The mood began to build up days before Burra Din actually arrived. Shops - from posh pastry outlets to the lowliest grocers - laid out huge displays of plum, fruit or just impossibly rich cakes. The day before Christmas Eve, I simply could not enter my favourite poor man's cake shop because of the crush inside. In anticipation, the shop itself had spilled onto the pavement by piling up packaged cakes on a large table.
Cakes, Christmas and linking up with a remembered past happened near Dalhousie Square - only the now non-official colonial name conveys the flavour - at the recently reopened and rechristened Lalit Great Eastern. Long after the Great Eastern, once a star among the British colonies of the east, had begun to decline, what thrived was its bakery. Now people queued up right on the pavement to buy a cake from the new-old bakery and claim that it tasted as good as ever.
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What, however, took the cake was Park Street. The dining-and-boozing heart of the city has been drawing bigger crowds every year ever since Christmas lighting returned - but this year marked the zenith. The lighting was more spectacular than ever and the government released a trigger by disallowing cars from 5 pm onwards on the important thoroughfare.
This was followed by a kind of impromptu carnival, which locals - in keeping with their penchant for exaggeration - have started to compare with the grandfather of carnivals in Rio. Food stalls sprang up, selling delicacies from pork chops to puchkas, which the thousands upon thousands who made up a drifting sea of humanity eagerly downed. The only lost souls were a few ministers. Unsure of their berths, they had cut short their holiday to come and hang around as rumours of an imminent Cabinet reshuffle circulated thick and fast.
If that was Burra Din in body and spirit, you could find the true spirit of Christmas - joy and hope among the humblest, symbolised by a birth in a manger - in the story the morning papers carried. The family of a mason, Jagat Sarkar, in the adjoining Hooghly district had much to celebrate: they were bringing him home after he had served a prison term for nearly 10 years for a murder that the high court now ruled he did not commit.
It all began in 2004, when Mr Sarkar was arrested by the local police for the murder of a fellow mason. The police subsequently told the court that Mr Sarkar had come to the police station, confessed to the crime and indicated where the dead body lay. It was recovered thereafter, and so were the supposed weapons of the crime - a sickle and a piece of wood. Mr Sarkar's family was unable to get him out on bail; he was sentenced by the lower court to life imprisonment.
In order to enable the family to survive, his wife went to work as a household help and his grocer brother offered whatever help he could. Mr Sarkar's daughter, Jhuma, then in class VIII, somehow managed to finish school. As soon as Jhuma Sarkar got into college, she began giving private coaching to earn more so that she could pay the legal costs for the appeal the family had filed. She and the rest of the family were convinced that he was innocent. He wouldn't kill an ant, they said.
Now, a division bench of the high court has in its verdict said that the whole case appears to have been a concoction in a suo moto submission by a sub-inspector who was then with the police station. No forensic tests were conducted on Mr Sarkar's clothes or the murder implements; nor were his fingerprints taken. No evidence was submitted other than the accused's confession, which he said he had been forced to sign.
In jail, Mr Sarkar was an exemplary inmate. He taught fellow inmates drawing, was elected to the prison panchayat, and was part of the famous social rehabilitation project that dancer Alokananda Roy conducted for prison inmates. He sang for the inmates' production of Rabindranath Tagore's dance-drama Valmiki-Pratibha ("The genius of Valmiki"), which is based on the story of how the thug Ratnakara reformed to become Valmiki and composed the Ramayana.
Jhuma Sarkar, now a postgraduate student, is free to marry, which she had vowed she would not till her father was freed. The mood in the family is one of sheer relief, and right now they cannot think of fighting another case for compensation.