For the six to seven years that these girls have been working with me, I have never seen them go anywhere except to visit ailing or dying relatives. Going out of district and that too for pleasure was certainly a first for these young Muslim girls. The recent rout notwithstanding, the Congress government's many schemes for the poor and their increasing salaries over the years had obviously given them the confidence to indulge in hitherto unknown luxuries.
I was made to listen to all their plans - about the bus being hired, the hotel being booked, and the food that was to be carried. In the middle of all the discussions, I asked whether this would indeed be their first trip out of Birbhum district and whether this would be their first view of the sea. Three of the girls who were going on the trip confirmed that this would indeed be the first time that they would watch the sea, but one other girl did not. She had seen the sea once when she was going from Kolkata to Delhi. I tried to explain why that wasn't possible but gave up realising they had absolutely no sense of geography.
Also Read
Next day, I bought a map of India, the type they sell in corner stores for schoolchildren and gave the girls a little explanation as to why no sea can be spotted from the train while going from Kolkata to Delhi. I also gave them a sense of where Digha was in connection to Santiniketan. My colleagues may be illiterate, but they are smart and truly enjoyed this little diversion from their everyday work life.
Armed with the knowledge of where they were going and what they were going to see, they got excited about getting new clothes for the excursion. Most of them were shown to me and I had to express my appreciation for the synthetic blingy clothes. But the piece de resistance was a faux georgette sharara cum sari (a sort of a petticoat with a pallu attached to it) which was totally covered with shiny zari and stones. The temperature in Santiniketan by then was already in the 30s and I shuddered at the thought of anybody wearing something so synthetic in the heat. "This is too beautiful to wear to go into the sea. It would surely get spoilt with the salt in the water," I said. "But this is not to wear for a dip in the sea," disclaimed the owner of the apparel. "I want to wear this on the bus".
After much haggling with the bus operator and many near cancellations, they finally managed to leave on the designated day. I got calls the next morning to tell me how they had reached safely and were enjoying themselves.
They returned after two days - full of stories and photographs. Shots of the sea, the sunset and selfies had filled their phones. They used the photographers who hang around tourist spots to take pictures from every conceivable angle, lying in the water, their hair in the wind, in hats and sunglasses (all available on hire I was told).
Last week, there was a young girl who visited us because she was writing a paper on artisans who do kantha embroidery. One cliched question she asked me was whether kantha had led to "empowerment". I told her she should see the pictures of my Muslim colleagues in Digha. But like many of her ilk that I have met, she was in Santiniketan for just a day. That was all the time her urban commitments allowed her to understand "empowerment".