, we were quiet again. Not out of awkwardness. But reverence. The road ahead curved unpredictably, half-covered in overgrowth. Dad took it anyway.
“There’s a metaphor in this,” I murmured.
Ma looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Everything’s a metaphor with you.”
We laughed, but it stayed with me. The feeling that we had stepped outside the known world. Like pages falling out of a guidebook, one by one, making space for a story no one had written yet.
We stopped that night near a sugarcane field. Slept in the car, wrapped in shawls and moonlight. No lodge. No hotel. Just the quiet hum of insects and our own breath, slowing down with the stars.
Chapter 4: The Taste of Kindness
The sun woke us before the birds did. Rohan was curled in the backseat with a shawl half over his face, Ma’s hand resting protectively on his chest. Dad had reclined the driver’s seat but clearly hadn’t slept well—there were creases under his eyes, the kind you earn only when you spend a night half-listening to the unfamiliar sounds of open fields.
We brushed our teeth using bottled water behind a bush. It was ridiculous, yet oddly liberating. The sugarcane field around us rustled in the morning breeze like it was murmuring secrets. Ma combed her hair using the rearview mirror and sighed, “We need a real breakfast.”
Rohan chimed in, “And tea. Please tea.”
So we got back on the road, hoping the next bend or by-lane would answer both.
About half an hour later, we reached a small market town—Barupur. A cluster of houses gathered around a crossroad. Shops had just opened, and vendors were laying out fruits, vegetables, and bundles of coriander tied with banana bark. The scent of fried dough floated in the air like an invisible thread leading us forward.
Then we saw it.
A small roadside shack with a corrugated tin roof and a board that simply said: “Maya Hotel & Bhojanalaya” in faded blue paint. It wasn’t a hotel, of course. Just three wooden benches, a stove at the back, and a woman in a faded cotton saree fanning the chulha with a piece of cardboard.
We pulled over. Ma looked skeptical. “Are you sure it’s clean?”
Dad grinned, “Only one way to find out.”
The woman turned as we approached and smiled with her whole face. “You’ve come far,” she said, as if she could smell the city on us. “Sit. I’ve just made rice. Will take a little time, but the food will be honest.”
We didn’t argue.
As we waited, I watched her work. Everything about her movements was purposeful—rinsing lentils in a steel bowl, slicing green chillies, frying mustard seeds till they sputtered, her wrists moving like practiced music. She introduced herself as Maya-di. “It’s not a hotel,” she admitted. “But I liked the sound of it. Feels grand, doesn’t it?”
She served us on steel plates lined with banana leaves. The food was simple—hot gobindobhog rice, masoor dal with a hint of lime, crispy begun bhaja, and a sabzi made of raw papaya and potatoes. It didn’t need spice. It didn’t need garnish. It needed only hunger and gratitude.
And we had both.
Rohan, after his first bite, paused and said with wide eyes, “This is better than pizza.”
Maya-di laughed. “Ami toh Michelin star pai ni. But children’s star is best.”
She poured us water from an earthen jug and sat down beside us. “Where are you from?”
“Kolkata,” Ma replied.
“Ah, the city of rush,” she nodded. “Here, the clock ticks slower.”
We talked, between mouthfuls and sighs of satisfaction. She had once worked as a cook for a family in Siliguri but returned to Barupur after her husband passed. “Started this place with one stove and three benches. Most days, I earn enough to buy vegetables and keep the light on.”
She didn’t say it like a complaint. Just fact.
We offered to pay more than what she asked. She shook her head. “Take extra food, not extra price. That’s how this works.” And she packed us four parathas and some aloo chokha in foil. “For the road.”
Before leaving, I asked to take a photo of her with Rohan. She agreed but insisted on first fixing her hair. “At least let me look like a hotel owner.”
We left with full stomachs and even fuller hearts. It struck me that Maya-di hadn’t just served us food. She’d served dignity, generosity, and care—spooned into rice and fried in mustard oil.
The road after Barupur felt softer somehow. As if the tarmac, too, had tasted kindness.
Around noon, we passed through a stretch of red-earth countryside where silk cotton trees bloomed like flames. We stopped under one, spreading the foil-wrapped parathas on the hood of the car. A group of goats wandered nearby, eyeing us with disinterest.
I wrote in my notebook: Kindness tastes like paratha in a red field.
Later, at a petrol pump, a man in a blue shirt pointed us toward a scenic spot we hadn’t heard of—Palashgram, a village named after the fiery red palash flowers. “Go now,” he said, “the whole forest looks like it’s on fire.”
We did.
The narrow road twisted upward, flanked by flame-of-the-forest trees in full bloom. The sun filtered through red-orange petals, casting a surreal glow. We parked the car in the shade and simply stood there, breath caught in wonder.
It was Rohan who whispered, “This is what dreams look like.”
We didn’t click photos right away. We didn’t talk. We just stood—four people bound not by blood alone, but by the shared silence of something beautiful.
Later that evening, as the sun dipped and the light turned golden, we found a small hut near the edge of Palashgram. The owner, a retired forest guard, agreed to let us sleep on his verandah. “You city folks love our trees,” he chuckled. “Good. Maybe you’ll remember them when you go back to concrete.”
That night, wrapped in shawls, under a sky freckled with stars, I thought about how food and kindness are more deeply connected than we realise. How it’s never really about hunger—but about being seen, being fed, and being held—by strangers who suddenly don’t feel like strangers.
Chapter 5: Return by the Long Road
We left Palashgram slowly, as though reluctant feet could somehow stretch time. The forest of red palash trees receded behind us, fading into memory like a dream half-remembered. Rohan insisted on keeping a fallen flower in the car’s dashboard, its orange petals already curling at the edges, but still brave, still beautiful.
“I don’t want to go back,” he murmured, voice small under the engine’s hum. None of us corrected him. We all felt it.
Dad had no intention of taking the direct route home. “Let’s keep hugging the side roads till the city drags us back,” he said, one hand on the steering wheel, the other tapping rhythmically to a tune only he could hear. Ma didn’t object this time. She had started wearing her smile differently since Sitapur—less like a shield, more like sunlight.
We drove past nameless ponds and sleepy villages where cows walked slower than time. People waved when they saw us. Not out of curiosity, but politeness. A gesture that said, I see you. You exist.
We stopped in a village where a man was selling small clay figurines—horses, owls, women with baskets on their heads. Rohan chose a crooked-looking lion and named it Hero. The old artisan, fingers dusty with red clay, refused to take more than ten rupees. “Let the boy remember the earth,” he said.
Lunch happened under a tree once again. This time, Ma made sandwiches with leftover paratha and pickle. There was a chill in the air, the kind that signals a coming change in weather—or maybe just the end of something soft and sacred.
As we sat eating, a woman passed by with a metal basket of marigolds on her head. She paused to look at us—smiling not with her mouth, but with her eyes. I imagined she must have wondered who we were, a family eating sandwiches under a tree in the middle of nowhere. But she said nothing. Just walked on, disappearing into the yellow-green horizon like a line of poetry.
The road eventually widened. Traffic thickened. Hoardings appeared—first for mobile recharge, then cement brands, then multiplex movies. Somewhere around Dankuni, the spell began to break. The car grew quieter. The trees thinned. The phone buzzed again. GPS reconnected. The city called us back like a mother sighing for runaway children.
Back in Kolkata, we hit the evening traffic head-on. Honking cars. Vendors shouting. Neon signboards. The familiar chaos. But we were not the same people who had left four days ago.
Home looked smaller than we remembered. As we parked, Ma turned to Dad and said, “We should do this again. But next time, even longer.”
Dad smiled. “Next time, no GPS at all.”
Rohan added, “Next time, can we live in Sitapur forever?”
That evening, Ma unpacked the bags in silence. The paratha tin still had the smell of Maya-di’s aloo. Rohan placed his clay lion on the shelf beside his toy train. I found my notebook again and flipped back through the pages: mustard fields, river whispers, temple ruins, fireflies, red flowers, kindness.
I added a final line: We went out looking for a road, but we found a rhythm.
At dinner, no one talked about school, work, or emails. We ate slowly, like we’d learned something about time. Something about tasting every bite and not letting the world rush past you.
Later that night, I walked up to the terrace alone. The city below was loud again—buses honking, dogs barking, a scooter speeding through a puddle. But above, the sky still had stars. Fewer than Palashgram, but stars nonetheless.
And I realized something.
Side roads aren’t always found on the outskirts of towns. Sometimes, they’re in how you live—how you pause, how you listen, how you let yourself be changed by places and people who owe you nothing but give you everything.
That journey didn’t just take us through Bengal’s backroads. It took us through a version of ourselves we had forgotten—kinder, slower, more open.
We didn’t take the long road home.
The long road was home.
END
