Durga Puja Triumph of Good over Evil
It was decided to do Breakfast first at Taj Bengal at 7:30 then do the pandals in New Alipore and Behala as I was not sure how long that would take with everyone wanting to take lots of photographs... but the mutiny at the breakfast table by the Demonic Doc left me mutinous. We could have easily visited the pandals I had in mind, as dismantling a whole fort in the middle of New Alipore takes time. Wanja and I had stumbled upon this Lal Quila on one of our pandal hopping jags and we’ve been back to it 4 times including last Sunday Lakhi Purnima /full moon night(just to prove that the pandal was very much there) and in place of the large scale Durga Protima/idol we saw a small Lakshmi thakur and the solitary priest softly reciting his mantras late into the night. Leila and Mark Elliott have taken loads of pictures.
The Group decided at the breakfast table to go instead to a garden. The Maha Doc decreed The Botanics, the others mooted the horticultural gardens on Peter’s doorstep. I was sitting at another table with Himanshu, Leila and Wanja. We were delayed getting to the Taj because I wanted to show Himanshu the 10 foot tall African doll in the stairwell of my house, that Francois had bought from the Bose Pukur Sitala Mandir pandal which was a recreation of a South African Ndebele village. We had visited it in Tony’s car with Wanja, Francois, Yvonnick, and Chiru on the Tuesday morning when we met once again in front of the HSBC on Rash Behari Crossing to take hashers to the pandals in North Calcutta. We negotiated a bride price for the giant putul/doll and Francois was transported with delight, while I had to organize the thankless task of transporting the thing to my house on Bisarjan day.
Wanja, who wouldn’t miss a hash in Cal as she enjoys reading all about it while rotting in Ranchi, was late surfacing on Sunday morning. We’d had a hectic day in Shantiniketan on Saturday with the crowd from the Bisarjan boat cruise on Thursday -Tony, Siddiqui, Mayank, Chiru, Mark McLean, Leila, Wanja and others who were ready to make the Saturday return trip to Shantiniketan by train. Wanja, Leila and I had gone with Rahul in his car, listening to lovely Spanish, Arabic, and even Swahili lounge music that thrilled Wanja no end. Therefore we were in the mood to dance into the early hours at Roxy with half French Half Tunisian Leila showing us the belly dance followed by late supper at Jai Hind dhaba.
The reason I’m writing all these details is because I never got to the Hash on Sunday as after a hurried and harried breakfast, no one told me that we weren’t going to the Botanical but to the Horticultural Gardens!
Having persuaded Himanshu to drive all the way to the Botanic Gardens on the promise that Leila would hold his hand and point out the names of all the flowers (did you know that the “Mother” in Pondicherry has given her own spiritual names to special flowers?), something that I should also do as despite numerous hashes with Bonani, I have still to master any botanical names! After taking him for a ride last Sunday, now I’ll probably never be able to con-vince Himanshu to come to a hash. So if you’d seen my face at the Botanics after asking the guards whether the foreigners in orange had come and gone, and been told they’d never arrived, you’d have seen the wrath of Durga!