A few days ago, I was taking out my scooter from the garage and ready to go to the fish market. Just then, a little boy of ten or eleven on a racing cycle applied the brakes and stopped before me. The boy was in a red T-shirt and a pair of denim trousers. He had bitten into and was chewing a guava that he held in one hand. Salted groundnuts were stuffed into his shirt pocket.
The boy hopped down from his bicycle. “Aunty,” he said, “Do you know how I can reach my chotomama’s house?” Confused, I asked him how I could help him if he did not tell me the locality or street where his chotomama lived. The boy seemed a little embarrassed, realising that his question had been rather foolish. Then he mentioned the name of the place: Krishnaganj.
The place was not more than a couple of kilometres from my house. The boy told me he had been there a few times with his parents but could not remember the right direction.
I advised him to take the main road and then follow a path on the left where the road bifurcated into two narrow lanes near a small Shiva temple. Then, I told him, he should continue going straight until he reached a restaurant named “Sliver Spoon”.
No sooner did I mention the restaurant, the boy became amazingly sprightly. He said that he could now clearly remember the way. He informed me with gusto that he had once visited the restaurant with his parents and relished chilli mushroom with tandoori rotis.
He went on to say that there was a crossing a little further. I nodded and was about to say that there stood a gorgeous jewellery showroom. But the boy, giving me no opportunity to speak, stated that just before the crossing there was a sweetmeat shop from where his chotomama used to fetch motichur laddoos and jumbo size langchas but that he preferred the hot jilipis. He added that just in front of his chotomama’s house, there was a chola batura stall that customers thronged during tiffin hour in the morning.
“Once I visited the stall with my chotomama but I couldn’t finish the channa masala as it was too spicy. I had to eat a couple of rajbhogs later,” he offered.
By now, I had given up my idea of mentioning some other prominent landmarks because I realised that his searching eyes might only spot food hubs. However, I was quite convinced that the boy wouldn’t have any difficulty to find his chotomama’s residence. In the meantime, the boy had already polished off the guava and had started munching the groundnuts.
When I asked him why he was going to visiting his chotomama, he pointed with his eyes at a bag wedged in the basket of the bicycle. “I have to fetch some oranges that chotomama has for me. I like oranges much more than grapes,” he stated. Then the boy waved and sped off. He disappeared in no time.
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