I stuck a shocking pink strappy candy lolly around my wrist !

Peak Summer was announced by the sugar-cane wallah outside the main gate of Jhoshoda Bhabhon on Godiahat Mode .The junction was always busy and chaotic too.While buses came from all directions,trams headed left towards Kosba and right towards Kalighat .Chillout!

Peddlers selling wares were a happy lot,alternating between sipping tea in mud cups and smoking beedis.The smell of the puff intermingled with the aroma of fresh singadas,puchkas,jhal muri,aloor dhom and the vegetable rolls .The Rasogollas soaked in jaggery treacle were always readily available.....:cheers

Generation of electricity was a major issue in the seventys and the eightys in West Bengal. Load shedding was rampant Giant generators worked day and night and I thank my good stars for ear drums that were drowned then, but have somehow managed to stay afloat.:drowning
Daily Bhola would station his cart outside the gates.He ran giant sticks of sugar-canes, eight at a time, through the hand-cranked press. He would double and triple the husked sticks and run them through again - and again and again… The juice ran through a sieve filled with broken ice into an old aluminium jug. Before he gave you the glass, he mixed in kala namak and a tbsp of nimboo ras.The juice, the 'ganne ka ras', was nectar and no one really minded about the dirt or the germs or the deep black fingernails, for the same reason as no one boiled water at home or bought water outside. Yet ! We were not stupid and didn't mind dying young perhaps. But I guess !The juice must have been Devaamruth and so I live to tell the tale today .

The cotton-candy man and the sugar-cane man are nearly extinct. When I was a child in Calcutta, the chana jor garam wala would visit once a week with a basket full of pressed masala chana dal. I loved the ice gola wala too. I ate the ice lollies because all my friends did.I had a shocking pink sticky candy watch stuck around my wrist coz all kids of my age had one to flaunt. I later became an enthusiastic patron of the 25 paise orange bar peddled by the Kwality Ice Cream man in the neighbourhood.

I dreamt of owning Geometry boxes by Staedtler, table tennis bats called Butterfly, phoren ballpoint pens and pencil boxes, little flat torches that dangled off key-chains, and Parker/Sheaffer pens with impossible-to-buy-in-India ink cartridges .These were a few of our favourite and much desired things. We almost never got them, but when we did, we experienced a gloating fulfillment that only scarcity can induce.

The children of the 1960s and the 1970s loved things much much more intensely than their children do today simply because they didn't have them. :cheers