Potatoes and Life in the Mountains
We had trekked to the Everest Base Camp and the Kalapathar in the autumn of 1997. We, meaning my inseparable companions of many a Himalayan trek, Swapan Chakrabarty, a schoolteacher from Budge Budge, another schoolmaster Subrata Chowdhury, Asit Bose, who celebrated his 76th birthday at the Base Camp and Mastermoshai, Rabindranath babu the Mathematics teacher in the Achipur High school. Of them Asitda is no more, he spent his last few years confined to his house in Tollygunge with Alzheimer’s disease. The most important thing when you are going for a long trek is to have a good comfort level among the participants, because you are thrown together at very close quarters and have to share your personal space in a way that even Indians, who do not set much store by privacy, may find irksome. However this group was one that had together walked many of the trails of the Himalayas and also most recently, the along the Damodar river in Bihar. (There was no Jharkhand then) At the end of a ha...