In bloom at Esplanade. Picture by Bishwarup Dutta

Why do the people in charge of doing up the tiny enclosures in the middle of roads and at crossings with a patch of green and perhaps a statue have a fetish for lotuses — concrete lotuses that look more like ornamental toilet seats painted a lurid pink?

You can see them at the Red Road crossing opposite Raj Bhavan, and in the evening they look even more ugly when spotlights are focused on them. But the lotus that takes the cake — if this lotus can be allowed, so can mixing of metaphors — is the one at the Esplanade crossing.

Lenin stands inside this enclosure and it had turned into a jungle of weeds. The fencing had been torn out and it had turned into an open-air public toilet. Suddenly someone has taken the trouble of clearing up the mess, and once again the huge concrete lotus stands revealed painted a bright pink.

We always thought that this particular bloom was the symbol of another political party at loggerheads with the Reds. Does this signify a change of heart or colour, or was this meant to leave the Left red in the face?

Birthday party

On a local train to Srirampore, a passenger was flummoxed when he was approached from the window and asked if he could ensure that a group of burqa-clad women got down at “birthday party”. As he tried to explain to the man, who was escorting them, that he didn’t know where the party was and that there was no station called “birthday party”, the train left the station.

The group of six women seemed unconcerned, however. When the passenger asked them if they knew where they would get off, they answered that there will be people waiting for them at “birthday party”. Repeated questions about where the “birthday party” was being held didn’t yield any answer.

When Srirampore came, he got off the train, the mystery of the “birthday party” unsolved. It wasn’t until he told his family that he realised that the women’s journey would end at “Baidyobati”, a station that followed Srirampore.

Letter effect

It’s not easy to work at a newsdesk. It requires a mastery over the language that no school can teach, for there often lands a missive that is undecipherable. A recent example: an invitation to a press conference. It came from a tenants’ association in the city. “We are held as on (date) at 1 pm in the (venue) for a very important Press Conference for in our Tenant’s present problem we are discussion to media,” it went.

“Our organisation move the problem solution and relief to my eighty to ninety percent of residential and commercial tenants in West Bengal. Our president speak to media for detail discussion on that day for a ‘Historical Press Conference.

“Please you and your media be present on that day and we request your media for coverage of the important news to present the effective percentage of public.”

We don’t know what happened since.