Durga Puja is nigh. Today, it means very little to me. There was a time, a long time ago, when these four-five days meant everything. They were the apotheosis of my annual calendar.
Nostalgia carries me back to a little ugly town called lumding (pronounced lamding). I see myself as a little boy, fashioning catapults, constructing kites, marking marbles on the red earth that is the speciality of the region, and happily romping about the jungles skirting our home, in the company of urchins, much to the chagrin of my mother. My father, a doctor with expertise in tropical medicine, and fired by the zeal to serve in the interiors, had become, very soon following our arrival, close to the strangely compact East Bengali dominated local community.
lumding stood out for two things — Durga Puja and wagon breakers. Wagon breaking involves breaking into goods trains parked in the yard of a railway station. The ‘don’ of this specialised field of activity in little lumding was a redoubtable bloke called ‘Gandhi’. His Durga Puja was the grandest of them all. No other Puja dare pretend to match Gandhi’s grandeur.
Now my dad wouldn’t have considered the adjective redoubtable even remotely flattering when applied to his own person; he was quite the go-getter, fighting against odds and generally producing results from practically nothing. Having settled into his role as eradicator of small pox (the period I speak of is the early 1970s), he was quietly nudged by elders of the community residing near the hospital to create a Pujo Bari. In sum, this meant that a new Durga Puja was to be inaugurated with my father as chief patron.
Money and means were procured. But the pujaris from Bihar at the adjacent Hanuman temple objected to the use of their grounds. Father reasoned with them thus: Hanuman paid obeisance to Rama; Rama prayed to Durga to vanquish Ravana; ergo, it was more than just that Durga Puja should be observed outside a Hanuman mandir. I am to date unclear as to whether it was their chillum or father’s logic that did the trick.
Oh the excitement. To be part of everything so complex and colourful and noisy and chaotic is sheer bliss at age four. I tagged along with father everywhere he went in pursuing his presidential obligation in the Puja Committee. I understood little, but felt every mood, since all of it touched me deep.
Then there was the actual puja, the transmutation of effort into celebration, when all the planning turned to pride and pleasure. I remember all that too. The rigging of the pandal, the scrumptious prasad, the toy pistols with their gunpowder pimpled ‘bullet’ rolls that went off with what I then thought was a deadening pop, the beautiful kind eyes of Ma Durga, flanked by chaste Saraswati and lakshmi on one side, and dapper Kartik and affable Ganesh on the other, the ladies with their yards and yards of colourful silk, rustling as they pressed to catch a glimpse of the aarti competition, and of course the moist eyes that bore farewell to Ma Durga on Bijoya Dashami, when the lady was sent back to her sasural.
The highpoint of the first year’s celebration was the arrival of an inebriated Gandhi at the pandal, ready to do battle to save the honour of his puja, which he believed had been overshadowed by this pretender, since the consensus was that it had outdone his in terms of pomp and show. I remember cowering, scared. I saw the committee members cringe. They were outraged, and scared, and not in that order. I remember my father, very tall (I would outshoot him by the time I was 16), stride out and dare Gandhi. He was very ‘doctor sahib’ and all that. But he was also very sharp. He challenged Gandhi to disrespect Ma Durga, asking him cannily if our Durga deserved less respect than his! Drunk Gandhi fell at father’s feet. The evening was won.
My father headed the puja at lumding for five years before we moved on. Seventeen years later, the year my mother passed on, we made a little pilgrimage to lumding to be a part of the puja that had continued to be observed even after we had left. That was in 1992. In 2002 my father passed on. Somewhere along the way, so did Durga Puja.