Recently, while Googling for places to get away in summer, I chanced upon the Lonely Planet page on Santiniketan. Of the five must dos in Santiniketan, "Alcha", our craft shop and cafe, topped the list. I thought the listing was alphabetical but it wasn't, because second in the list was "Paus mela", a fair that is held every winter since the time of Rabindranath Tagore, and then came the Tagore museum.
My initial reaction was to write to Lonely Planet to change the rankings. The "Paus mela" - from a three-day celebration of Bengal folk culture and craft - had become a humongous commercial event with folk culture and craft on the fringes. A million people descend on Santiniketan for the mela and authorities are hard put to clean up the mess later on. But the museum? It seemed ridiculous for Alcha to get a billing higher than the Tagore museum. I do not know whether it is the ministry of culture or tourism, state or Centre, or the Visva Bharati University that is responsible for the museum, but the fact is that they have been unable to create a buzz around it. But for Lonely Planet to give it a billing below a craft shop was probably a sign of our times. To think that a repertoire as vast as Tagore's could not be presented in a form that would draw in both the initiated and the ignorant is really sad.
Just when I was thinking of all this and the general degradation of taste, God intervened. The lady who owns the property on which we run the cafe called to say that she wanted her house back since she wanted to sell the property. For a while now, I must admit, both my partner and I were getting a trifle tired of running the cafe. It was completely our fault that we had chosen to be there every evening, which later became part of our customers' expectation. We were like the sugar with the tea, the aroma with the coffee. If we chose to stay away, customers would call to find out whether we were out of town or sick.
While we enjoyed these interactions for many years, lately our enthusiasm for small talk was waning. Also, our advancing age was making it stressful to remember names of all the customers who would come and say hello and seemed to know us well. It was like a daily reminder of how old we were getting. So when the landlady called, it was the moment of truth for us. We asked ourselves whether we wanted to buy the property from her, or shift the cafe somewhere else. The answer was a resounding "no".
We put up a notice to say that the cafe would shut on May 15 (the shop, however, continues to do business next door as usual) and told our colleagues, who helped us run the cafe, that we would remain in the food business but out of the restaurant business, so their jobs were safe. I must say that the reaction has been overwhelming. First, the locals and then even those from Kolkata said they were devastated. Some even braved the April heat to get here for the weekend to have their "last" snack at Alcha. The old and the young called to say that it was not only the food they were going to be deprived of, but a place to meet and exchange ideas.
The most extraordinary people were the elderly of Santiniketan, many of them Tagore scholars - steeped in the traditions of his culture, who called to say that for many of their friends and family a trip to Santiniketan was to see them and visit Alcha. We then wondered whether in our enthusiasm to create a "space" in Santinketan for interactions, intellectuals or otherwise, we had, for many, taken away the pleasure of just visiting Santiniketan.
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