Hey I didn’t meet them for a long time. My friends in sleep have started visiting me again. They are hilarious, they are funny and at times they are scary too. Last night they had come in. I don’t know why I was staying in that big house with a complex architecture. My friend Himadri and Amitava had come calling. Himadri was there by evening. So we had a proper dinner and went into sleep chatting. We discovered in the morning that Amitava had come in the middle of the night and found his way in a couch left in the balcony. He slept there until we came out in the morning. An old man who goes to pick up flowers from the neighbourhood every morning alerted us.
No it didn’t start there. I had gone to my school to cover the recovery of explosives in the garden at the back of the junior high or senior basic school. It is the garden where we used to go to search for the ball after someone hit a sixer in our days of T-20 or T-10 and the caretaker Achchhalal with a long beard, red eyes, and dirty cloths holding a garland of key used to be after us. But today I was late. My cameraperson reached the spot much earlier and shot all the visuals. The moment I reached the spot, I saw the explosive experts coming out after, may be, a meeting with the management or the teachers of the school. The hard-news-TV-reporter habit prompted me to hold the mike in front of the ‘chief’ who gave me the exclusive and explosive byte slamming the school authority for lack of vigilance and safety. I jumped on my feet. I shouted at my cameraman to immediately feed it through the OB van (couldn’t find where exactly my OB van was parked in the school). I asked him to send the ‘chief’s byte’ only. But what was this going on? I was on one part of the big school ground and my cameraperson was on the other part shooting something. I called him loudly trying to tell him the urgency to break the news. Doesn’t he know we live on such one liner breaking news! He was reluctant to send the ‘byte’ only. After all he had put in his effort to shoot so much of visuals of the explosives. He thought of shooting more ‘establishing’ shots. But I was in a hurry to break my news. This was the same old confrontation. It was not to be like this between us though. Is it the ‘punishment’ for the reporter coming late in the spot? I called in my input desk and give them the chief’s reaction asking them to break it. I had the byte. ‘Please take it and call my cameraperson to feed it’ was my plea. Oh no it was a Saturday full of programmes on the channel. There was no immediate scope to take the byte on air. I was disheartened.
No it didn’t end there too. My sister came in with a story idea (Now I don’t remember the idea though; may be on the handloom workers). She spelt out the idea. I jumped on to it finding another story in it. She left the room. I followed her asking for more information to make my story. It seemed she was not eager to divulge more. Right! She might have thought I would steal her idea and do the story. Trust me it was not my intention.
Then came the moment of the sleep. Mamata Bannerjee came visiting me. This is for the first time she entered into my home. We were busy discussing some problem about some pilgrims somewhere (again I have lost the link). You know who could solve the problem. Forward Bloc’s Ashok Ghosh. She asked me to connect her to Ashokda. How could I tell her a ‘national’ reporter doesn’t keep the phone number of a regional political party handy! Who told you that you are a national reporter? Don’t you remember your boss telling you are a local reporter like any other stringers reporting out of the villages of Canning in South 24 Parganas! That didn’t make any difference so late in the evening as I was frantically looking for the telephone number of Forward Bloc office. At last he came in my help. A good old senior friend of mine, Rabida, (I don’t know how he appeared in the scene) took out his tiny phone book from his chest pocket and handed me the number. I dialed the same. Now a new trouble emerged. After keeping me on hold for a few minutes I was told Ashokda had gone to the room on the top floor and it is not possible to transfer the line to him! Aaare Didi is sitting here to talk to Ashokda and you are refusing it!!! No it can’t be connected. Didi left my house.
Many others followed. Now a football match is going on inside my head. Everyone is kicking the ball and the ball is hitting on the walls of my head. I opened my eyes and suddenly found that the first rays of twilight filtering through my windows. So many ideas are kicking inside trying to come out. The good news at the moment is they have started revisiting me.
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