So this year’s Durga pujo just got over.
In far away Madurai, miles apart from my hometown and parents, did I miss the heady fragrances of the pujo, the frenzy pandal hopping with friends from saptami to navami, the joy of eating both street food and Devi Maa's bhog prasad, wearing new dresses on all five days of durga puja, finding my way through the maddening crowd, enjoying the evening cultural programmes and making merry?
Durga pujo is not just an annual ritual. It is sheer happiness which only a Bengali understands and feels the way it should be.
When I first moved to Madurai nearly a decade-and-a-half ago, my heart would wrench particularly during the autumn month. In the quietude of my home I would simply sit and imagine how people in places like Kolkata and Delhi must be coming together to celebrate the sarbojonin festival. I would reminisce the stories of my childhood to my children. My friends and cousins would never forget to send their greetings from day One of Mahalaya while my father would each year remind me of offering pushpanjali to the devi in any temple if I could not locate a puja pandal in the city I had migrated to post-marriage.
When you are in a mixed marriage household many things quietly change without you realising it perhaps. Many Ugadis, I remember, I left home for an assignment without greeting my husband, who is an Andhraite. He never complained and I never felt guilty.
There were years when my heart just stopped beating in anticipation of the pujo to come. I just kept up a smiling face even though my pujo days were no longer as fun-filled as it used to be. And when a meal at home started with mother-in-law's home-made gongura pickle on a hot bed of rice and ended with K.C.Das' canned roshogolla, harmony prevailed.
Over the years I found new friends and new ways to be happy and now often I feel I really don't need to trace back my memories that are perhaps slowly fading.
In all these years that I have been here there was perhaps not enough to overwhelm me during the pujo season. Except once. when in 2011 the small goldsmith community in Temple Town got together and conducted the Durga puja. It helped me to end my 12 year drought of offering pushpanjali to Maa Durga. Yes, standing inside the pandal I turned very gooey-eyed that year.
This year too it was the same. But with one difference. I was not inside the Durga pujo pandal but witnessing the festival of music and dance inside temples as part of navaratri and golu celebrations and savouring different types of sundals.
I was moved watching the upcoming little artists and the established dancers perform the divine art with equal grace. With their colourful, coordinated, energetic and mesmerising performance of bharatanatyam, they sought the blessings of the three forms of shakti -- Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati.
When valour, wealth and knowledge combine as the feminine power and influence, the sanctity and the grandness of the moment is a treat to watch.
Be it the grand dasara procession in Mysore, Durga puja in Bengal, Garba in Gujarat, golu in Tamil Nadu, dussehra in the North -- each personifies the triumph of good over evil and one senses the strange and overpowering energy that emanates from such celebrations. It is all about the spirit and essence of the festival celebrated across the country with local and social legends.
And nothing captures the compassion and joy of the celebration more than a smile straight from the heart of cherubic children who train hard to get a chance to perform in temples during navaratri celebrations in Tamil Nadu. They reflect a sense of empowerment and the element of pure worship. And I made a leap of a journey from Delhi to Madurai seeing a bit of Ma Durga in each of them. That, then was pujo for me.
