chapter V

“Do you booze?” our nineteen year-old cousin Babai asks me.

Of course I do not. “Well, we won’t be drinking until tonight, so why don’t you come out with us today?”

On the street where Baba, my ex-wife’s father was raised and where he met my Ma over forty years ago, we sit beneath the pandal. The pujari, or priest, is wearing the traditional white cloth that Gandhi would approve of, and is reading from Sanskrit scriptures in a deep voice over a loudspeaker system pushed to its maximum volume. His clipped voice broadcasting the prayers as his father recited them before him, and his father before him. After each extended Bengali mantra, he declares his devotion, by an even louder oblation.

To amuse myself, I make humorous translations of the mantras in my head:

doshta roshogulla ekhooni khete chai…

“I really want to eat ten roshogullas [a popular Bengali sweet] right about now…”

NAMO STU’ TE!

Ek paha mangsho-bhat khabo…

“I am going to eat a mountain of meat and rice…”

NAMO NAMAH!

Amar kaupin bicchu ke anek kaushto dicche…

“This loin cloth is giving my balls great trouble…”

SVAHA!

Durga puja is Calcutta’s largest festival of the year. It’s like Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and Independence Day all wrapped-up into one super-holiday. The city positively comes alive; masses of shoppers clear the shelves of sari shops, temporary temples to the Goddess are erected in every neighborhood, tailors fit men in colorful punjabis, and beauty parlors do a brisk business tweezing, peeling, plucking, snipping, filing, and exfoliating young ladies to perfection.

Today is ashtami, the eighth day of the month according to the lunar calander, and Puja is in full swing as of today. Anyone with the use of his two legs is out on the streets. The boys are all wearing their best panjabi shirts, this year most have Hindu symbols such as “Om” or Sanskrit mantras printed boldly on them. The girls are wearing their finest saris and many have mehendi [henna] decorations painted on their hands. An improbable number of colorful bangles hang loosely on their wrists. Everyone is out and about visiting the various pandals across the city. Now I have and invitation from Babai, so why not enjoy the celebration like everyone else?

“Sure, let‘s get out of here.”

Babis’ friend Mithun has an Ambassador car and a driver at his disposal, so this will be easy for us. He is likeable guy, short and fashionable in his faded jeans and squared off Geisha-looking sandals. He tells me his sad story of how he drank too much the other night and passed out on the street, while Babai went to call his parents for help getting him home.

“I had no idea what was going on around me, I was just completely out-of-it. Someone even stole my bracelet,” he informs me while displaying a bare wrist. The skin is a bit lighter where the bracelet had been. “I was in a pathetic state…”

“He puked in my hand,” Babai chimes in.

“…but I will never do it again. I am finished with drinking.” finishes Mithun.

Friends here are more true than any I have known in the States. They are more like brothers and sisters than friends. Closer than that even. They borrow each other’s clothes, share the contents of their tiffins [lunch-boxes] at school, eat from the same plate, and often remain friends for life. Parents of friends are always called “Auntie” and “Uncle.” Never Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So.

We pick up Chellu, another cousin [pictured above in the fancy panjabi with Babai on his left], and some more friends and pile them all into the back. Mithun and I squeeze in the front seat with the driver while Chellu sits on top of his friend’s lap. Chellu’s friend is a bit on the queer side, so I make him promise to deliver our cousin back home with his virginity intact.

Babai pulls out some cigarettes:

“Do you fag?”

Of course I do not, so he thoughtfully opens the window and is careful to blow his smoke outwards.

We hit several pandals to offer our respects to the various deities of Durga. Most often our attention is diverted by the attractive girls present. At one very popular pandal, a TV actress everyone immediately recognizes is clapping her hands while a Baul [holy man] pays his ektar [single stringed instrument] and dances in circles before her. The monk flashes me a smile that is either inspired by spiritual bliss or purely mundane lust. Plucking his instrument, he sways his hips while whirling like a drunken dervish. “How embarrassing,” I announce to everyone, “This so-called ascetic is dancing to the clapping of some woman’s hands.” Leaving such cheap entertainment aside, we look for a place to sit.

There are chairs scattered about the pandal set in circles where teenagers gossip good-naturedly. We all arrange some chairs and sit similarly in a circle. Indeed, such gossip groups are highly prized in this city. There is even a Bengali word for such a phenomena, adda. The closest English equivalent might be “coffee clutch.”

Before our adda even gets under way, a commotion catches everyone’s attention; a teenage boy wearing a long black panjabi printed with golden swastikas [symbol of peace in Asia - swasti means 'peace' in Sanskrit] enters with his friends. Unable to walk on his own accord, they half-carry him inside. A crowd of sympathetic youths arrive to help him lay down on some chairs. He looks skywards, but his eyes seem unable to focus. Soon the security guards inform his friends that they cannot keep him inside the pandal and they take him out as they brought him in. Undoubtedly his body would soon reject the poison within it and there would be more on the front of his Punjabi than just swastikas.

“That was me the other night,” declares Mithun. Babai slapped me so hard to wake me up that my face is still swollen.” Angling his face, I can see that his jaw is still puffy on one side.

Even more disturbing than the overwhelming presence of alcohol during Puja is the ubiquitous Hindi cinema music blaring from tin loudspeakers. Like Medieval gargoyles they sit perched on telephone poles and rooftops above the city, vomiting their aural bile at ear-splitting decibels throughout the day and night.

Personally I don’t care for Hindi cinema in general. Indeed, one could never separate the music from the movies. Every time I hear those tinny voices and disco beats immediately a mental picture pops up in my mind’s eye of a toothy Bollywood actor in bad need of a haircut dancing on a mountain top with a jiggling, slightly overweight actress who changes outfits faster than Superman could manage while Lois Lane was getting gang-raped by The Harlem Globetrotters.

I prefer Bhangra music from Punjab. It is much more amicable, being funky and danceable and most often bereft of those whiney female voices they love in Bollywood. Arguably macho by nature, it provides one with the far more satisfying - if somewhat homoerotic - mental image of bearded, burly Punjabi men banging drums and dancing in wheat fields while wearing colorful turbans upon their heads, circus-monkey vests on their ample torsos, and sheathed knifes dangling at their hips as an overt reminder of the manly bulges concealed beneath their baggy trousers.

Today we visit some more friends’ houses, do some shopping, and make even more new acquaintances. Mostly, we visit the beautiful pandals across the city. Many pandals are outrageous affairs, often based upon some current events. Charu Chandra Market, Mudiali, Siva Mandira, Kasbah.... the names become a blur as we visit one after the other. New Alipura is thronged with thousands of people and the streets surrounding the pandal are full of food stalls selling every imaginable snack available in Calcutta: phujka, chaat, ice cream, cold drinks, tea, samosas, pakoras, pau bhaji, egg rolls, and chow mein are all available for a price. The pandal proudly displays many awards but it takes me a minutes to figure out exactly what I am looking at. In a Balinese style, it is unlike any other pandal we have seen today and there is an enormous blue wall behind it cresting like a wave;

"I got it,” I declare; “It’s a Tsunami!”

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chapter VI