Bong voyage!

The image cheers me up even now, some 20 years after it stumped a friend. There she was, still huffing and puffing, having trekked up with a group of people to the last village in India. There, that’s China across the border, said someone. The group breathed in the fresh air and marvelled at all that Mother Nature had bestowed on that pristine little Himachal village which hardly ever saw visitors — when a rickety bus rumbled up. It stopped, and out trooped a large number of people: Grandpas, grandmas, mums, dads, children and neighbours. They all wore monkey caps.

“ Ai , can we get hot water here,” asked the man who looked like the leader of the group in his vowelly Bengali-accented Hindi to bemused villagers, as my friend recounted later. I picture this often, especially when everybody is laughing at Didi, or when Bengalis are being generally lammed. Take that, I say.

It’s a common demand, and a common sight: Bengali families and friends travelling to the remotest of hill stations and seaside by bus, and asking for hot water. In some parts of India, we ask for samosas or singara , as they are called in Bengal. And that is why, says a friend from Sikkim whose family runs a hotel in Gangtok, Bengalis are called Singara travellers there.

Of course, everybody loves to travel. Tourists come in large numbers from Gujarat, Maharashtra and West Bengal, government data tell us. But, quite possibly, though I don’t suppose there is a conclusive study on this, Bengalis like to travel more than anybody else. Through the year, teachers, home-makers, private office-goers, babus, small businessmen and others save and plan for their next holiday. We pack our Boroline and Gelusil, to say nothing of our woollen caps. It’s cheaper to travel in groups, so many of us do so. We hire a bus and the travel agent plans out our stops and meals. A long tour takes us to the temples of south India or the deserts of Rajasthan. We journey to the hills of Himachal Pradesh or Uttarakhand, and Kashmir is a particular favourite. And we love the sea.

It was to capture this strange wanderlust among the people of Bengal that an enterprising gentleman called Sripati Charan Kundu started a travel service in 1933. Wiki tells us that the Kharagpur resident reserved an entire train and undertook a 56-day all-India tour. Kundu Travels still does a roaring business. Its website is full of attractive plans and packages. Its rules and regulations — about cancellation and other such matters — include one bit of advice that is rather endearing. “Please entrain & detrain with your own belongings at Howrah/Sealdah/Santragachi/ Kolkata/Shalimar Station,” it says.

Kundu caught the pulse of the people, but what fanned our imagination, quite possibly, was the rich tradition of travelogues. Theatre actress Binodini Dasi’s autobiography Amar Kotha included her north India travel accounts in the 19th century, while scholar and British spy Sarat Chandra Das wrote about travelling in Tibet in 1879 and 1881-82. Generations of people have read — and enjoyed — the travel writings of Jaladhar Sen, Uma Prasad Mukherjee’s Himalayer Pathey Pathey (Himalayan paths) and Shanku Maharaj’s travelogues on Amarnath, Khajuraho and Ladakh, to name just a few.

Reel-life inspiration: Satyajit Ray’s Sonar Kella — the golden fortress — led to many people from Bengal visiting Jaisalmer Fort in Rajasthan

Children’s books are often about travel, too, even when they are not. Many of Satyajit Ray’s Feluda novels about the Charminar-smoking detective and his teenaged cousin, Topshe, were set in towns and cities outside Bengal. The first novella in the series took the two — and a million readers — to Lucknow. The detective duo and their companion, the adventure novel writer Lalmohan Ganguly, have solved mysteries in Jaisalmer, Kathmandu, Bombay, Banaras and Gangtok — and a great many other cities. Ganguly’s novels have delightful backgrounds (and titles), too. His bestsellers include Vampires in Vancouver, Shivers in Sahara and Hullaballoo in Honduras .

Bengali author Sunil Gangopadhyay’s popular children’s character Kakababu — or Uncle — goes to the most amazing places for his adventures. Quite a few of those have been adapted into films and, as you would expect, were mega hits. Premendra Mitra’s fictional character Ghana-da, known for telling tall tales, once regaled his young fans with a detailed story about his journey to Mars and back.

There are a great many journals devoted to travel — or bhromon , as Bengalis call it. You open the pages of a magazine, and the waves kiss your feet, or the mountains wave out to you. You finish reading it, check your savings and make a plan for taking the extended family — and the neighbours’ son, Poltu, who is quite a trekker — to Kausani. Tagore stayed there for a bit, remember?

Television shows on travel are a great hit, too. My mother watched one every Sunday, about a Kolkata boy, part wet-behind-the-ears, part street-smart, who goes abroad for the first time — to England, I seem to remember — after an uncle sends him a ticket. There was one show sponsored by a travel agent where viewers were told that their journey would be filmed and aired on television. There are Bengali comedy films about friends and families travelling to Thailand. Ray’s Sonar Kella — the golden fortress — on a small boy who remembers his previous birth, apparently led to so many people from Bengal visiting Jaisalmer that the fortress where Ray shot parts of the film is still known as Sonar Kella . His 1962 film Kanchenjungha — about families and friends travelling to Darjeeling — apparently led to a spike in the number of tourists to North Bengal.

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Travel, like life in Bengal, can cost as much or as little as you’d want it to. The walls of the tiny grocery shop in your neighbourhood have posters that tempt you with easy-to-afford travel plans. “ Ashun, beriye ashi (come, let’s travel),” they state.

There is something for everybody. If you are short of funds, you can plan a weekend trip to the seaside of Digha or the khoai of Santiniketan. If you have money, you travel by train and an air-conditioned bus, all organised by the travel agent. A maharaj — or cook — goes with you. Once, while holidaying in the Kumaon Hills, we ran into a group of Bengali tourists following a man who carried several squawking cockerels. Dinner that evening was going to include murgir jhol — chicken curry.

Middle-class Bengalis are holidaying abroad in large groups, too. I remember being surprised some years ago, while returning from Europe, at the Bengali voices and words I heard once I had boarded. I looked around and found that there were Bengalis everywhere — not the well-heeled box-wallah or the professional who travels abroad like their cousins everywhere and whispers on a flight, but the school headmaster and his wife, the office clerk and his parents, in short, the average, middle-class Bengali. They sat in different rows, but there was a lot of conversation — along with loud laughter, and some consternation — across the aisles. Someone, an elderly dada , was apparently missing.

“Where is he,” they asked each other, but didn’t seem greatly bothered. Clearly, dada had a habit of getting lost and being found. When we landed at the Delhi airport, I (not knowing dada and getting a bit worried) asked a young woman — a vocal member of the group — if he had been located. She laughed. Oh, yes. He was in the washroom.

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What is it about Bengalis and wanderlust, I asked a friend who grew up in Kolkata, and travels whenever and wherever she can. She came up with a few theories. The early introduction of schools and colleges in what was the capital of British India led to a greater understanding of the country and the world. People were reading the works of writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, and getting influenced by their all-embracing world views. Tagore had travelled extensively, and written about his sojourns in detail. Thinker Swami Vivekananda is also believed to have urged Bengalis to travel to foreign lands.

“Nah,” said another friend. All that sounds lofty, but Bengalis travel for other reasons, he contends. We just like wearing monkey caps, carrying Eagle flasks strapped to our shoulders and holding the rims of our cameras on our paunches.

Some believe the Bengali’s love for travel stems from the fact that the state itself is full of scenic spots — the Himalayas, ocean, rivers, forests, tea gardens, ancient temples. And once we have seen them all, we travel to other parts of the country and the world. And when we are not travelling, we climb mountains. There are possibly more mountain and trekking associations and clubs in Bengal than anywhere else in the world.

Speaking of mountains, ever heard the story about Tenzing and Hillary’s Everest climb? It underlines our penchant for typecasting people: You know, Bengalis are all poets, Punjabis like their music loud, Tamilians are mathematicians, Maharashtrians are gifted musicians, Andhraites enjoy hot food, and Malayalis are great entrepreneurs. So, to go back to the Hillary-Tenzing story, what did the duo find when they scaled Everest? A Malayali selling tea, goes the old joke.

What the joke doesn’t say is that behind the Malayali, there was the Bengali in the monkey cap. “ Ai , can we get hot water here,” he was asking.