SUDESHNA BANERJEE grew up in Ranaghat, relishing its famed pantua and hearing stories of footballer Nikhil Nandy’s exploits on the Maidan and starry-eyed local girl Rakhee’s rise to stardom in Bollywood. Banerjee narrates why her most recent visit to her hometown was unlike any she had made before
Pantua. From time immemorial, the blackish-brown fried sweet, oblong in shape, has been Ranaghat's calling card. It has put my hometown on the west bank of the Churni river on the gastronomic map of Bengal. But what the pantua never did, a ghastly incident at the Convent of Jesus and Mary has: leave its 72,000 residents ashamed and angry in the glare of unwanted attention.
Life goes on in the teeming, pavement-less streets with open drains, made more chaotic with the advent of the Totos or e-rickshaws that now jostle for space with cycle rickshaws, bikes, cycles, cars, trekkers, cycle vans and pedestrians. But scratch the surface and the wounds are still raw.
"Ranaghat does not deserve to be identified with such barbarity. We have a lot going for us," Chinmoy Mukherjee, 60, bristles at the mention of the town becoming primetime fodder ever since the rape and robbery at the convent. "We have a history as a seat of music, theatre and sports."
One had grown up hearing about the Chatterjee household, whose members included the Nazrulgeeti exponent Anjali Mukherjee, who trained under Angurbala Devi and became a doctor with a degree from the UK. Then there was her brother Shibkumar, a central figure in the town's cultural activities in the 1970s.
The kitchen chatter, fed on film magazines, centred on Rakhee Biswas, the ticket collector's daughter from Mahaprabhutala who had made it big in Bombay. Yes, the lady who won Amitabh Bachchan's heart in Kabhi Kabhie and Anusandhan. There was also Nikhil Nandy, the football right-half who represented India in the Olympic Games.
"Keshto Mitra, the centre-forward, and Gobindo Guha Thakurta, the goalie, wore Mohun Bagan colours. Goal-keeper Abani Bose's house in Chhotobazar still stands. Ashok Dutta played volleyball for Bengal," Mukherjee, the secretary of Town Club, rattles off.
The club, established in 1905, is among the oldest three in Nadia. The nearby Ranaghat Sporting Club bears a plaque to commemorate a visit by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. The poet Nabinchandra Sen had served as the SDO there in the 1890s and Rabindranath Tagore had come to meet him. The SDO's bungalow still hosts the Nabin-Kabi Milonotsab every September.
In his seminal work Paschimbanger Sanskriti, Binoy Ghosh quotes the 1910 Nadia Gazeteer on how "dacoits swarmed here in 1809". The irony is that this is a town that possibly drew its name from one Rana dacoit of lore and has now had infamy thrust on it by another gang of dacoits.
There is no documentary evidence but legend has it that Rana the robber worshipped Siddheshwari Kali, the town's oldest deity, before he set out on his raids. The temple was then hidden in a dense jungle but is now at the centre of the town.
Disgust has co-existed with pride in the Sarkar home over the past two weeks. Here lives Sudhir Sarkar, the founder of one of the town's oldest pantua shops, Mishtimukh.
At 91, he still remembers vividly how he crossed the border from Bangladesh's Rangpur in the aftermath of Partition and set up his shop in 1950 in this town of barely 20,000 people. "Customers would troop in with each train that whistled into the station nearby. The evenings were lonely," he recalls.
Sudhir supplied tins of pantua to Calcutta too. "The canteens of the India Tobacco Company and Orient Fans used to take 16 tins daily, each containing 200 pieces."
His son Bitan looked after the Calcutta branch, beside Rangmahal hall in Sovabazar, that supplied pantua to singer Manna Dey before his trips to Bombay and once received an order from Hema Malini.
Bitan's daughter Debasmita happens to be the convent school's head girl and is part of the institution's first batch that is currently writing the ISC examinations. "We want justice," she says, echoing a demand reverberating through the town. "We want those men to be handed over to us, the students. The police can only put them in jail."
Debasmita had joined a rally on March 14, the day after the incident, despite her mathematics paper being two days away. “We were not in the right frame of mind,” she says of the stress under which she and her classmates wrote the paper. “When we were coming out after the test, so many cameras were focused on us that we felt like animals in a zoo. The SDO escorted us out. We didn’t even cross-check our answers (with friends) before going home.”
Chief minister Mamata Banerjee had visited Ranaghat the same afternoon but Debasmita and the other examinees didn’t stay back to meet her.
“Such a dirty thing to do!” Bitan says of the assault on the 74-year-old nun. “She is old enough to be their grandmother.”
Across the road, Papia Bose, the mother of another student at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, is overcome by shame. “They (the nuns) came from afar to teach our children. And this is how we treated them,” she says, seated next to daughter Ria, who is appearing for her ICSE. “Guardians of the younger students can’t even tell the kids what happened.”
On Subhas Avenue, the town’s busiest street leading to the rail station, Prosenjit Ghosh is poring over an article on Ranaghat in the day’s Anandabazar Patrika. His shop, from which my earliest fairy tales, translated world classics and comic books came, wears a depleted look. A single rack holds fiction for grown-ups. The rest are all cookbooks, almanacs, religious texts and Rabindrasangeet notations.
“Until last year, our biggest business was school textbooks. With the government deciding to distribute those free, we are left with only guidebooks to sell,” he rues, adding that all his customers are aged 50-plus.
The family has already wound up its other business — sports goods. Is that because the empty plots where children used to play have been overrun by concrete? “The big grounds are still there. But boys today don’t care for outdoor sports,” says Prosenjit.
His brother-in-law had called from Mumbai after news broke of the rape and robbery at the convent. “The world is talking about Ranaghat only because of this,” Prosenjit sighs.
Station master Swapan Kumar Mondal is in charge of the busy tracks, with Ranaghat station handling 104 pairs of trains daily. “The CID came to ask me about the trains in the early hours. Apparently, the dacoits didn’t have a vehicle. Even between 4.30am and 6.30am, there are trains going everywhere — Gede, Bongaon, Shantipur, Krishnagar, Sealdah,” he says. “Kono sobhyo deshe e ghotona juktitey mele na (Such an incident does not make sense in a civilised nation).”
Look-out notices, including CCTV pictures of the miscreants, are pasted all around the ticketing area at the station. “Bhogoban jodi thaken ora dhora porbei (If there is God, they will be caught),” Tapati Pramanik says in a trembling voice. The elderly woman runs a cigarette shop right across the ticket counter. If the criminals left by train, she couldn’t have seen them. “My husband and I can’t reach the station to open the shop before 11am. We are too old.”
Most people are convinced that the culprits who are at large are in Bangladesh. “We need passports to cross over, not them,” Bitan says. The two arrested so far are said to have entered India illegally from Bangladesh.
Many in Ranaghat blame the porous border for the town’s burgeoning population.Ranaghat is likely to stay in the spotlight for some time. Although the town itself is unaffected by the presence of the media contingent — the school in focus is on the outskirts, across the highway — those who have witnessed the horde up close seem impressed and bemused at the same time.
Debasmita’s mother Tania can even name some of those working for the news channels. “How hardworking they are, waiting all day in the verandah of a nearby house without access to even toilets,” she says.
Debasmita, she declares, has decided to become a journalist, making her daughter blush. “She used to watch only the music channels. Now she keeps a ear out for updates whenever the news is on,” father Bitan smiles.
Nobody believes that the sudden interest in the town will last. “We will plunge back into oblivion,” says bookstore owner Prosenjit.
Local political leaders aren’t worried that the incident at the convent would affect the outcome of the civic polls. Shankar Singh, the Congress leader from Nadia, is apparently in talks to join the Trinamul Congress and there is more curiosity about how many nominations he can wrangle for his acolytes rather than anything else.
As night descends, National Highway 34 becomes the playground of speeding trucks. I stop for a look at the school before heading back to Calcutta. “That building across the courtyard with the barbed-wire fence,” Prafulla Sikdar points out from across the highway.
The owner of Sikdar Electronics, a spare parts shop, had seen the school building come up.
Did he see the chief minister when she came? “Only from the shop. It was too crowded,” he says, clearly wary of the administration’s attempt to identify those who had blocked Mamata’s way that day.
Straining my eyes on the unlit road, I can barely make out the white building engulfed in darkness. Much like the town’s reputation.
