Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily down the Hooghly into the new year

Contrary to expectation, 2019 got off on a positive note

Contrary to my expectation, 2019 has opened with a bang. First there was that glorious Vanitha Mathil, the Women’s Wall, made up of five million women lined up shoulder to shoulder along 620 kilometres in Kerala, pledging to stand against patriarchy. Shortly thereafter, two women became the first ever to enter the Sabarimala temple. This event short circuited everyone’s brains so badly that they had to shut the place down for an hour to conduct ‘purification’ rites, which I bet involved harmonic swearing at the Supreme Court. They really do loathe women, so it makes me terribly happy to know that they have to let them in.

Then there was a scene in Parliament, when Rahul Gandhi lobbed a few Rafale type apples at the treasury benches, and the treasury benches hurled some Bofors type oranges back, presumably in the hope that the nation cannot tell an apple from an orange. The Speaker forbade Rahul to speak Anil Ambani’s name, so he asked if he could call him AA instead. This caused me to tweet a ‘Dassault and AA battery’ joke, with which I was extremely pleased even though the internet totally ignored it. 

And now I find myself on a boat sailing down the placid waters of the Hooghly river on an overnight cruise for a friend’s 50th birthday, and what’s not to love about that? I have been in Kolkata only four times in my life, each time only briefly, so I can tell you nothing about it other than that the metro is old but gold, some parts of it are strikingly litter-free, Mamata Banerjee is the Modi of West Bengal in the Put Your Mug On Everything department, and the food is to die for.

Who knows how much more action the year will have brought by the time we’re done wishing all our Whatsapp groups a happy new year, in June?

Coming from the frigid northern plains, I gladly shed my layers and walked the sun-washed streets in a happy sweat, observing that an inordinate number of people were wearing woolly hats with pompoms. Thank you, new year, for validating another cultural cliche.

Given that the cruise involved four dozen people, there was a fair amount of good-humoured confusion about where the ship left from, and at what time. Millennium Park was filled with people striding purposefully in all directions. There was also much confusion about which bottle of booze was in which room. The bottle I’d brought as a birthday present was half gone by the time the birthday boy got anywhere near it. When I woke up in the morning not only was it empty, but another half-full bottle had materialised beside it, and I swear on my mother’s head that I had nothing to do with it.

As usual I was the most underdressed person present, clomping about in jeans and walking shoes amid ladies in beautiful saris, who had helped to dry each others’ thick long black hair and applied surma to each others’ eyes. The ship was lovely, and so was the river, but since I have the sense of humour of an 8-yr-old, I continue to be unable to take the name ‘Hooghly’ seriously. If anyone saw me standing on the deck smoking a cigarette and gazing out at the sunset, they should know that I was shouting ‘Hooghly, Hooghly, Hooghly! Hahahahahaha!’ in my head the whole time. Still, there was much Bengali singing, Bengali food, and Bengali chatter, and a good time was had by all.

The first week of January isn’t done and 2019 already feels action packed. Who knows how much more action the year will have brought by the time we’re done wishing all our Whatsapp groups a happy new year, in June? Mitali Saran is a Delhi-based writer

Twitter: @mitalisaran