Durga Puja and Dussehra Memoirs

Take 16 - Sipra Pati

Durga Puja in my childhood was synonymous with the week-long visit to my Jeje Bapa and JejeMaa’s house in Cuttack. Only we called it Dussehra. There are so many memories... that it is quite the task to lean in and pick out one to share because that one memory is like a loose piece of wool from a sweater. Tug on it and it just unravels... memory upon memory. There were the games my cousins and I played, improvising the rules, the games we invented, reading those old Penguin publications and sepia-toned Reader’s Digests collections of my Dad and kakei, sitting on the verandah and watching the crowd as they headed towards the Kathajodi to the Naee Jatra, the food, the moms cooking, the sneaking onto the terrace in the middle of the night, walking in my JejeMaa’s baadi with her exotic plant collection, going to watch a movie with the whole clan. One Dussehra, when I was in Class VII, I remember 22 of the Patis walking to Durga Talkies to see Sree Jaganath! We did go visit the pandals, but they were almost an afterthought, and my memories regarding the ‘medhas’ and bhasani are vague at best.

One of my more vivid memories relate to the Naee Jatra. I don’t know if this still takes place now. But back in the 80s the banks of the Kathajodi would be home to a jatra where farmers and tradespersons from the small villages around Cuttack and from the islands in the Mahanadi would come to sell their ware. Baskets (kula), jhaadu, and other household products not typically found in the stand-alone grocery stores of those days. While I do not like being in a crowd, I enjoy watching a crowd. Our house in Cuttack offered the best gallery to watch throngs of people heading to the Naee Jatra, their numbers increasing as the afternoon progressed into early evening. People carrying their ware, the rickshaw wala yelling for people to move because no one was heeding his cycle bell, women and children dressed in resplendence (literally - my cousins and I had a running count of women wearing ‘shocking pink’ sarees; we used to also have a running count of the number of times cyclists had to dismount because pedestrians would not move), the stray bull plopping down in the middle of the road, the dahi bara-aloo dum vendors ‘walking’ their bicycles, the gupchup walas pushing their thelas, vendors balancing aluminum containers with singhadha and rasagolla on either side of flimsy bamboo pole, men carrying baskets covered with khalipatra on their heads… it was a human mosaic of color, sound, and sight! And, deft navigation!

I visited Cuttack every single year during Durga Puja till I moved out of Bhubaneswar in the early 90s. My last Puja was in 1990. And it was my last time at my grandparents’ home. To me this festive season has always been about family. I feel blessed to have a large family with scores of cousins on both sides. And a Puja does not feel like a Puja if I am alone.