Digha, four years later

I might not be Rabindranath, but I am peripatetic enough: stuck for a few months in my house and town, I get breathless. So I announced a three-day break and took my mother along on another trip to Digha on the 16th, almost four years since I last visited with Pupu in January 2017.

I won’t write a travelogue here, because my daughter did that already in 2017, and we virtually visited the same places over again. I shall instead make a few remarks on the changes I noticed, especially in this (almost) post-pandemic season.

The road is good, even excellent, in patches, but there are long stretches where it is narrow, or in poor condition, or simply too congested, passing as it does through little market towns where people neither know nor care about traffic rules, their only catch-all solution when there is an accident being to beat up the driver of the bigger vehicle if they can catch him. There were two heart-in-mouth moments, one on the journey outwards, when a man thumbed down a bus and suddenly ran across the road, entirely oblivious of the traffic, and our car missed him by an inch or two, and once on the way back, when a truck tyre blew up right in our faces while both vehicles were going at high speed. The blast was a real shocker, and it’s a wonder that our windscreen remained intact. The trucker went on driving unconcerned, he having 15 or 17 wheels to spare, but we stopped briefly to take deep breaths, and some bystanders came running over to check whether we were okay. Google was quite right in predicting that the average driving time each way would be six hours and a half, but given better road conditions throughout, it can be done in an hour less with far less anxiety.

We put up at the renovated Tourist Lodge this time, and it was good for the price overall – much better than most private hotels in the same tariff range – though the food, which is very good, is rather overpriced. The secure parking and the lush garden were part of the bonus. If you prefer to eat out – there are cheap eateries aplenty within a stone’s throw – this might just be the best place to stay. You cross the road, take a hundred steps, and you are on the beach.

Digha is swarming with happy holiday makers, and for once I did not even mind the noise. We were told that it would be still more crowded during the weekend, and even more so during the year-ending holiday week. Good to see that a lot of people have decided enough is enough, and gone travelling with family and friends. We heard sad stories galore about how badly business had been hit all through March to September, including one from a smart and affable young man selling tea on Mohona beach, who lives in nearby Contai, used to work as a cook in Mumbai, came home at great expense and trouble during the lockdown, and still cannot see any prospects in venturing back. So I am truly glad that things are getting back to normal again, and I curse all those who not only stayed at home all through the year but were quite happy that they could eat well, the rest of the world be damned. My moral sights have become very clear: the biggest problem with the world today is that there are far too many people who can not only afford to ignore the misery of others but even pontificate about how everybody should emulate them. Ministers, doctors, journalists, pensioners, or rentiers, they are fundamentally sick, and bad for all the rest of us who, for economic or mental health reasons, cannot ‘live’ (if that is called living) like them.

The Saikat Sarani walkway, not having been maintained for over a year, looks rather down in the mouth now: many structures could do with repair, replacement or at least a fresh coat of paint. New Digha has become overcrowded with hotels. The entire beachfront from New Digha to Oceania Park to Udaipur was a treat for sore eyes, but we liked best the Mohona point (where we saw gigantic lobsters on sale, along with a huge variety of seafood) and Tajpur, which – besides Mandarmoni – has the only extensive sandy beach available, all the others having been dumped with boulders and laid out with concrete to prevent the sea eroding away everything. Lunch with freshly caught pomfret (when will Bengalis learn to pronounce it correctly?) on the beach was a moment to remember, and we lazed around till almost sunset, watching the white light slowly mellowing to golden and then red, and the horizon vanishing from sight… ma was content, too, because she had not visited these sites the last time she was here, back in 2013, she told me. Dad and she had come to Digha to mark a quiet golden jubilee.

When we were strolling on Digha beach at 9 p.m., it was still crowded with tourists and vendors selling an incredible variety of snacks and knick knacks. The lights twinkling form the trawlers far out at sea gave me a very strange feeling: this is one of those very, very rare cases when I am at a loss for words! Believe it or not, we had to use the ceiling fan at night (after pulling on a blanket, though) in mid-December.

We returned in the afternoon of the third day, yesterday. The class in the evening had rather more pupils than usual, because I had punched classes together, and they were all in a chirpy mood, happy to see friends after a long time, having had to make do with the incredibly tedious and lonely ‘online studies’ nonsense for so many months on end. I was deliberately lenient with them, so we had a little less of studies than usual, but the happiness going around was well worth it.

I’ll see later whether there are some worthwhile photos to put up.

P.S.: Last night, 18th December again, it suddenly became very cold. Weird coincidence this, the very same day as last year!