A goddess among men Appreciates the charms of being in Kolkata during the Pujas

A goddess among men

Appreciates the charms of being in Kolkata during the Pujas

If you happen to be on the lookout for a new Ibn Battuta, someone whose footsteps leave you with an immaculate and fulfilling map, you may want to settle for the path Durga leaves in her wake. She makes for quite the intrepid, but punctual traveller. With ten weapons as her check-in baggage, the goddess concludes her celestial travels here in Kolkata around this time each year. The unmistakable scent of a faint autumn is sign enough for a city to prepare itself for a guest who is as reputedly fierce as she is benevolent. Not the kind of visitor you’d find easy to ignore. The task becomes even harder when the self-respecting priest and the neutral observer are both made to testify that she is seemingly everywhere. Omnipresence literally starts at the street corner. In the event that your itinerary roughly converges with the arrival of the deity, you’d find that it is the traffic which first loses its way. As October sets in, even the narrowest lanes make room for bamboo and cane sticks, frames for pandals that double up as makeshift temples. With hardly any permanent shrines dedicated to her in the state, the goddess is never really set in stone. And as the makers of a thousand idols in Kumartuli have found, the dissolution of clay makes it a material that is much in keeping with the impermanence of the world that their goddess comes to protect. Superstitious readers of the sky interpret the thunder of a retreating monsoon as the incoming roar of Durga’s lion and the weary office-goer starts the countdown toward that five-day holiday. There really is just the one danger that accompanies a visit to Kolkata at this time — getting caught in irresistible flux. There’s something infectious about Kolkata’s collective wait for sashti (the first day of the Pujas). The calendar, for once, becomes comforting rather than oppressive. Retail establishments cater to your every shopping need by going into a discounted overdrive, and if classic mishti and phuchkas happen to be that guilty pleasure, there are enough corner shops who have hoarded sugar and cooking oil to satiate strolling revellers who loosen themselves up along with their wallets. The Pujas, in a sense, are an unlikely, almost unseemly occurrence. Despite the mercurial shrieks of its chief minister, it is hard to ascribe energetic enthusiasm to a city that almost always has its feet up. During the festival, however, much of Kolkata seems to find a new nimbleness. Every walker becomes a tourist, starting his or her journey in North Kolkata’s Bagbazar and often ending up in Maddox Square, the destination for much of South Kolkata’s aspirational youth. Like many an archetypal Bengali babu, you could choose to be a judge of aesthetics, a connoisseur who notices the goddess’ eyes and comments on its lustre, or if you wanted to keep it simple, you could just submit to the flow of a crowd and take in a sleepy city suddenly awakened. The good news is that even in this atmosphere of collective bonhomie, Kolkata never loses its parochial charms. The city’s addas are moved from the local tea-shop to the parar pujo, pandals made by the area’s community and financed by sponsors who do much to share banner-space with a bevy of divinities. While there might still be the politics of who would be the first to offer their prayers in the form of anjali, the hope is that the goddess would be too busy slaying demons to notice such pettiness. As the incense from countless pandals comes to mingle as one sweet smoky smell, the care taken by each local community to mark its inventiveness is intriguing. While the original habitat of the goddess — the cave — is still a popular choice, you have the case of an organiser being convinced that Durga is most comfortable amongst the stars and should thus be given a spaceship to stay. The goddess’ nemesis Mahisha, for instance, has donned even more contemporary avatars. He has been portrayed as Osama bin Laden and in that terrible time for Bengali cricket, he was once the Australian Greg Chappell. (Strangely though, the pike was never Sourav’s bat.) It perhaps isn’t strange that it is primarily in Bengal that Durga comes to be adored in the manner she is. The state has always had a penchant for the more feminine cosmic principles, manifest in Kali’s protruding tongue and Durga’s maternal eyes. While it does seem peculiar that a city which is otherwise resolutely secular would turn out in such numbers to celebrate a particularly Hindu tradition, there is some levelling equality in the fact that the goddess and passers-by are both equally decked. In a final assessment, it would only be fair to say that Kolkata’s five-day celebration is as akin to Rio’s Carnival as it is to the Vatican’s Christmas. A boisterous hoorah you really mustn’t miss.