An excerpt from Rabindranath Tagore’s poem “Haat” goes-

“Kumor paarar gorur gadi
Bojhai kora kolshi hari”

This roughly translates to –

“The potter’s bullock cart on the bumpy road,
carries many pots and vessels, I’m told.”

Hari is a terracotta pot, common in rural Indian households. So what’s in these pots? Well, in a misty winter morning, a ten-year-old me wondered the same while walking on the kuccha road that leads out of the village, towards the paddy fields. Accompanying me were my cousins and aunt. The sun was still waking up, and dense fog made it hard to see beyond a couple of hundred meters. I distinctly remember that this fog smelled like water and petrichor. A smell I haven’t encountered in long, living in cities where dense pungent fog have caressed the inner walls of my airways.

The path was damp and cold from the morning dew. Droplets had pearled on grass. I was walking, not knowing where we were going. Through chattering teeth, we were appreciating the previous night’s feast.

After a few minutes of walking through the dense fog, we came across the hut of a shuli or date palm tree tapper. Wispy smoke was emanating from an iron kadhai on an unoon (clay oven) fired with dried dung cakes or ghutey. He explained, this was a fresh batch of date palm tree sap or raw jaggery or gur, cooking slowly. A few earthen pots were kept nearby, filled with older batches cooling. The shuli, a farmer by day, was smoking a bidi in the cold. I was too young to recall his name, but what I do recall is the taste of freshly brewed jaggery. And you know it’s fresh because he got it out of one of the earthen pots kept aside. It was pure, unadulterated jaggery. The kind of pure that makes your throat sting as it goes down.

Being a Bengali, my heart beats faster as the month of Poush comes to an end. Poush Parbon is a festival we all eagerly await, celebrating the sun’s journey into Capricorn as per the Hindu astrology. It is an occasion where we express gratitude for the harvest season and relish the sweets that are prepared with seasonal ingredients like gur. In Bengal, where agriculture has always been the lifeline of the people, this festival holds a special place in our hearts. As the day approaches, our homes are filled with the fragrant aroma of nolen gur, which we buy from local grocery stores and sweet shops.

Pithe, a delicacy made of rice flour filled with coconut soaked in nolen gur, is passed around among family, friends, and neighbours. We savor patishapta, a thin crêpe made of rice flour and filled with coconut and nolen gur. Gur, has been used in Bengal for ages and probably even predates cane sugar in the region. When I was a child, the only thing that made me look forward to the biting cold winters was nolen gurer roshogolla, a spongy, melt-in-your-mouth dessert soaked in nolen gur syrup.

Nowadays, these sweets are available throughout the year, and gur is often found in a more basic form, mixed with sugar and turned into crumbly powder. So when I take a few teaspoons of this powder and mix it in my morning coffee, I don’t really find that familiar jaggery flavour any more. The moments are rather bittersweet.

A few weeks ago on a chilly Sunday afternoon, I needed to catch some sun. The chilly air in the capital was getting to my bones and yours truly is more suited to tropical weather. So I walk to the nearby park and walked to a shady spot and start staring at the kids who are playing. Ah yes, textbook predatory behavior. In my defense, the group of old uncles playing cards and the couples munching on peanuts were rather boring. The kids on the other hand, reminded me of looney tunes, same reason you’ll see them here.

This guy had football studs on while his friends were running around in sandals and slippers. Needless to say, he dribbled a lot, passed less and kept yelling at his team mates.

This guy is an amalgamation of three brothers (probably) who looked fresh in their shiny shaadi sherwanis and glistening oily hair. Kind of unexpected that they decided to play some football, swinging on monkey-bars in that attire, while spinning their fancy fidget spinners.

Amidst the chaos there was this little girl who was playing by herself. She derived much delight from kicking the ball, and fetching it then giving it a hug-bite-sniff and setting it down and kicking it again. She’ll probably will grow up to have one hell of an immune system.

Out of all the kids, this guy seemed the most delightful. He had come dressed like accidental Santa, laughed and played with the other kids and kicked up a lot of dust as he walked. Such joy!

Fewer times have I ever before noticed emotions change as fast as the graph of a crypto token. The other day, I was at the saloon ( what a barbershop is called in India). As I waited for my turn for a haircut, I couldn’t help but notice the customer beside me — a middle-aged guy getting the full service package on offer. The barber was done with the shave and had now taken up the role of a masseuse with a massager clamped to the back of his hand. It vivaciously vibrated like a purring cat. As the vibrating fingers walked against the customer’s head and body, his resulting orgasmic expressions kept nudging me towards absurd but funny assumptions.

It seemed like this was the first-time-in-a-long-time someone was touching him this way. His eyes almost shut in a dizzying trance when the barber put his vibrating finger inside the guy’s aural orifice. The poor barber was probably used to these reactions off the many such middle-aged men he has had to serve, but he had a neat trick up his sleeve. The massage session drew to a close and in the ultimate act, the barber took off the whirring massager, rubbed his palms, cracked his knuckles, and smacked the dozing post orgasmic customer hard on his back. In less than a second, the guy was getting smacked, shaken and shuffled around in the seat and it was pretty apparent why the barber was suddenly loving every second of his job. Ultimately, it’s safe to say the guy got the complete awakening experience. It’s safer to say, when it comes to me, I could pass on that experience for a few more years, or decades.

Quite a few weeks ago one of my team-mates spotted me out a shrub on the sidelines of our field. These otherwise thorny menaces which had caused god-knows-how-many bleeding scratches on my ankle when we were busy stomping around the field, kicking around a ball, suddenly seemed like an alien being amidst usual life.

As a child I had read about the touch-me-nots or lojjaboti (Bengali) but cared to finally notice one after all these years. Fascinating! “I didn’t expect it to be so animal-like…” was my first reaction as I watched the tiny leaves shrivel up, up and a little bit more, almost like a worm. It’s bright purplish crimson stems seemed as if blood flowed through them.

I spent a good ten minutes or so, paying the touch-me-nots the much deserved attention but spent longer —procrastinating— penning it down on pixels.