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And so one fine day, four of us ( from extreme left - Ankita, Jana, Jigisha ; and me ) decided to set out for the ancient cemetery at Park Street.
Stepping outside the campus under the blazing summer sun, catching a metro to Park Street, and roaming the near-serpentine streets in twists and turns, (with Jana's occassional sugarcoated warnings of "Bhai, prochur hnaat'tey hobe kintu." ) with nothing to feed on but some long-forgotten fragments of campus-gossips, we finally reached our destination, dripping with sweat and heads as hot as a well-heated frying-pan.
Oh, I almost forgot. We stopped midway to enter an overpriced Fastrack store.
Jigisha had managed to secure a small fortune from her mother that day & seemed hell-bent on buying a semi-gigantic pair of brown-coloured sunglasses.
She put it on. The glasses gave her an interesting, serious godmother-type look.
However, coming back to the quaint dwelling of the numerous bodiless souls cenotaphed here and there.
We passed giant stone graves one after another, dusty and mournful, sometimes adorned by sheafs of yellowed leaves carelessly strewn over their cracked bodies.
The entire place had an air of melancholy calmness, punctuated by the coos and caws of birds that swept in an archlike fashion under the dense canopy of trees.
"Achchha, ekhane bhoot-toot nei bodhoy, na?" I asked, after the four of us had disrespectfully slumped down on a particularly grimy, cemented grave having tapering pillars on either side. The grave was built on an unkempt, shady nook of the cemetery, and provided some comfort from the blazing sunlight.
" Kejane! ", replied Jana, with a scowl. Clearly, he had lost all enthusiasm about the trip.
Meanwhile Ankita had busied herself with a bar of chocolate, nibbling at it now and then, while Jigisha kept on blushing for no reason, completely lost, gazing at her mobile-screen.
When caught in the act by a questioning look given by me and Jana ( Ankita seemed to be interested in her own phone right then ), Jigisha cleared her throat, and said in an unimportant tone : " Kharagpur. "
Okay.
Apparently, all of us were jobless right then. We needed to do something.
I mean, hungry and exhausted though we all were, we couldn't just sit upon the grave for hours doing nothing apart from debating about exactly how old this particular grave was. It may piss off the poor spirit of the sahib, if he happened to be lurking nearby his grave somewhere.
So we got up, still very much jobless ; and decided to go look at the names engraved on the marble slabs of the obelisks and see how many names each of us were familiar with.
As the three friends, brushing dust off their bags and jeans, left the reclining spot, and followed one another in a single-file under the torturing afternoon sun in search of the obelisks, I decided to capture this moment as a memento of my very first visit to this uncannily tranquil graveyard.
The picture, as you can see, tells you that I'm yet to learn the technicalities of my camera fully.
Nevertheless, it manages to speak to me, through its trembling daubs of colour & the hazy contours, about one particularly sultry summer afternoon, depicting the Tale of Three Friends. ( Teen Yaari Kotha )
