Courtesy of Sara RayAn idol display at Singhi Park in Kolkata, West Bengal in this Oct. 19, 2012 photo.COLLEGE PARK, Maryland - It's October, the season of Durga Puja (Puja being Sanskrit for worship), the most important religious festival for Bengali-Hindus.
As a Non-Resident-Indian- first-generation-Bengali-settled-in-the-United States, I have a standard operating procedure for this time of the year. I go online, find out the venues (usually schools) and the dates (usually weekends) of each of the local Durga Pujos. I then use a complex algorithm, one that factors in inputs like the distance of the venue from my house and the entry-fee, to settle on a destination. Then my wife states her preference and that is where we end up going.
I take my traditional Bengali kurta-pyjama out from the suitcase, fire up the GPS, arrive at the venue, sit around for some time making small talk with my wife and overhearing scraps of conversations about mortgage rates, while keeping a standard-issue smile plastered to my face, trying to avoid the jolly-faced lady floating about in a friendly way trying to sell “latest-design†saris from India. I have my food, snigger at the cultural programs and finally drive back home, promising myself that this is the last time I will go to one of these events. It's a resolve I maintain until the next October comes around.
For the uninitiated, Durga Puja, or Pujo as we Bengalis pronounce it, is the Bengali-Hindu equivalent of Christmas. According to lore, the Goddess Durga spends the whole year caring for her husband, Lord Shiva, in the Himalayas. But for four golden days in autumn, she returns to her parents' house, accompanied by her children, an occasion that mortals celebrate with pomp and pageantry. The essence of the festivities thus lies in coming home and being with all those whom one loves.
It's difficult to get this warm, fuzzy sensation sitting in a large school cafeteria that has been converted into a Durga Pujo venue, thousands of miles away from the place I call home. As a matter of fact, it's difficult to consider the American Durga Pujo as even a mildly authentic experience, since four days of religious ceremonies are often squeezed into a Saturday and a Sunday (sometimes even a single day) on a weekend that may be before or after the actual Durga Pujo days, an experience as unreal as celebrating Thanksgiving and Christmas on the same day in the month of April.
The mind tends to wander, back to when one didn't have to settle with pallid re-creations in foreign lands. In Ko lkata when I was a child, the excitement starting building in the month of August. Organizers of community Durga Pujos, of which there were thousands, would go knocking door to door, using every technique from gentle emotional blackmail to enforcer-like intimidation to collect donations. The shopping and gift-giving season would also be in full swing, with the scientist in me trying to calculate an objective measure of how much my relatives loved me by counting the number of shirt pieces and trouser pieces I received.
Courtesy of Sara RayA pandal, or temporary structure in which the Durga idol is housed, a t Adi Ballygunge in Kolkata, West Bengal, Oct. 19.About three weeks before the event, the countdown would begin in earnest. Elaborate bamboo structures were set up at every street-corner and park. Very rapidly, these skeletons would be transformed by cloth and artwork into exquisitely beautiful pandals, the temporary structures in which the Durga idols would be housed once they arrived. Which they did soon enough, in trucks, their faces covered because one was not allowed to see the Goddess and her children unless it was time. Of course that was one of the few times that time was taken seriously. Otherwise, that concept was pretty elastic. Theoretically, the ceremony is for four days. In fact, it stretches to six, sometimes even seven.
Those days would be the shortest of the year. There were just so many things to do. Night-long pandal-hopping expeditions in rented cars, stuck in traffic for 60 minutes and moving for five. Enjoying oily chicken rolls from street-side vendors. Getting my feet trampled on while trying to join the line at College Square. Gawking at the supreme level of artistry on display at the Mohammed Ali Park pandal. Strutting up and down Maddox Square, admiring the ethereal beauty of the Goddess in clay and the angels of flesh and blood that flit around, all dressed up in their finest, the cadence of their laughter melting into the music of the drumbeats, a testament to how, when the Gods come to earth, they bring heaven with them.
Of course everything has to end, more so when the Kolkata police stipulates the deadline for idol immersion.
Sweets would then be exchanged, married women would playfully smear vermilion (sindoor), the mark of marriage for Hindu women, on each others' foreheads in a ceremony known as sindoor khela, a quiet tear would be shed as the idols would float away in the Ganges, and the burden of all the work that I had pushed off for months telling myself “I will do it after Pujo†would bear down upon me with great urgency even as the anticipation and planning for next year would begin.
Now of course, many years later and many miles away, things are different.
The new Durga Pujo is an optional social event, scheduled around my life.
The old Durga Pujo was my life, and everything else was scheduled around it.
By the light of day, Arnab Ray is a research scientist at the Fraunhofer Center For Experimental Software Engineering and also an adjunct assistant professor at the Computer Science department of the University of Maryland at College Park. Come night, he metamorphoses into blogger , novelist (“May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss†and “The Mineâ€) and columnist.
He can be followed at @greatbong on Twitter.
