Dominoes Of Dreams

Second Position- English, Writing Contest 2025

By Atreyee Ghosh

City: Kolkata, West Bengal

Description: In this essay, the author brings Kolkata alive not through the monuments, but in the everyday lives, through the artists on the streets, vendors in markets, and friendships stitched in small gestures. It is a portrait of resilience and warmth, where survival meets creativity, and the city’s true soul is found in its people. Bringing back the focus on how the place is only as good as the people in it.

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Image Source: Author

A city isn’t as much about the fancy buildings, metalled roads, pavements, and cars as much as it is about the people and their stories. It isn’t about its humongous width or length but about the small, insignificant lives that give it depth. Thus to talk about cities is to talk about its people. Every city hides in its nooks and crannies thousands of tiny little cities, millions of sorrows, happiness, love, desires and expectations. Every other busy day, every other monochromatic face captured in a photographer’s lens, every other graffiti on broken walls or garage fronts, every little hand with dirt under the nails that scrambles for coins on the road, the conspicuous hopelessness in every other pair of eyes, the sweat clinging to the vendor’s brows, every other unfed street dog clamoring for a piece of bread- they all make up a city as much as its shopping plazas and food courts.

I wasn’t born or brought up in Kolkata- the city of joy, the city this story is going to be about. I was born in Howrah, a satellite town on the other side of the Ganges. For the people living in my town, Kolkata is not only the city of joy but also the city of their small town dreams. It means good food, bigger malls, the comfort of metro rides, better healthcare, better schools, colleges and less poverty. We all think on the other side of the river we can make big money. And we go. We try our level best to flee this dirty, polluted, cramped little insignificant town to the other side – to even more dirt, pollution and insignificance.

In a small town you have an identity. In a big city you’re just another corporate employee fighting for a bus seat on a busy, bustling Monday morning.

My experience with Kolkata began somewhat similarly. Sometimes I would stand in a big packed bus and couldn’t breathe. The amount of smoke and dust and people was absolutely overwhelming. As days rolled on and life went on, and I was a little more settled in my degree, I would agree to hang out with friends until late in the evening and our usual haunts varied from Nandan (the cheap government

place for film and theatre, five minutes from Rabindra Sadan metro station), to Maidan, to the

shopping mall called Forum near Bhawanipur college.

It was on one such occasion when I and my friend went for the afternoon show at Nandan that we chanced across that peculiar man. Usually the place is full of artists and musicians of all kinds. It is like a regular hangout for eccentric people. Ponytails, sketchbooks and guitars are a common sight - especially ponytails.

But this man didn’t fit into the description of some young, eccentric teenager looking for art

inspiration or like-minded individuals. He looked like a regular man with a backpack and a clipboard in hand, he held a pencil that was too blunt and too short to make sketches of people professionally. And yet here he came. He asked if he should sketch me and my friend for a hundred and fifty rupees each. My friend shook his head vigorously asking him to leave us alone. But he kept bargaining. He asked us if we would be interested in a hundred rupees each. He kept saying over and over again that he wasn’t some sort of a no-name artist, that he was genuinely exceptional at his work. But we refused again. Back in those days we were scrimping and saving money for our small outings.

This time he offered to make sketches for fifty rupees each. I noticed each time his prices went down my friend grew more and more agitated. Finally he stopped ignoring the man, looked straight into his eyes and told him to bugger off. As the man walked away I noticed he had a peculiar body structure- an exceptionally short torso and long thin legs. His gait was hunched and slow and it almost gave him

the air of a cartoon character. When he was gone my friend told me that the man usually hangs around here and keeps bugging people for portraits. He said he had once allowed the man to sketch

him and that he had done a horrible job for a whole hundred rupees.

“Don’t ever look into his eyes,” he said. “If you do, you'll never be able to refuse him, the way he begs.”

The last word made me wonder if he was actually in dire need of money, if he was in reality begging

behind the pretense of being an artist, whether he would have taken ten-twenty rupees without the

fuss of any portrait. So the next time I was there {this time with a bigger group) and he approached us

for sketches I handed him a twenty rupees note when he started bargaining his prices. He took a good

look at me, handed back the money and said he doesn’t accept charity.

“I sell my work. I’m not here for help.” And then he walked away.

This time his prices kept hanging at a hundred. It might have been my imagination but his hunch looked straighter and he saw me a number of times thereafter at Nandan but never asked if I wanted a portrait again. Perhaps he had already made my portrait in his mind and judging by the looks of it, for him I wasn’t worth sketching for a million rupees.

Nandan is probably the only place in all of Kolkata where people from various walks of life all come to

sell their art. Painters, musicians, and lost poets throng the streets as they sell what they make for the bare minimum public admiration and pittance. For young children they become entertainment, for the grownups they're just another person to give money for charity, for the teenagers trying to dream big -they're a scary live example that frightens the living daylights out of them.

They live from hand to mouth and their future is as small as their shrunken bellies. If they pay for a

new brush they skip a meal, if they pay for a new set of strings they walk instead of taking a bus, if they buy a new book they sell the old ones they have read already. They form the breathing intonation of Camus' Absurdism. They know life is empty in its intrinsic meaning. It is pointless to care about anything or anyone anymore and yet they do. They wake up and choose to care and work interminably to keep body and soul together— all for their art. They try their best to survive yet another day of knowing they're not good enough at the only thing they want to be good enough.

They teach us how to exist, how to live without seeking meaning, to live for the sake of living, to make art for the sake of making art. It's Aestheticism in its rawest form. For them it's not about money, it's not about material pleasure. It's about what they passionately love and live for. Every new morning is a new attempt at survival. Every new day, a new breath of existing for their art.

The famous author of the Kakababur series, a collection of detective novellas, Sunil Ganguly once said in an interview, if he absolutely has to live, he would rather make a living writing, otherwise starve. There's no alternative for him.

To love something so completely, in its entire entirety, so stubbornly that you wouldn't sacrifice it for all the happiness in the world— that must be true devotion. It is the pain that you love and the tears

that you smile through. If you don't abandon it at its worst, it wouldn't abandon you at yours.

There’s a flute seller who sits outside Gagenendra Shilpa Pradarshashala, the exclusive art gallery of

Nandan. Every evening at around five or six the entire area inside and outside the theatre is suffused

with the sweet dragging lilt of musical notes that he plays to attract customers. It imbues the air with a

sort of interminable peace, an unexplained sepulchral end to a long hard day of work. There is a bus

stand right beside where he sits with his flutes, the corporate workers who wait in long queues listen to him -their eyes glazed, hearts captivated by the softness of his Midas touch.

I have a friend who plays the Tabla. On a rather stuffy summer evening we were aimlessly walking around the theatre, sucking on popsicles, when we first heard the flute. My friend has a natural affinity for all sorts of classical music. I was half dragged by him to the place where the man crouched

on the ground breathing his soul into instruments he has always sold but never owned. We stood

listening to him for a really long while before I noticed that my friend was growing rather dismal and uncomfortable. I found it strange that something so peaceful could cause such a turn in his mood. I asked him what he thinks of the flute seller and he said he couldn’t imagine how hard it must have been for the old man to have sacrificed his life as a musician and instead sell the very same instruments for money. Back then he was also caught up in a trepidation regarding his career, he didn’t

know if he should have dared pursue music or something more conventional. He told me that day while I got upon the bus that he realized he probably wouldn’t be able to make as hard a sacrifice as the flute seller had done. That he would always want to own his instrument and all the money in the world wouldn’t suffice if he didn’t have a home to house his passion. It seemed his question had been answered.

The Ahiritola Ghat on the left bank of the Hooghly River is a bare fifteen minutes walk from the

Shobhabazar Sutanuti Metro Station. I had had a terrible day and the sickness in the pit of my stomach from losing five hundred rupees was nauseating. I had applied the previous night for the bachelor’s program in English at the Scottish Church College through their online application portal. The application fee had got deducted from my account but did not show up on the college server and I

seemed to have lost a whole five hundred rupees in thin air. The next morning my friend and I went to

Shobhabazar to talk to the college authorities and figure out what had gone wrong. The college is

located on Duff Street, about half an hour from Ahiritola Ghat. That day it was raining in soft warm

showers and after waiting in the premises for nearly four hours without finding any significant solution to our problem, the two of us decided that since we had come so far and the weather was so pleasant it would be a waste to not have some tea on the river bank.

And so we took a short auto ride, walked along Ahiritola Street and found ourselves a nice dry spot on

the stairs of the Ghat. All around us people sat huddled together, gossiping and smoking cigarettes and

having lemon tea. As soon as we had settled down, an old man came fussing over and started smiling at my friend. My friend grinned back ear to ear and asked him how he was doing. The man pointed to the sky and his heart and started pouring us two cups of lemon tea. Pretty soon it occurred to me that the man was mute and the two of them have known each other for what seemed like a really good amount of time. They spoke for a while, the old man miming his responses to my friend’s questions and re- asking him the same in sign. Their conversation flowed smooth as a stroke of good ink and neither of them seemed to have any problem comprehending. I understood only obscurely, certain less ambiguous parts of this dialogue, here and there improvising my own meaning. When the man had taken the money for the tea and left, I asked my friend how he knew this man. He said he used to come here often as a lonely teenager and sit alone watching and musing over the waves in the river. He had met this man back then and had been given tea for free. Now whenever he came to the Ghat he would buy tea from him. This man apparently had no family and loved my friend like his own son.

For the rest of my time there, I sat watching the man. He limped from one group of people to another, with the heavy kettle in hand, beaming and feeding them warm tea wrapped in the comfort of silence on a rainy evening. With each sip the tangy taste of lemon and the sweet aroma of ginger exploded on

the tip of their tongue. With each sip of his tea, they had a sip of his smiling silence that echoed with a mellow welcome. The strength in his eyes that spoke louder than words ever could, the hopeful little

smile on his face that never got tired of life, the two minutes in which I had the company of his warm

tea, made me forget all about the five hundred rupees I had lost by the time I took the ride home.

Hope is an infectious little bug. You never know when you have caught the fever, especially in a big city like Kolkata. Kolkata is not only the city of joy but also the city of new possibilities. Every day the city unfolds itself in innovative ways.

It holds the vestiges of a rich cultural heritage under the foreboding shadow of a fast paced city life and the gnawing jaws of capitalism. The multinational companies and their range of minimalist architecture might eat up the hanging balconies and decorative pillars, the crunch of old bricks and plaster might sound in every corner, but the heart of a true Bengali refuses to move on from "Uthons" and "Rowaks". "Uthon" is a fancy front yard, paved and surrounded by rooms on all sides, it is the heart of old Kolkata's architecture. "Rowak" is an elevated platform that runs along house fronts, sometimes interrupted by doorways. It is the place where evening "addas" take place- leisurely, free flowing gossip that often turns into violent or animated debates on a plethora of subjects. It is usually accompanied by a game of cards and one or more rounds of tea.

It was on one such evening adda at my friend's house on Raja Dinendra Street in Shyambazar that I came across Srijan. He happened to be my friend's cousin. From him I heard of his story. Soon after the lockdown had ended, his family was going through a lot of financial issues owing to his father's

degrading health. They needed a total of fifty lakh rupees for his surgery. His mother ran a small tailoring shop and his father's business was drowning in debt. He had a fierce passion for music. He

played the guitar in cafes and restaurants to make a living. His father was strictly against his son's musical endeavours and wanted him to settle down with a job at the earliest so he could take care of

his family. When his father fell ill and there was no one to take their side, he said with pride that his music did.

"I played on streets for free, bowl in front of me, practically begging for money. It worked on good days, didn't on the bad. That added with the classes I taught at the local music school and the performances at cafes, and weddings, each day I returned with more than five thousand rupees in cash." The others would nod in awe and sympathy and congratulate him on his success, both as a son and a musician.

"I and maa would give up one meal per day to save up enough for the surgery. I was surviving on three hours of sleep and a mouthful of rice a day. There was somehow never enough."

"And now has your father accepted your music?" Somebody would ask. He would look down at his calloused hands and give a sad, faint, quivering, little smile in reply.

Raja Dinendra Narayan Ray, or Dinendranath Tagore, was the grandson of Dwijendranath Tagore and a key figure in the Tagore family's musical legacy. He was known for his musical talent, particularly in Hindustani classical music and Rabindra Sangeet. He was also famously known for his baritone voice, which can be heard in his early recordings of Rabindra Sangeet. He was proficient in both Sargam and Western staff notation. He was also involved in the notation and preservation of Tagore's melodies and was nicknamed "Amar gaaner bhandari" (the keeper of my songs) by Rabindranath Tagore. He served as the principal of Visva-Bharati's Music school, Sangit Bhavana for its opening years.

The street on which Srijan lived is named in Raja Dinendra's honour. It's a well-known location, and

there are various businesses and restaurants located along it. Sometimes puffing on cigarettes and slapping cards down on the rowk I would wonder, how would Dinu Thakur have felt had he met Srijan?

A music enthusiast starving in the street named after another music enthusiast. It is possible perhaps only in the city of possibilities, never in the one of joy.

I was in school back then, probably in the eighth or ninth grade. It was December of 2019. I was returning home after a rather unexciting day at school and stood in front of the Mio Amore Cake Shop near Bijon Setu to cross the road and take an auto home. The signal had just turned green when I felt a slight tap on my left shoulder. I turned my head back to find myself staring into the eyes of a frail, wrinkled face that looked dry and drained of colour owing to hunger and thirst. The woman had

cascades of silver hair falling onto her shoulders, she wore a tattered green sari that had faded to a whitish sage. Her thin quivering hand reached out to me. There were a few coins of one and two rupees lying in the cup of her hand. I dug into my pocket for leftover change and handed her two rupees. She stared at my face for a split second before turning back and limping away. She was hunched over, slow and unsteady. I watched her as she sat down on the pavement of a nearby shop and started counting the money. I knew it couldn't have exceeded ten rupees in all. Suddenly my heart filled with guilt and sympathy. She hadn't had a proper meal in two-three days. I could have easily made the effort to take my purse out and given her a ten or twenty rupees note but I chose to consciously look for leftover change. I cursed myself under my breath and went into the cake shop behind me. I started looking for anything that I could buy for fifty rupees (it was all the money I had in my purse back then). The woman could have easily asked for more like so many other beggars did, but she chose to keep close to herself the last remnants of her dignity, and accepted her predicament in silence. Her resilience almost made one feel small and petty.

I emptied my purse on a sweet called "Mishti Sukh" and rushed back to her. She stared at my face as I

placed the box on her lap. The corners of her eyes twitched as they kept looking at the weight on her thighs. Then she opened the box slowly, almost carefully, and divided the sweet in two equal halves. She handed me a half and made me sit and have the first bite. Then she put the whole other half in her mouth in one go and chewed like she hadn't chewed in ages. Before I left she smiled warmly and

blessed me a lot in her own grandmotherly way. Perhaps the sweet had been aptly named. Mishti Sukh - sweet happiness.

As I walked back home I was taken over by a surprising, unexplained giddiness. I didn't know who was

kinder, me for buying a poor old lady a sweet worth a mere fifty rupees, or her for making me have the

first bite of the only meal of her day.

I realised that day that kindness doesn't come with a lot of money. You could have a million rupees the very next day but not become kinder overnight. If you are kind, you'd be kind both as a millionaire and a beggar. You could live hand to mouth yet have enough to share.

Unfortunately today the alienation is so strong and rigid that we could talk from both ends of the conversation in our head but not ask the man beside us if he is doing alright. Sharing is only a

farfetched ideal. Somewhere we all feel the lack of meaning in our hyperreal worlds locked away

behind phone screens, but the lack of meaning in the real world overpowers. The meaning and meaningless blur, the life and lies overlap and man today lives more in the immaterial than the material in all big cities.

One today can only speculate but never really know where dreams end and realities begin. In the haze of busy corporate lives do we really live in tangible cities of bricks and buildings or invisible ones, dominos of dreams?

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About the Author:

Atreyee Ghosh

Atreyee, a 19-year-old girl from the small town of Howrah and is pursuing her Bachelor’s degree in English Honours at Jadavpur University. Deeply drawn to the sights and stories around her, she often finds inspiration in Kolkata, a city that has long held the imagination of those from nearby towns. A lover of both words and images, she expresses herself through poetry and photography, capturing fleeting emotions and everyday moments. Through her writing and art, she hopes to celebrate the beauty of simple experiences and the stories they quietly tell.