Thongas -- the unacknowledged legacy

Not thongs, ye hopefuls, but thongas. Those paper packets you get from every possible store. The local sweetshop wraps hot jilipis in it, the footpath jewellery shack shoves five pairs of earrings in one of them, the street corner telebhaja sellers use them to put oil-oozing alu'r chop and beguni and phuluri in, with a layer of puffy white muri beneath and two green chillies delicately poised on top. One of those things.

When I was younger I used to, or so I'm told (never completely trust fond recollections of assorted relatives. They inevitably remember you as goofier and themselves as more indulgent than either of you actually were) collect all and every thonga that crossed the threshold. I would then carefully dismantle it -- and trust me, this takes care -- tearing slowly and carefully along the gum-line and using the back of a teaspoon to pry particularly stubborn sections apart. Then I would read each piece of paper to the last syllable. It was a most entertaining occupation. In fact, so enamoured was I of thongas that I would crane my neck at impossible angles to follow a sentence around the circular bends and little tucks at the bottom of the thonga topography when my mum stopped to talk to people on our way back from shops, thus delaying my more leisurely perusal of the riveting stuff in the comfort of our home.

And riveting it was. I have personal recollections of reading tearfully reproachful love letters in a putative female voice ("If your family mattered to you more than our love did then why did you make my heart soar with false hopes?" -- preserved for posterity in my diary, with the 'why' underlined thrice), a page from a glossy magazine with tips to aid conception, two of them ticked and one crossed out, a page of handwritten political science class notes and half a mathematics question paper with answers scribbled next to questions. I had borrowed my grandfather's notepad and worked out all six sums, I remember, and realised the poor fellow had suffered muchly on the publication of the results. Besides, in those days of two-channel television and monitored reading, chastely brought up young men of my acquaintance had their first vicarious carnal experiences via thongas, treasuring smoothed out half-a-pages of particular prettiness from Anadalok or similar that they had procured in moments of rare luck from smirking shopkeepers. Such were our small joys.

Plus there was the occasional fix of 'literature'. Two paragraphs of a short story, a poem in free verse, the climax of a novel minus the last three sentences -- our imagination got plenty of practice. Thongas was how I started on Sanjeeb Chattopadhyay's Shiuli. The week's raw pulses had been put into a large thonga made from not one, but one and a half pages of a reasonably recent edition of Anandamela, which is where I read a particularly sappy bit of the story and was absolutely enthralled. I started subscribing to the magazine a few months after this, and Shiuli ended by my fifth or sixth issue. I never did try to find a complete copy of the novel when it was published later to read the chapters I had missed. The only connection I had with the rest of the story was those one and a half pages' worth of paragraphs that I had read off a packet of pulses, and somehow, that was enough. I didn't want to make the story less magical by ferreting out every last detail.
I was thirteen and obviously, a lot less repressive of my romantic side than I am now.

Mostly though, the glossy magazine pages -- especially those with pictures -- were a bit of a novelty, not used to pour your month's supply of grains or rice into. In my more youthful days, they were reserved for the rarer purchases of dry fruits and spices. Pages from diaries and personal letters were rarer still, and these days they are completely nonexistent (who writes diaries and letters anymore?). Pages from textbooks, ledgers, question papers, answer scripts, class notebooks and old bills made -- and make -- only occasional appearances. What your everyday thongas were usually made of was old newspapers.

Which is another thing I notice, by the way. When I say most thongas were made of old newspapers, I mean old newspapers. Old magazines, too. If you checked (and I did), you'd see the folded and gummed page from Sananda that brought the Gobindobhog rice home was from at least eight months back, and that's an at least. Thongas were not your useful summary of the week's headlines. They served stale bits of news cold, usually the stuff you somehow never noticed while actually flipping through the newspaper. These days, I see thongas made from last Thursday's ToI. All this speed is a little unsettling. It robs that mellowed, smooth, vintage quality that was the prime joy of reading thongas, apart from the secret thrills of reading about complete strangers domestic squabbles, of course. I really do not need Mayawati's face looking up at me, half-soaked in oil oozing from the piping hot beguni and lonkar chop inside. It ruins my appetite.

Sometimes I wish I had kept those thongas though, the ones made from old newspapers. Had it not been for their example, I would probably not have noticed how quickly people dispose of their stacks of newspapers these days, how other languages have found their niche in a market that was English when it wasn't Bengali, and how packets from certain localities show greater tendencies to be of one of these minority languages. Had I not remembered them, I would never have noticed how the regular content of the inside pages of vernacular dailies changed gradually from reporting the birth of triplets to a young couple in some remote village and the death of a two-headed calf (with a side of local skirmish that was resolved by the local people and the local cops) to violence, violence and more violence.

Oh well.