Keya Sarkar: Still like the good ol' times

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

The breeze is cooler, the days are shorter, the winter vegetables are slowly making their appearance, and the streets of Santiniketan are beginning to get filled with bhadralok tourists from Kolkata and, of course, all those Germans, the French, the Poles, the Danes, the Japanese, the Koreans, the English and the Americans who make Santiniketan their home in winter. Suddenly, from a sticky, humid, power-deficient small town, Santiniketan gets transformed into an international centre of cultural exchange.

Since we now live in Santiniketan we have to answer questions on temperature, accommodation available, places to eat, things to do, places to see "" all of which I do with the greatest of enthusiasm.

After all Santiniketan is the number two tourist destination in West Bengal (after Darjeeling), and all that the state government does not bother to provide by way of information, residents have a moral obligation to do.

One question that bhadralok tourists (who invariably, when you meet them, tell you which clubs of Kolkata they frequent) somehow never fail to ask is about the rickshaw fares. "How much should I pay from the station? You know I hate getting gypped," is an oft repeated refrain.

Considering the cycle rickshaw drivers overcharge if at all in amounts of Rs 10 or Rs 20, I can never understand what all the fuss is about. Especially since the same penny pinchers drive around gas guzzlers in their home towns.

In fact, if anything amazes me about Santiniketan, it is the ridiculous prices. Most of us who own bicycles take it to cycle repair shops for pumping the tyres. When we first arrived from Mumbai, we paid Rs 2 for two tyres "" until a friendly fellow cyclist informed us that the rate was actually Rs 1.

And so it continued till one day we asked our gardener to get some air into the tyres. He waltzed off and I had a one rupee coin ready to hand over when he got back. He refused the money and taught us a huge lesson. If you borrow the pump at the repair shop and pump it yourself, you pay nothing!

Another day, an Australian tourist arrived with her reading glasses rendered useless since one lens had come off. She was sceptical about whether the opticians of Santiniketan would have the skill to mend her glasses. I assured her that they did, since the same thing had happened to me once and pointed her in the direction of the optician.

She came back with her lens fitted back but extremely shamed at her initial scepticism. The price that the optician had charged was Rs 1! I told her she had been over-charged as a tourist and a foreigner, because I had got by with a smile.

A couple of days ago, a Danish friend of ours lost his cell phone. We tried calling that number, it rang, but nobody picked up. We had no clue as where it could be, but since it kept ringing, we felt it could not be in the hands of a seasoned cell phone flicker.

There is something truly serendipitous about Santiniketan and we all went to bed that night secure in our belief that the phone would be found.

We tried the number the next morning and again it rang but this time there was someone at the other end. He answered in an excited voice to say that the cell phone had been left behind in his rickshaw. He had even seen it at night lying in the corner of the rickshaw seat, but he mistook the cell phone's blinking light to be a firefly.

He gave Peter directions to a tea shop where he said he would deliver the phone. Peter left disbelievingly but came back a changed man. He found a group of almost fifty gathered to witness this handing over ceremony. They were happy to return the phone and no money in return was asked for and none given.