The Trail to Spring

Chapter 30

"I wouldn't say that we hated our time in Happy Days Orphanage.

There was Mr. Pronoy De and his nephew Chintuda who ran the place together. Pronoy kaku was awesome – he had a successful business venture going on and he had lots of money. Chintuda was good but we always used to play tricks on him that would make him cross. He didn't really like that I guess but he always humoured us and so we never stopped doing so.

There were of course the ten of us. There was Lokesh, the eldest and the meanest. He always used to boss over us and make us do his biddings. But he had a heart of gold and never hesitated in sneaking out one or two sweets from Chintuda's stocks whenever we asked him to.

Then there was Mishti, a little girl who used to roam about the orphanage with her little pony tails dangling behind her and she would never tire of playing ikir mikir cham chikir with us.

There was my friend, Tokai Pakhi who always used to roam about with a tulsi sapling with him. It was actually a neem plant but he never accepted that fact however much we tried to convince him so. Naturally, we began to call him Tulsi and the name stuck.

There was also Shruti, the woman you met in Mrs. Banerjee's place, except she was just a little girl back then.

There were the twins Asit and Achir, who always did everything together, even if they had to go to the washroom. It was quite funny.

Your brother was there too, occasionally silent and brooding, but the brightest and the most cheerful when he was in his element. None of the others knew that he had actually come here after running away from home. He had just appeared out of nowhere one day but despite our conditions, we always had room to spare and he was in our clan in no time. Most of us had been left behind by our parents or our family was never found. But we had formed a family of our own so that didn't bother us much.

There wouldn't be enough beds for each of us every night and we used to sleep on the floor and the bed turn wise. It may have been a bit uncomfortable at times but I kind of miss it now, God knows why. Every evening, we would talk about superheroes or books or far off countries – anything that would capture our interests. We ate together, we slept together, we played together and we even fought together although that could become nasty at times. But be as it may, we always stuck together.

Every year, we would host a grand function where we would enact a play. Nobody really saw our plays except ourselves but we did them nevertheless. Our favourite one was 'Pagla Dashu' by Sukumar Ray. We revelled in our roles as kings and queens, knights and pirates and mad children who went to school. The whole world was in our fingertips and we shaped it just the way we liked. Obviously, the villain (most often played by Lokesh) would lose every time and the hero (your brother or the twins) would always succeed in saving the heroine (played by either Mishti, or Shruti and once by Tulsi). And don't let me even get started on Durga Pujas. I can never forget those countless times when we had sneaked out of the orphanage in the middle of the night and roamed around and visited pandals to our hearts' contents. Eating phuchkas while standing in line for entering a puja pandal had almost become a ritual for us every year. Such were the days.

All was going nicely and things had never been better. We were happy and satisfied with our lives and Pronoy kaku had even made arrangements for us to go to school from next year. But that's when he died an untimely death.

Everything started to go downhill from there. Pronoy kaku's wealth passed on to his own son who lived in the USA and who hardly cared about us. Chintuda was left alone, managing an orphanage and ten orphans. He was broke and didn't have enough resources to run an orphanage on his own. But we still ploughed through as much as we could. He tried to collect funds and donations but it was never enough. We started to miss some of our meals and our indulgences became lesser and lesser.  Chintuda, however, never showed the worries in his face and for a while, we had also thought everything was alright after all.

One night, Tulsi and I saw Chintuda sitting alone in his room and drinking. We realised that he had not been eating properly and had given most of the share of his food to us for the last few days. We decided that we had to do something. It simply could not go on like this anymore. Some of us had to leave the orphanage if that meant the others could lead a proper life.

Lokesh, Tulsi, the twins, your brother and I volunteered to do that since we were the oldest and hence, the next day we packed our bags and set off out into the world to fend for ourselves. The rest stayed back with Chintuda. Shruti told me later that all of them got adopted at one point of time or another in the next few years, so there was some respite in that.

As for us, we travelled the length and breadth of the city, trying to find work and sleeping under bridges and make-shift shacks. It was hard for us to find work as no one wanted to have so small children under their employment.

Well, desperate times called for desperate measures. We divided into groups, each of us going our own way. Tulsi and I spent a few days in Sealdah trying to beg, for there were countless days when we couldn't find anything to eat. Finally we started to pickpocket people. We generally avoided doing so but I daresay that we were getting quite good at it. The money was enough for us to buy food for a few days but you can only earn so much by picking pockets. It was just a temporary solution for us. And that's quite apart from the beating that we had to face if we were caught in the act. It wasn't nice.

Tulsi still kept his small pot beside him at all times throughout everything. It was the only thing that had a sense of belonging to him now.  But the plant started to get bigger and bigger until he finally had to accept that it was a neem plant and planted it beside a pond near Basanti. The tree soon began to branch out and became quite big and it would become our hangout spot every day.

"I want to be like my tree, Rakesh," he would say, "Start out small and then surprise everyone by being something else entirely. I want to be like my Tulsi plant. I want to do something big so that nobody would forget Tokai Pakhi."

Months passed. Our clothes were in tatters by now and we knew we needed to find some place to stay or else we would freeze in the winter. We travelled to various slums hoping somebody could help us get some work, however nominal it may be. And finally luck struck. A friendly rickshaw driver who lived in Basanti helped us to find a job in a small hotel as dishwashers. I know it wasn't much but a year of roaming around the city aimlessly made us jump and grab this opportunity with both hands. The man offered a part of his place for us to stay and we were grateful to him for his help.

Another year passed and this was by far, the best time we had experienced till now since we had left the orphanage. People in the slum were very friendly and often invited us to their places and even treated us to churmur sometimes. We would all collect money and buy firecrackers like fuljhuri, chorkis and rockets and burst them during Kali Puja. Our job was going well too. We were being paid enough so that we didn't have to depend on others anymore and it was the most that we could have wished for then.

One day, Tulsi came to me and handed me a harmonica. He said that he had found it on the road. It was a bit broken but I was able to repair it so that it worked like magic. I slowly learnt to play it by watching videos on the Internet. Initially, I had a bit of problem in navigating the bends but with practise I was able to smooth it out. Every day, I would sit under Tulsi's tree in the evening. Tulsi and a few others would gather and sit around me. I would play my harmonica and they would sit there mesmerised and waving to my improvised tunes. It was truly magical.

If only we knew then that good times never last.