My Puja Memories

10/3/2025

When I go depressed the hurts collapse on me like dominoes, but not like any polite dominoes arranged on a child’s parquet floor for a moment’s entertainment, but like those ancient standing stones one sees in old engravings of druidic circles, monoliths of grievance toppling one after another with a sound that is at once internal and seismic, a sound felt in the teeth and the back of the skull, until at last I find myself in the clearing they have encircled, weak and trembling, a figure riveted not by chains but by a dense immobility, as if my own blood had thickened into resin and set me in place to receive the oncoming shock; and in this paralysis a curious thing happens, the passage of time slows to the viscosity of honey so that each small humiliation, each microscopic cut, reveals itself in its miniature striations and hues, like a drop of pond water under a microscope suddenly full of wriggling alien creatures, and I am compelled to watch as they move; and every depressive episode, though from a distance indistinguishable from the last, is in fact its own elaborate specimen, a different arrangement in the salad bar of benthic emotions—one day the glaucous rage of a deep-sea eel, another the slack pale inertia of a creature living without sunlight—each with its particular strength to roil and to rile, to heat the inner furnace where indignant thoughts clink like untempered metal on brittle nerves; and this monotone, though monotonous in its persistence, is not monotonous in its texture, but full of ruinous music like the low note of a cathedral organ sustained past the point of beauty into ache, until at last, without any act of will, I am dropped into sleep again, as if some operator unseen has dimmed the lights and closed the curtains on a stage whose drama I had no more desire to witness but could not exit of my own accord.

Then in the midst of this inward collapse, when the hurts line themselves up for their nightly procession and topple in the familiar funereal sequence, there breaks in through the window or through the thin walls of memory the lights and sounds of Durga Puja, that intoxication of drums, bells, conches, and the strange neon hues like tropical fish schooling for a week in streets otherwise gray, and at once, against my will, I am carried backwards, not by the melancholy but by its opposite—by the remembered happiness of childhood, a happiness that has all the intensity of reality and none of its accessibility, for I cannot reach it anymore, strapped as I am at fifty to this waterlogged Calcutta whose streets puddle with rank rain because the city, like its people, has forgotten the art of drainage, physical or spiritual, and in its place has cultivated only the shallow festooning of hollow idols, hollow men, shallow fallow men who parade in devotion without devotion, noise without music, festivity without joy, while I stand in the middle, hostage to both the thunderous drums outside and the brittle silence inside, and the cruelest thing is that the flashbacks do not anesthetize but rather sharpen the loss, for the very nearness of remembered joy exposes the irretrievable gulf between the boy who once chased lights reflected in oily puddles and the man now riveted in immobility, a spectator chained to the railing of time as the city goes rattling past with its false fireworks, its tinseled gods, its neon pantheon indifferent to the mortal who stares too long into its flicker.

Then the strange alchemy occurs: I walk in the present down the swollen streets of Calcutta, rain pooling ankle-deep where the drains choke on plastic and phlegm, but overlaid upon this sodden landscape is another Calcutta, the one that lived in my eyes at ten, twelve, fourteen—the boy running, not trudging, through lanes where the pandals rose like miraculous tents of color, bamboo skeletons clothed in cloth and painted plaster, whole mythologies constructed in a week and dismantled in another, but to him eternal; and now as I hear the same dhak, the great leather drum that shakes the belly as much as the air, the sound arrives doubled, one beat for the man and one for the boy, the boy’s beat jubilant, soaring, a call to race toward the goddess’ clay face, to lose himself in the festival of crowds, and the man’s beat leaden, a knell reminding him of how far that boy has receded into time.

The lights too bifurcate—the garish LEDs strung across rain-slick roads seem to me tawdry, disposable, yet at the same moment I see their ancestors: bulbs glowing orange, green, blue, warm as marbles in the boy’s hand, each filament a miniature sun. The smells overlap as well: the faint stench of sewage and frying oil that now disgusts me was once a fragrance of promise, of bhog rice and khichuri and incense, mingled in the air of October evenings when the city bloomed, not yet festooned with advertisements and hollow gestures but vibrating, at least for the boy, with a reality so radiant that even hunger or mud could not diminish it.

And so as I move—or fail to move—down this double-exposed street, I feel myself both solid and ghost, the man unable to escape his immobility, the boy leaping puddles and craning his neck at illuminations strung like constellations of his own invention. To live both layers at once is a form of torture, for the happiness is not entirely gone but sits superimposed like a photograph that won’t fade, making the present not merely bleak but haunted by the technicolor of the past. It is not that joy has died, but that it persists in exile, just across a border that no passport, no ritual, no nonexistent god, no city can let me cross, and especially since I can’t bring me to love myself.

I just look at my reflection or at my own thoughts and I can’t recognize who I’ve become, it’s almost like a stranger is inside me and I can’t do anything about it. It is as though, in some obscure corridor of my own memory, a mirror had been hung not to return my image but to refract it, to give back not myself but some spectral inhabitant who has taken up residence where I once was. When I look upon my reflection—whether in glass or in the stiller, more treacherous pools of my thoughts—it is not the face of my childhood, nor the inner voice that once, like an intimate friend, narrated my days, but a stranger, whose gestures are familiar only because they have borrowed mine, whose gaze seems to be appraising me from the inside with a patience I never learned. And yet, even in this estrangement, I sense the faint perfume of continuity, like the ghost of a scent left behind in a room after its occupant has departed, so that I cannot tell if it is I who have changed or the world’s memory of me, nor whether the stranger inside me is an interloper or merely myself returned, in a form so altered by time and silence that I no longer dare claim it as my own.

For me the real Durga is not the stage-managed clay idol under neon tubes but this Durga, the one walking barefoot in Sonagachhi with her body traded to keep her children alive, the one hauling bricks in the heat with breasts already drained dry, the one whose infant cries meet not milk but the acrid cruelty that capitalism has bestowed upon the poor Indian woman, this unglamorous, un-garlanded, ungarmented Durga who stands every day against demons not of mythology but of hunger, debt, and exploitation, and who will never be worshipped by the shallow fallow men of my city—yet who is the only goddess worth kneeling to.