As I write today, in Bengal, it is Mahalaya.
The counting down to a major festival, the Durga Pujo, has started.

Pinning the new moon for reference,
it marks the beginning of a new lunar phase,
the seventh to the tenth day being the four days of the Pujo.

Early in the morning, All India Radio will broadcast a reading from a sacred text,
just as it has done for the last 80 years or so, the same recording,
the same lines, the same songs and the very same voice
of Birendra Krishna Bhadra.

Ever since I can remember, it would seem a magical time,
we would be up almost the whole night not wanting to miss a second of it.
We didn’t have a radio, relied on our neighbour to turn up the volume of his.
Later, when we proudly had one we too turned our sets up for others to listen.

Never a year, when the recitation failed to reverberate the exciting anticipation
of the coming pujodays, of new clothes, visiting relatives, and total freedom.

The programme was timed to end with the first lights of dawn.
Being autumn, the air would be cool, the grey sky freshly washed with layers of pink.

The clay modellers have worked feverishly in their workshops to create images
of Goddess Durga, out of smooth alluvial clay of the Ganges; and
on this Mahalaya day, they will paint the idols’ eyes.

The image of the goddess traditionally shows her in battle,
a weapon in each of her 10 arms.
10!!? yes.
She is also called Dashobhuja, the One with 10 arms.

When very young, somehow I never questioned it.
She was a goddess, everything was accepted without questioning.

And every passing year, the whole ritual repeated,
the annual visit of Ma Durga with 10 arms became part of our lives.

But with time, I realised ten arms was bio-mechanically impossible,
Ma Durga and her ten arms got pushed into the realms of mythology.
Only of late I have started to believe that most of our God and Goddesses
were infact aliens from far off galaxies with unimaginably advanced technology.

It set me thinking, some of these god(dess)s have 4 arms, whiles Durga has 10.
What if the narrators of ancients, in their writing of events long ago
used multiple arms as a way of comparing their strengths?
And Goddess Durga, who came to earth to fight a battle
was the most powerful of them all, the perfect 10?

Photograph: Baptist Mission Press Calcutta.

After all, I do not see the 149 horses pulling my car,
even though the manual states it has a pull of that many horse power!
What if the authors had simply tried to tell us that she had ten kinds of weapons?
With every writing the texts got changed bit by bit, to a very different interpretation.

It is possible.

I have drifted away from home religion and gods, but I miss that atmosphere
and I miss the sweet hot tea, with freshly fried singaras and warm jilipis.

Oh! to be in Kolkata, once again for a Mahalaya morning,

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