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DurgaPuja 2020

The Issue

Arnab Ray

“Let me go and offer puja”, the wife says pointing to the Durga idol to the right, up on the stage, “You
can sit there, see if you know anyone.”
All married couples know this passage of play. It’s when one of the two makes the other do
something that that person doesn’t want, and then compensates by backing off for a certain period of
time afterwards. My wife knows I am not happy. I did not want to be here. Weekends are for reading
books and watching movies, not for wearing kurta-pyjama that don’t really fit me in the way they
were originally tailored, driving an hour, taking three exits, and then paying fifty dollars per person at
the door for the dubious privilege of lunch, dinner and “cultural program”.
But it’s Pujo. Are we not going anywhere?
Even if that place is a high school rented for the weekend, and we don’t know anyone there.
So here we are.
“Well why don’t you go to Bangali Association meetings?” My wife had said on the drive here, chilly
inside the car even though the heat was turned up high, “Then everyone would not be a stranger.”
I had simply gripped the steering wheel harder. I have been married for ten years. I know not to
answer such questions.
“But you used to love Durga Pujo.”
I did. Back in Calcutta. When I had friends. When I could walk into a random pandal at any time of the
day and most likely meet someone I knew, from school or college or from “coaching”, when the
whole city was extended family.
Not now. Not in the US. Not anymore.
And now as my wife walks away, I look around at the assemblage.
The usual stereotypes.

The newlyweds, the ink on their registry papers not even dried. You can always tell the newlyweds.
The husband, that engineering college-face I can make out anywhere because I see it every day in the
mirror, with that glow of “I am having sex people, and not with my hand” taking pictures of his wife,
one after another, here, there, look this way, not that way, bend shoulder a bit, just a shadow of
cleavage, but not the real thing for that would be against culture and very chi-chi and “issh ma ki
bolbe” and I can see these pictures on timelines on the Interwebs, as the song “Dekhuk para porsite
kemon maach gentechi borsite” (Let the neighbors know, I have netted a marvelous fish) plays in my
mind, and in his.
As an aside, you can tell how long a couple has been arrived, by watching the line of the sari at the
waist, the more the years, the more it rises.
And then there are those whose sari-lines have advanced, over the years, to their necks. The
mashimas. They are there, selling gaudy saris, passing off what I am sure are fifteen-year-old hand-
me-downs as the “latest design from Calcutta”, and for variety, “ethnic jewelry original from
Bankura”, which if I didn’t know better, are massively marked-up items picked up from Dakkhinapan,
from the last time said mashima was back home. The unsuccessful businesswomen stand quietly
behind their table, while the more dangerous of them, work the crowd, catching the newly weds, and
even she knows the sari-line index which allows them to home in on them like a heat-seeking missile.
Then, and here I must use my only Gunda-reference, “chikni chikni baatein kaarke” she unloads her
wares on those least likely to be able to resist her aggression.

Central Ohio Bengali Cultural Association