The Dislocated Hippies

Bill and Kristen

(We have cheated a bit here. This picture and the text have been copied from Airbnb pages. Bill and Kristen have given us such a glowing report, I can’t but reproduce it here and if it is disallowed, I beg mea culpa and forgiveness of Airbnb. Meeting this couple has been the high point of my life and I recommend all who read this to open your home to Airbnb and get guests such as these two. We are including their recent review of their stay here and an experience they have had, as written in their blog ‘Dislocated Hippies’ – Editor)

‘We have been travelling in Australia, SE Asia and India since November 2017 and this was the highlight of our travels. Keya and Rono are Brilliant, warm, articulate, film and book loving, kind, generous people. We bought several friends over to dinner and they too were blown away. Wonderful tea parties on the rooftop garden with delicious home cooked snacks. Truly Delicious home cooked veg and non veg meals with always stimulating conversation. A delightful location, just a ten minute ride to the heart of the city but a very stimulating environment. Walking distance to Kali Ghat, the Lakes, the Metro and Hindustan Park which is full of superb coffee shops and boutique Bengali fabric and book shops. This was our third visit to Keya and Rono’s and we are a little loath to tell the truth about them because we want to keep this place to ourselves. Our current plan is to come back for several months in 2020 so if you want to stay there you better be quick and beat us to it.’ – Bill and Kristen

119 Lake Terrace Ballygunge. A house like any other in a street like any other.

There’s our room, with the green shutters closed, on the top floor.

This is Shonkar. Cook, valet, chowkidar, odd jobs man, you name it. Faithful servant of the Dutt family these many years past. Shonkar came from a small village in Orissa, where his wife lives still. He fancies himself a ladies man, or so we’re told, and does have a sort of swaggering insouciance about him which we wouldn’t be surprised to find the chicks dug.

One evening Shonkar told a story in Bengali, translated to us by the lovely Keya, of the ghost of a woman in a white sari with a red trim who haunts the little lane at the back of the building.

We couldn’t follow him at all, except the part where the ghostly woman recognises him and beckons eerily to him “ Shonnnnnn-karrrrrr” !!! Also the bit where he stamps his foot twice “ doof, doof !” whenever he enters the back lane in an attempt to warn the ghost he’s coming and to scare her off,

This may...or may not....be the ghost.

This gorgeous apparition calls men by their name, entices them into her lair and then jumps up and down on them, sits on them and drains them of their vital bodily fluids.

You would think that men would be forming a queue outside.

We wandered down to wish her a happy International Women’s Day but she must have been off luring another man to his untimely fate.

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