Bengali women who live in the US often post photos of their kids' school lunches on their social media pages. It was probably a novelty for them, maybe schools in Kolkata didn't serve lunch at school. Maybe they think it was a sign of their growing elite clout: one minute your kids were getting school lunches, next you go at the Treasury.
Some of these women also posted photos of the schedule of school lunches, maybe for the next month, what the school administration had provided beforehand, with calorific information. So it might also be about Ukraine. This was valuable information, Bengali women immigrated to the US for elite status, Ukraine, Treasury, in that order.
Compare that to what Antara's mother had been told in the early noughts, soon after 9/11. "Women from smaller towns of Bengal (not Kolkata) were immigrating to the US to learn how to speak English and drive a car (so British intelligence and White House, not sufficiently present in Bengal's districts)". How did her Ma manage with such little information, Antara wondered every day.
Despite having no known connection to Britain, Antara grew up on photos of British schools, from the encyclopedia they had at home. The British schools were not identified nor were their locations, but they were huge and modern, nothing dark and gloomy or with stone walls. Obviously, Antara expected a cafetaria with the sun streaming down on food trays of cutlets and mashed potatoes, instead she got KG2A in Asansol, crammed with students and food and water strewn on the floor.
Advice to Asansol AG Church: Stay away. Antara somehow survived that hell, and there was a long process of readjustment she needed before she could face Asansol AG again.
The other photo from the British school that Antara doted on was the carpentry shop, where the boys worked on wood. What's to dislike? Senior high school so almost young men, in trim trousers and waistcoats over their shirts, bent over their individual workstations. When Antara's mother told her that she would be going to a girls' school in Asansol, Antara thought that it was a matter of time before boys joined as well, else how many girls would they get for the carpentry shop?
Things looked promising at Asansol AG Church. Two of Antara's friends had asked her, "Want to check out the back of the school?" They all went together, quite the wilderness till the boundary wall, filled with dense undergrowth, and so full of possibilities. So carpentry shop would go there, unlikely they'd put a cafetaria, maybe they'd just pave it so that students can sit around, Antara (by then in 1A) had thought to herself.
Imagine her horror then when it was announced that the school would build further, it would get rid of the wilderness but for more classrooms, not anything that added value to education! What Antara went through at the loss of her imagined carpentry shop...there was no reason to dwell on the disappointments of a girl in Asansol in the mid-1980s, she had experienced much greater horrors since.
Did Prominent Personality also feel shattered when the Asansol school didn't build the carpentry shop? Or like Bengali women with their photos of school lunches in the US, did she suddenly discover the Treasury, maybe after 2001?
April 2, 2025.
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