Few stretches of the Hooghly river pack as much history, architecture and quiet grandeur into so compact a zone as the Bansberia-Tribeni Belt. Wedged between the industrial outskirts of Kolkata to the south and the old colonial river towns to the north, this twenty-kilometre corridor of the river's western bank is home to some of the most dazzling terracotta temples in Bengal, the sacred confluence where three rivers meet, the ghosts of a long-gone Portuguese trading post and mango orchards that seem frozen in a gentler century.