Durga Puja

Our plane from Varanasi landed in Kolkata late Sunday afternoon. After the hour and a half cab ride we took to our friends' house, we met up with Hunter, an ETA in Kolkata, who let us into the apartment he shares with three of the four other ETAs in that city. We were thrilled to finally be there, having heard so much about the festival for so long. Tangi was flying to meet us there on Tuesday and all five of the ETAs in Madurai were already there. In short, we were very excited to see all the other ETAs, whom we had gotten to know both at the pre-departure orientation in Austin and at the Delhi orientation we had when we first arrived. Though the groups in other cities seem to be having more social drama than we are here, I am very fond of all of the other people in the group. It's a great group of people to be a part of--everyone else is so smart and well-informed, adventurous and fun. Even though we were bracing ourselves to spend three nights in a four bedroom apartment with thirteen people, it was a great feeling of anticipation as we waited to see everyone else. When the rest of the group arrived at the apartment after their day of wandering the streets, the fun began immediately. Drinks were passed around and an impromptu dance party ensued. The best!

From left: Vaishnavi, Sandy, Sarah, Nicole, and Erin live it up!

After a while, we headed out to see the city in all its Durga Puja glory. Durga Puja is a celebration of the goddess Durga, wife of Shiva, the destroyer god, one of the most important of the hundreds of Hindu gods. The six-day holiday celebrates the yearly visit Durga makes to the human world, leaving her home in the heavens and seeing the people in the mortal world. They celebrate her by creating temporary shrines called pandals, decorated elaborately according to various themes and aesthetics. 

Inside the pandal

Same scene, but different

The pandals generally have a wooden frame and are covered with intricately molded styrofoam or fabric. Inside, every pandal depicts the same scene: Durga, holding a weapons given to her by other gods in each of her ten hands, riding a lion and slaying the devil and a demon in the form of a buffalo. She is flanked by her four children, Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of plenty and luck, Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, Karthik, referred to by my teacher as "prince charming," and Saraswati, goddess of knowledge and wisdom. Each of these demigods has its own animal companion, including the owl, the swan, the rabbit and one other animal (goat, maybe?) that I don't remember and can't find information about anywhere! Each pandal is sponsored, either by businesses or by neighborhoods and communities. Each neighborhood in the whole greater Kolkata area has its own pandal, causing hundreds of these structures to be spread throughout the city. Some are simple and clearly made by individuals who are devout but not necessarily artists, while others are the equivalent of the Christmas windows at Bergdorf Goodman. 

These neon displays looked like giant Lite Brites!

As we walked through the city, we visited different pandals and admired the creativity and worksmanship of the structures, built several weeks before the Puja and taken down a week or two after. In visiting the pandals, the point is not just to see the goddess in idol form, but also to be seen by her. As a result, people wear beautiful new clothes when as they go from pandal to pandal, so everyone is walking around the lit up city in starched, colorful garments in silk and golden thread. Whole families are out and about, no matter how late, admiring the lights and artistry, communing with their god and each other. We stayed out several hours that night, enjoying the night and each other, cramming sixteen people in a minivan to get to the largest pandal in the city and taking it all in. The atmosphere was so festive and joyful, though it did get extremely crowded and it became less pleasant to walk through the throng. In any case, I was exhausted from traveling and ended up going home with more than an eyeful of pandals and decorated Kolkata, eager to enjoy a good night's sleep. 

The next morning I woke up before most, and headed out with Sean and Sarah, an ETA in Madurai, to get coffee downtown. We had our drinks and then had kathi rolls, Kolkata's famous street food--a fried aloo parantha (like a thick potato-based pancake), filled with curried vegetables and a fried egg, and wrapped up into a delicious, greasy burrito-like delicacy. We walked to the park and watched a man herd goats there while we ate what must have been twice our recommended calorie intake (and enjoyed every bite). Afterwards we met up with the rest of the group for a bus tour of some of Kolkata's oldest and most traditional pandals. 

This one smelled incredible. Look at all those flowers!

It was fun--a lot of time schlepping between sites, but it was nice to be together and not have to think of the logistics at all. These pandals were essentially shrines created in older buildings, rather than temporary structures, but were beautiful nonetheless. At one of the places we went to, we saw a young girl dressed in an elaborate white costume, while her relatives oohed and aahed around her, taking pictures and adjusting her trappings. We were told that sometimes young girls are selected to dress like the goddess and have people revel as if she were the real thing. 

Goddess for a day...literally

Pandal hopping in their finest

Tangi arrived the next day, and it was great to see her. We ate brunch at a fancy breakfast place that has been around forever, and then spent the rest of the day walking around, seeing pandals and admiring the decorations throughout the city. We tried to go to some big markets, but everything was closed for the puja. In the evening, we went to dinner with the whole group, found that the restaurants were packed but ended up at a restaurant where we could all sit together. Bengal is known for its seafood, mostly prawns and a fish called bekti, and I ate it every chance I could get. I never knew I would miss seafood so much! All the Bengali food I tried was delicious, from the fish to the luchis, fried bread similar to pouri but smaller and made with refined flour. 

Dunkin' Durgas 

Discarded Durgas

On the boat

 The morning of our last day was spent lazily, waiting for everyone to get it together and eventually heading downtown to Park Street for breakfast. We lingered for a while there, and I got impatient, as it was the last, most eventful day of the Puja. At the end of the six days, all of the Durgas from all of the far reaches of the city are brought to the ghat on the Ganges and immersed, releasing her from this world back to heaven. They used to throw the idols in the river and leave them there, but environmental concerns over the past few years have led them to remove the idols after dunking them, placing them afterwards in an unceremonious trash heap on the river bank. I made my way down to the river with Hannah, Tangi, and four of the girls from Madurai: Kelly, Sarah, Vaishnavi and Nicole. We were walking to the water's edge to watch the ceremony, when we saw on the boat moored parallel to the bank none other than Hunter and Erin, dancing on the boat with their faces painted red and microphones in their faces, asking where they were from! Like a sign from Durga herself, the MC on the boat invited any interested foreigners aboard the boat right then. We took of our shoes and hiked up our pants to wade through the ankle-deep mud, walking up a plank of wood to reach the ship's deck. Hunter and Erin only then saw us and were thrilled at the amazing coincidence of time and place. The people on the boat were from a neighborhood community that was immersing their Durga, one member of which happened to be the vice principal of Hunter's school. When Hunter had shown up at the ghat, they were invited on the boat not even knowing this fact! Sometimes even India is the smallest of worlds. The hosts wanted us to be front and center, placing drumsticks in our hands, commanding us to dance and smearing our faces with the celebratory vermilion, something usually reserved for married women but I think they just thought it was fun to put it on our foreign faces. At one point it felt like three pairs of hands were on my face, rubbing in the rich red powder. 

Dance circle! Followed by the paparazzi...

We watched Durga's dive into the river, and danced on the boat for almost an hour. The boat stayed anchored most of the time, then departed to sail ten minutes down the river, at which point everyone got off and we walked back to where we had started. The whole experience was incredible, something we never could have planned but that made the whole trip. It was exactly what I had hoped for when I came to India, the kind of spontaneous, adventurous celebration that only a place like this can offer. I always say that the Indians are not playing around when it comes to celebrating. Music and dance and festive joy is so integral to peoples' lives here, regardless of caste, race, religion, education and wealth. I felt so privileged to have been invited into this world, into this joy and celebration. The feeling of dancing on the river, my face painted red and laughing with friends and strangers is something that will stay with me forever.

The hilarious epilogue to this story is that the river bank and boat were full of television and newspaper reporters, getting footage for the evening news and stories about the last night of the Puja. As we sat around in our pajamas that night, coming down from the high of our day, the Kolkata residents relieved at the end of this intensive month full of Durga, none other than our own faces came up as "Breaking News." Sarah, Hunter and Hannah had interviews on the segment, and the rest of us were shown front and center, banging on our drums out of rhythm but so happily that it didn't matter. I don't want to brag but I'm kind of a big deal in Kolkata nowadays. If you haven't already seen my photos from Kolkata, or just want a refresher to go with the explanation, click here and enjoy.

Happy ETA family!