house, bed made of hay, bamboo water pipe to bring water from waterfalls, makeshift toilets made of bamboo, everything blew off my mind.
Though economic conditions were unyielding, my parents used to manage a tour outside Assam, every year. I am thankful to my parents that we traveled to Puri, Kolkata, Darjeeling, Mumbai, Delhi, Nepal, and so many other places during my school days. Puta had stories to tell us for every place we traveled.
Some of the stories were about the history of that place, and some of the stories were from his training days at those places. Our tours might not be that luxurious but were full of fun and exciting experiences.
I remember spending a day, sleeping on the railway platform with my family on a tour to Haridwar. This made me watch the life of people living on the platform. I wrote a story about it and got myself the first position in a story writing competition at my school. The last tour with him was to Jammu and Kashmir.
During that tour, we went to Baishnu Devi Mandir on foot. He always walked ahead of us while climbing the hill of Trikuta. It was a great experience walking an entire night with the devotees. Puta was not a believer in gods. But never failed to visit places of devotion. Every place inspired him with a story and influenced his writing. A life with him was a life of adventure. He always wished to visit a foreign country. Dhaka was in the first place on his bucket list. He used to ask me to accompany him to a foreign country. It breaks my heart not to be able to fullfill this wish of his.
Puta has always been a workaholic. He was a great help to my mother in the kitchen. Though we were not a fan of his cooking, he tried to cook foods from different cuisines which were surprisingly too good most of the time. He used to do most of the household chores like cleaning and planting the garden, cleaning drains, fixing broken things, etc. by himself. Whether it is cooking food or cleaning a gutter, he used to teach me all kinds of work.I
