Keya Sarkar: Thankfully unspoilt

The million lights, synthetic smell and the mingling of various odours in the food court made me long for the low voltage power that the West Bengal State Electricity dishes out in Santiniketan and the heady smell of summer flowers and the absence of the lure to buy.

Thankfully the next morning, I was on a train back to Paradise. On return to Santiniketan, I learnt that in the evening there was going to be a music programme to mark singer Neelima Sen's birth anniversary. "Where will it be held?" I asked my informer, "and when?" "Purono ghanta talay," (where the bell used to be) "in the evening," she replied, befitting an occasion which needed no tickets and therefore no planning.

We reached the spot within the Visva Bharati University campus by evening and saw that an audience of about two hundred had collected around a banyan tree. There were a few chairs for the elders and rugs on the ground for the young. The stage was at the foot of the tree, decorated merely by a few coloured fabric strips hanging from its branches.

We sat on the verandah of a nearby building where the branches of a