The Tale of a Breakdown

Hello friends, when we revisit some moments and events of our past, and each time it invariably brings a smile on your face, then it is worth mentioning to you too! It happened during our visit to the famous temple town of Goddess Kali in Tarapeeth. My family was accompanied by my eldest brother in law’s and one of his friend’s family.

We all had a divine Darshan (glimpse) of the mother deity (Goddess Tara) in sanctum sanctorum in the morning. Then all enjoyed a delicious breakfast of kachoris (a kind of fried phulkas stuffed with spiced and mashed green peas filling), alur dum (a spicy and dry potato curry which goes very well with kachoris) and a special sweet called langcha which is very famous in that part of Bengal( which is a kind of elongated version of gulab jamun).

Kachori and alu dum

No – no friends the food though we relished thoroughly is not the matter of my story. It’s something else. It was the sight seeing tour afterwards! The children of the group curtly excused themselves after the sumptuous breakfast and duely returned back to the hotel. So the three couple were left in the field to undertake it. As it was a place of pilgrimage, sightseeing was mainly comprised of the temples (some of which I displayed in my previous post).

We’re particularly curious to see the temple where the deity of the Goddess is said to be residing underground and known as Patal Kali. We hired an E- rickshaw called Toto and reached there. The men of the group promptly got down, the ladies sat there looking at the temple in awe, conjecturing about the reason of underground abode of the Goddess.

Suddenly, a tall and thin middle aged stranger came forward and began explaining to us about his own version of the mythological event. His gestures and postures with his hands and eyes and modulated voice were so convincing, as if a seasoned actor was enacting the scene for us. We listened to him in rapt attention.

The person was at his eloquent best, we all the three ladies sat enthralled gaping at him expectantly as if something new was to be revealed to us about the Goddess. We were so mesmerized that we even forgot to get down from the vehicle.

We were completely oblivious that males of our group are getting impatient and utterly disliking the undue and unsolicited intrusion. Suddenly my eldest brother in law approached him and gently tapped the person’s shoulder to seek his attention and asked in a concerned voice, ‘Since when the breakdown has occurred?’

The person abruptly stopped in his track, his extended hands hanging in the air as they were, seemed to be pondering about the import of the words asked to him. The spell was broken and we get down the vehicle, also thinking about what did he really mean by his question.

Then suddenly the realization dawned on us. Maybe it was precisely the moment, the understanding prevailed on him too that the pun was intended on his faculty! In a very indignant voice he replied, ‘Sir, I do not have any breakdown, I cause breakdowns in others.’

By that time, all the men have proceeded towards the temple and we the ladies left to react. We tried to overlook the situation, but the instant our eyes met, we spilled into laughter. Visibly embarrassed the person hastily retreated from the scene and joined a group of tourists standing in a distance.

When we eventually came out of the temple the person and his group were nowhere to be seen. The puzzled face of the erstwhile confident stranger who was regaling the ladies with his own spin-off story, without asking for it, was so comical that we broke out in giggles whenever reminded of it afterwards.

Cover photo, a winter morning, ctsy: Riya Mukherjee

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