Baraf Ka Gola And Waiting

  

With winter approaching, daylight succumbs to dusk early, and bright lamps that’d hasten wandering feet home early on most days now beckon Kolkata’s faithful onto the streets for Durga Puja celebrations into the wee hours of the night.

The lane is quiet save for the occasional light-stepping hand-held rickshaw puller depositing residents home in the old neighbourhood on Dr. Rajendra Road in Bhowanipore.

Shadows breathe life into passing life just as surely as sodium lamps stretch them into a slow, long caress along the beaten path.

Outside the north-west entrance to Northern Park, a woman has set up her Baraf Gola (Ice Gola) stall hoping visitors to the playground fair in the park will step up for some shaved ice candy.

Coloured syrups in square pockets line the edge of the wooden frame that betrays its age from years on the road waiting on street corners, come day, come night.

Among the syrups figure perennial favourites: Kalakhatta, Khus, Rose and Lemon. A hand powered ice crusher stands to one side, waiting with the vendor for someone to show up.

The white of shuttered windows frozen in a perennial pause in the facade of a red building across the lane from her, strip the night of its studied monotony.

As the night stretches its lonesome fingers, it traces a path to a family of three in a hand-pulled rickshaw approaching the entrance to the playground fair that’s come visiting Bhowanipore in South Kolkata, its character transformed from a small village in early nineteenth century to a bustling upmarket locality by migrants from erstwhile East Bengal who settled here in the early 1850s.

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Behind her, and us, the fair is in full swing. But we might as well have been wrapped in the silence that anticipation spreads around it to shore up hope and make waiting, tolerable.

As the lean figure of the hand-pulled rickshawallah draws into view, emerging from the dark of the street into warm swells of Sodium dispersing over him, the woman straightens up on the makeshift crate she’s parked by her roadside stall.

No sooner her eyes adjust to the three forms in the back of the rickshaw, they light up in anticipation. A half smile spreads across her face as the trio draw closer, revealing a young boy among them.

"What child can possibly resist a colourful baraf ka gola?" I imagine her thinking.

She looks in their direction hoping to catch their attention.

And the yellow of sodium suddenly pours its weight into the pause now pregnant with possibilities.