On a warm September morning in 1943, Chand Ali Khamaru walked eight grueling miles with a small bundle of rice to his father in Medinipur, in rural West Bengal. With the rice, he had googli (small, hapless snails he had cooked into a broth) and kochu shaak (fibrous leaves of the taro plant, which he had plucked from a pond and steamed in an iron pot). This was during the Bengal Famine of 1943, one of the greatest tragedies to strike the Indian subcontinent, known in Bengal as Panchasher Akal….
