A Sweet Ending to an Unforgettable Night

 

Once we crossed Jora Girja (the name refers to the twin steeple of St. James' Church), my wife announced that she wanted ice cream from a place she had recently discovered. So off we went to All Blues, tucked away on Wood Street just off Shakespeare Sarani.

The café was beautifully done up and offered an impressive range of handcrafted ice creams, many with wonderfully unusual flavours. I settled on a generous scoop of Piña Colada, while my wife chose Cherry Woods. Both were served in crisp cones and were absolutely worth the detour.

By now it was around half past one in the morning, yet Kolkata showed no signs of slowing down. As we approached the Park Circus Seven-Point Crossing, fruit sellers were still doing brisk business. Naturally, we stopped. One vendor had an irresistible display of mangoes, and we came away with a couple of kilograms of Chausa and Langra mangoes.

This season, we've been enjoying mangoes almost every day—perhaps making up for the years when we somehow never got around to eating enough of them.

We finally reached home a little after 2 a.m., tired but smiling.

It had been one of those wonderfully unplanned nights that began with meeting a new friend and ended with discovering an all-night market, eating ice cream after midnight and buying mangoes on the way home. Kolkata has always had a way of rewarding those willing to stay out just a little longer, and this was a perfect reminder that the city still has plenty of stories waiting to be discovered after dark.