Travelling with Father.

When I chose to read Geography at college, there were more reasons than one for my decision. Of course, it was true that I loved geography. I loved reading about rocks and clouds and the soil and the people of the world. I thought it was the purest of all disciplines, and that understanding geography would make me understand nature better, and make me a better person by giving me wisdom and compassion. The second reason was the fact that I had excellent teachers at school, and the third reason therefore was that I always did very well at the subject.

But there was another subtle, unspoken reason why I chose Geography; I wanted to travel. I knew that as part of the curricula, geography students had to go on at least one long trek in each of their three years at college. I also knew that these treks were almost always to secluded places where tourists would not travel. After traveling on a vacation only once during the seventeen years of my life, I was impatient to travel, anywhere, and with however much roughing it took.

For we hardly ever traveled as a family. It was curious, because the Bengali is usually an inveterate traveler. Father believed in the philosophy of manas bhraman (literally, traveling in the mind; metaphorically similar to an armchair traveler), and had a fanatical aversion to disturbing his equilibrium at home; his reading glasses beside his pillow and his glass of milk and his weekend game of soccer. Also, he was obsessively hygienic, and reduced to jitters every time we traveled 50 kilometers to go to our uncle’s house.

"Taken the boiled water?"

"Yes."

"Boiled eggs?"

"Yes."

"Peanuts?"

"Yes, yes."

"Don’t eat anything on the train but boiled eggs and peanuts."

Needless to say, we never ate the boiled eggs and peanuts. They traveled unharmed in their shells to our uncle’s house, where they were roundly made fun of by our cousins.