Friends,
My native place is Rajgram, Bankura, West Bengal. It is a village known for the handloom industry.
Though I was born and brought up in Kolkata, my root remains in my native place. Most of my paternal relatives belong to Bankura.
In my childhood days every year during summer vacation and in Durga Puja holidays, we were at Bankura. All of my cousin's brothers and sisters were together, and we were forty-five brothers and sisters together.
During summer vacation, we used to go to the enormous garden full of mango trees every morning. We would climb the trees and pick mangos by hand and eat them. These were plenty. We had guava trees also, which was another attraction for us.
We had puffed rice, sweets, or fried vegetables mixed with rice in the late afternoon.
Then the cricket or kabaddi match we used to play. There were other indigenous games we used to play.
We have a massive house at Rajgram. We have our dispensary as my uncles were doctors and had huge land property. We have paddy fields, vegetable grounds, and ponds. So rice, vegetable, and fish were plenty.
Evening time was story listening time. Elder sisters and brothers used to tell ghost stories, detective stories, and fairy tales, and we juniors were engrossed with that. Sometimes we used to play drama, and the characterisation was done by us.
At night most of us used to sleep together.
Nowadays, the concept of a joint family is almost non-existent, and most of our children don’t have the opportunity to understand the same. Whether the joint family or the single-family is better is a million-dollar question.
