Kolkata Part 5 – The Bengali meal

We walked through a few side lanes to get to the restaurant but found ourselves returning to the pandal area when we realized we were taking a wrong turn. The pandal area was swarmed by a large crowd now, and we could sense the increased pedestrian traffic even on other streets. We found our way to the Bhojohori Manna restaurant at 1 pm (the board said ‘Bengali home style cuisine’). Deb had said that it was likely we’d have to wait for 30 minutes at least but fortunately for us, there was not much of a waiting crowd – a table for two was readily available, and the waiter guided us to it.

Deb had given us recommendations on what to have – the thali (a set meal), at least one mutton dish, illish bhapa (fish), mutton kosha, daab chingri (prawn) which is cooked in coconut. And so we went with the thali along with the fish and prawn dishes. The Bengali thali had a cup of white rice, a cup of ghee rice with some nuts (a form of light pulao/pilau), dal, shukto (a mixed vegetable gravy which uses a little milk for the dish), a couple of vegetable dishes (one dry and one gravy based), a large begun bhaja (marinated brinjal/eggplant slice that is cooked in oil). I loved all the gravies; they were flavourful but not spicy hot – and tasted delicious with rice. The same was the case with the fish and prawn dishes too. And dessert in the thali consisted of the mishti doi and another sweet.

(You can click on the snaps to see the larger version)

When we left the restaurant, there was a huge queue waiting to enter; we were lucky that we came 30 minutes earlier. Per the itinerary, we were supposed to take a bus to Jodhpur Park for the pandal there. But having been out on the streets for about 5 hours on such a hot and humid day, we decided to head back to the hotel for a break. We waded through the crowds to make it to the main road; one challenge with Uber/Ola was that we found the fares were high for short rides – possibly because of the festive period. Finding the share-auto route took us a while, and we had to switch two to get back to the Circus Maidan.

Double booking

Another friend of mine, Kshitij, had warned that 5 pm to 2 am is the peak time zone in the city; we were curious to see what it would be like. At about 5 pm we searched for Ubers/Olas but couldn’t get anything. He had told us that the cabs won’t take us to the pandals, but the apps said there were no taxis available at this hour. Considering the distance of 3.5 km, we decided to walk it out to Maddox square park (this was on Kshitij’s list).

We avoided the main road because of the traffic and noise and stuck to the side lanes. By 5:40 pm, the sun was out, and it turned dark; there were stretches of road that we passed which were deserted and made us wonder if we were on the right path because we didn’t see the type of decoration we saw near the pandals. And we were surprised to suddenly see skyscrapers – some of which were still not occupied but up until this point, we had only seen buildings with 2 or 3 floors.

We finally did see a board indicating the direction to the park. Took us 45 minutes. Maddox Park seemed like a college hangout spot – many youngsters in small groups chatting and enjoying the food from the stalls in the park. We also bought some snacks and sat down for a bit of rest. The Maddox pandal was relatively simpler than the grander ones we saw in the afternoon.

By 6:10 pm, we were on our way to check our next accommodation spot – we couldn’t get continuous accommodation for all days in the same hotel and had to break it up – our 2nd place of stay was a backpacker’s hostel near Maddox Square. It was kind of hidden from view – the road was pretty dark as well, and it took a while for us to locate the road and then some time to find the shady back entrance; we took the steps up since there was nothing below – on each level there were a few rooms, and there was also a large dog loitering around the hostel which we had to evade. We finally found the hostel’s owner – he was a great host; he took us to the terrace, where we chatted and discovered to our shock, that we didn’t really have rooms! Apparently, the booking aggregator company had made a double booking in this place – fortunate for us that we visited the area early. The other folks with the overlapping booking had already confirmed checking in – their stay was longer than ours. There wasn’t much we could do for now – had to find another place to stay. As we departed, the host mentioned a couple of other places in the locality to check out while we explored Kolkata.