8th of May,2023.
Hitchhiking in India.
Somebody gives me a lift in a motorbike for about 20 Km. But the place where he drops me off is not ideal for hitchhiking, so I walk for a while. A few cars going to Kolkata stop and offer to take me there, from where I could carry on to Bangladesh. But I refuse. I am now just after a toll gate.
After so many cars going to Kolkata offering to take me, I finally accept the offer of B.P. He can speak a great English, so I think that this factor it helped me on making my decision, so he could explain everything to me. He works in a legal division of the government, and his car even has a special sticker which allows him to pass free in the toll gates. He is divorced and we have some deep chat about that and life in general. He stops in a hotel in the road to buy me some paratha and a delicious sweet pickle. And we are listening to English pop music all the time. It is a very pleasant trip.
Unfortunately, after B.P. drops me off in Kolkata, things get tricky. I will have to walk a lot to get to a suitable place to hitchhike towards Bangladesh. And time is not on my side, because it is getting late. I start walking and at certain point, I finally start showing my sign to the cars passing by me as I walk. A lovely senior man offers me two red guavas out of his trolley. I try to refuse, explaining to him that I cannot pay, but he insists. I accept and he seems happy.
At certain point a fancy SUV stops. The driver is a young man and he tells me he can take me to the airport, which is on the way to Bangladesh. Yay!
Rabi is such a sweet guy! He is driving a little girl and her nanny, a senior lady. He has been working with this family for about 2 years now and he tells me that he is almost 24/7 available for them, which shocks me! The car is fancy from inside too and I cannot stop thinking on how some people love to take advantage of the less privileged ones. Why not have two drivers and give them some free time to live? Anyway, we first drop the child and the nanny somewhere, and then Rabi drives me a bit further, closer to the airport.
I am walking again when Arpinta stops her motorbike and tell me she can take me a bit further. Yay! A woman! Finally! When we arrive to the edge of where she can take me, she says we could have some chai together. She is a photographer and we keep chatting for a while. I know now that I cannot keep travelling today because it is almost night time, so we try to come up with a plan of where can I stay. Everything gets really cloudy from this moment on.
I cannot stay with Arpinta because of her parents. Talking with the owner of the restaurant where we are having chai, he says I can camp beside his restaurant, but only later night. I say I am OK with that, but first I will walk to the village nearby and see if I can get to stay with some of the locals. I am not successful with that, actually I have a really hard time by the village, but I rather not go into details. When I come back to the restaurant, the owner is gone but the guy working there tells me that I cannot stay anymore. What? Why? I am so tired and now I am really upset.
While I am by the road, wondering where to go and what to do, a young man asks me if I am fine and if he can help me. After so many people offering me help in the past 2 hours, only to retrieve the offer and vanish when I explain that all I need is a place to spend the night, I don’t really believe in the young man’s offer, and tell him off.
But instead of walk away, he gathers some of his friends and come back to talk with me again. They are all very young, and he insists that he can help me. We talk for a little while by the road, while he calls his relatives and arrange everything with his friends too, about how we will be split between the motorbikes so we can go to his home. All sorted, we embark in a long ride across the town, while laughing and the boys making videos of the whole thing. I am the first foreigner they ever met and, of course, helped.
This village is Duttapukur (I wander how did I get this far from the Airport…) and the boys are Tushar, Anup, Tirtha, Sajib and Rupom. I stay in the house of Tirtha. He lives with his mother and his grandmother. I meet them both. We chat for a little while and take some photos, then all the guys leave. I share the bed with Tirtha‘s grandmother.
Next morning, I help the mother a little bit with the breakfast. After eating, Tirtha takes me to a hitchhiking spot.
10 Years Around the World 