Of books, looks and what cooks on Saraswati Puja

Among the pantheon of Gods and Goddess in our country, Ma Saraswati occupies a sacred place among students and learners of all age groups. Aai Saraswati blesses us with knowledge and wisdom and candles our lives with brightness and hope. She is also the Hindu goddess of learning, music and arts.

In Assam, youngsters esp. the girls of school-going age clad themselves in mekhela-chador on this special day. When I was a student, preparation for what to wear went much ahead of the day of Saraswati Puja. Since I went to a missionary school the puja was not held within the school premise. However, the day being a holiday, I with my friends went from one school to another in the radius of about 2-3 kms on foot, that too clad in mekhela-chador, to seek the blessings of Ma Saraswati. This was a special day for us since it was the only day, out of all 365 ¼ days, when we got the chance to wear our mother’s mekhela-chador.

Ma jokingly sang these lines in Assamese- “Saraswati Aai, ashirbad kora, porixat nokol korilau noporu je dhora” meaning Goddess Saraswati, bless me so that even if I use unfair means in the examination, may I never be caught.

Bogori (berry) which ripens during this festival always brought water to our mouths. However, eating the berry before Saraswati Puja was associated with either bad results or poor academic performance. Hence, my friends and I totally refrained from eating it while in school even when temptations raised high in our tongues, just like Eve for the forbidden apple.

On the day of Saraswati Puja we were given some money (Rs 5 or Rs 10 then) by our parents to eat something outside. I remember there was this new restaurant which opened in Rukmini Nagar- Ambees. We placed our order and when on my last bite I remembered it was Saraswati Puja when non-veg should have been avoided. I had already committed the mistake of eating flesh on the day of Saraswati Puja and dreaded the result day at school and hence I surmised I would flunk in the examination for eating non-veg. This restaurant still exists now and this is where I once went with my boyfriend while dating him years later after this incident.

 Saraswati Puja is that one day of the year when we try not to read books and newspapers as it is believed that Ma Saraswati may knock us out of our brains if we read or write. I still avoid reading the newspapers on this day even when I am in my late 30s. Habits die hard. I associate computers with Lakshmi and hence happily charted out maps or keyed in it.

Saraswati Puja during college life was quite different from those of school life. The streets of Panbazar would flow like a river of lava, fresh out of its volcano with pretty young ladies in their best attires paparazzied by a battalion of equally adorable young men. There would be more of glamour and beauty than obeisance to the deity.

Khichdi (kedgeree) with labra served during Saraswati Puja was a simple yet  grand feast which every bhakt looked forward to after the puja was over. The aroma of such puja prasad still brings water to my mouth. Chick peas mixed with green gram (soaked overnight) with slices of ginger in it and cut fruits, served to one and all on banana leaves added to the traditional touch.

Even Durga Puja, celebrated in the later part of the year, is incomplete without an idol of Ma Saraswati sitting on her bahn- the white swan or on the white lotus. Her whiteness stands for purity of thoughts. I remember taking school books and genuflecting before the idol of Ma Saraswati, seeking her blessings religiously in order to pass in the examination, on the last day of the Durga Puja. It’s a ritual I abandoned as I grew up.

We were taught when very young to touch our book(s) on to our forehead if it accidentally fell down on the floor. This was done to ensure that we treated our books (and other stationery items like pencil and pen too) with utmost care so that Ma Saraswati won’t desert us at any point of time or lest she thought that we didn’t pay her enough respect.

The only thing one cannot steal from others is one’s knowledge but definitely it grows when we share our knowledge with others. Without learning and without education, this life is an abyss of vacuum and emptiness. Books, one of the greatest sources of knowledge, are also man’s best companion which even helps to keep loneliness at bay.

Near my house there is an SBI Learning Centre with a small idol of Ma Saraswati at a distance, somewhat away from the road. Every time I walk or wheel on my cycle on this road my head bows down as I offer a quick, silent prayer so that Ma Saraswati can bless me, like all others, with wisdom, confidence, courage and strength. As I write this I sincerely hope that spread of knowledge and education engulfs us like a forest fire, removing social evils like witch-hunting which still plagues our society.

There is no full-stop for learning and ameliorating our skills. I find the presence of Ma Saraswati in my Mother- my first teacher in life’s nursery, my elder sister who is no less than a preacher and all my teachers from school who taught us to dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s, the college and university lecturers/ professors who imprinted strong impressions in the ‘tabula rasa’; my colleagues (both superiors and juniors) who has helped me grow immensely both professionally and personally. Each and everyone one is a tributary of that river of knowledge which flows and grows at each confluence and what Ma Saraswati epitomizes. And like rain drops falling from the sky, may we be showered with blessings by Her, removing the dust of ignorance and illiteracy.

Durga Puja- a garland of memories

Durga Puja- a garland of memories                           

The four seasons are equally blessed with colours and festivities so when the scent of sewali phool (night jasmine) is in the air, when the hot and sultry days of summer perspiration ebbs and our skin is kissed by a slight morning chill, you can smell the sweet fervour of Durga Puja which lingers in the air.

The other day while cycling in the downtown areas of the city I spotted an idol of Ma Durga clad in clay when the childhood reels set rolling. Durga Puja marks the celebration of ushering in goodness, victory of good over evil and the killing of all negativity from our lives. The foreground of the puja pandal, where I religiously worshipped Ma Durga since my childhood years and spanning for around 2 decades, was the World War tank, coated in olive green, which stood rooted within the erstwhile Dispur Capital Campus, a cosmopolitan colony of sarkari officewallahs with a high and a huge stage between the Durga Puja pandal and the war tank. This ‘stage’ was the fixed venue for not only Durga Puja, Kali Puja, Lakhi Puja and all other pujas but also the Rongali Bihu functions three to four decades back. A few metres walk led you to a serene lake. This rectangular stretch between the stage and the lake was the divide between the Assam Sachibalaya (Janata Bhawan now) and the residential colony where I grew up.

In the pre-globalization era, Fancy Bazar was the sure stop for buyers and sellers alike. People thronged in large numbers to Fancy Bazar a month or two ahead of Durga Puja. And if you were a last minute shopper you won’t get enough space to even drag your feet a few inches. Buyers walked in inches, rubbing shoulder to shoulder in the streets of Fancy Bazar and the voices of the roadside vendors luring customers resonated within the bazaar. But nevertheless people still went to shop.

As a school student, I eagerly waited for the Durga Pujas not because of the new dresses esp. frocks, skirts and tops I was gifted by Ma-Deota. We didn’t have the luxury of buying dresses frequently then but it was limited to twice and thrice a year. Puja was associated with chutti from school, family visits by my dear aunts and uncles showering us with their gifts of toys, ludos, pencil boxes and such things which were very precious to me for the simple pleasure of owing them. Herein I would like to add that Mahalaya was eagerly awaited by my parents and they would be glued to All India Radio to listen to the chanting of the slokas. It won’t be wrong to state that we grew up listening to it on Mahalaya, every year.

The lane where I grew up and its adjoining areas were populated more with girls than boys. This young girl’s group was notorious for stealing. No, no, please don’t get me wrong. It was only confined to stealing flowers during Durga Puja. Every household had a front garden which was fenced by bamboo trellis. The young gang were pretty flexible in physique. It didn’t take us much time to trespass on our neighbour’s compound, pluck it with our tiny delicate fingers and stack the flowers into our pockets or baskets as delicately as possible or while handing it over to our partner’s in crime across the fence in no seconds and vanish like a passing tornedo from the scene.

We were very meticulous in the art of stealing flowers. It needed much pre-planning and preparation, mindfulness, the Do’s and the Don’ts when ‘work was in progress’ and last but not the least you had to be a good sprinter (our Bihu medals proved the last skill required for this). A day before stealing, we planned who would bring the knife, the torch and such other paraphernalia, the time of waking up and the venue of meeting at the next pre-dawn. It was invariably at one of our friend’s house, right in front of the gate when it was still dark.  Even though we were scared of ghosts and ‘jokhinis’ it took us good courage to shun it for a few hours. Not all the flowers came from our stealing. Wherever there was a sewali in full bloom with its boughs shading the lanes and by-lanes, it was GPS-ed well in advance by us.

There was one particular family, a Bengali family in our locality which belonged to an IAS officer. It was a south-facing corner house lining the post office field. The aunty of that house had a passion for gardening and come spring (or even during autumn) her house was a riot of colours. Hence, aunty’s house occupied the top slot in our ‘places to steal’ list. Aunty would keep guard a day before Durga Puja as we once discovered to our dismay.

It must have been around 3:30 am/ 4 am when we went on our rounds. When we flashed on the torchlight to focus on the flowers, the beam of light lit a full moon-like purnima-face. My friend Bhonti- the female priest in our group, saw aunty’s face (as she swore later to us). Bhonti whispered something to us and we ran as if we saw a ghost at night. It was pitch dark then and the sentinel of the house sacrificed her sleep just like we did on one such raid.

After the ritual of plundering the neighbourhood off flowers and collecting the freshly-fallen sewali phool from the lanes and by-lanes, we gathered in our friends Kabita and Tutumoni’s house with needles and white thread to make garlands for the various idols. The largest and the brightest garland was marked for the idol of Durga Ma and the rest for the idols of Lakhi, Saraswati, Ganesh and Kartik. The last one was meant for the ‘banana plant’. The entire duration of making a garland was time-taking. We would sit in pairs, each holding the two ends of the thread and running the needle through the fresh flowers. Sewali phool (night jasmine), gendha phool (marigold) and joba phool (hibiscus) were the mostly sought-after flowers for the garlands. While making the garland we weighed the pros and the cons of stealing flowers and if we would be punished by Goddess Ma Durga for such a wrong-doing. We consoled ourselves right on the spot that we would be propitiated of our sins since we were offering our garlands to none other than Goddess Ma Durga herself. Our parents knew about our garden plunder but never dissuaded us from doing so. Their ways of parenting was very strict when it came to core values but permissible around this part of the year for the fun we got from it. Once the garland was handed over to the committee people we waited for the evening.

The stalls that sprang up overnight near the tank field also left an indelible mark in my mind’s sepia album. There would be stalls selling all kinds of food and cheap fancy stuffs. Tea-stalls to sweet-shops, stalls selling paratha-ghugni, puchkas, toffees and lozenges, chewing gums and bubble gums, local potato chips, balloons, cheap and colourful plastic toys. One such toy which every child in those years possessed was the pistol and the rolling gullis. While leaving from home for the puja venue we reminded each other to take a safety pin so that we could deflate the balloons at one go from whosoever carried one on his/ her hands.

One incident which I vividly remember happened at Durga Puja night. My elder brother came home late after the cultural show during puja. The rest of us were sleeping when we heard Deota’s shouts from the dining-room. He had a habit of waking up at night to drink water. Since all the government quarters were small in size (and also probably because he was diabetic), he never kept a bottle of water in his bedroom but preferred to walk a few steps to the dining-room. When I ran to the dining room to check what the matter was, I saw Deota holding the hard stick which was meant to shoo-off thieves (that is in case if one broke-in into our house). There was no thief around on a puja night but Deota aimed at a snake resting right at the centre on top of the dining table. It was only when my elder brother entered the room, the confusion was cleared. It was a ‘cherry-blossom’ black snake made of plastic which my brother got from one of such stalls, probably to scare me off, which he never thought in his wildest imagination that someone else would be petrified by it, least of all Deota.

On the days of saptami, astami, nabami and dasami, we chanted the Sanskrit slokas after the purohit and took pushpanjali. I also remember collecting all the rice grains and chewing a few grains of raw rice right there. The collected lot was tied in a corner of a new handkerchief and was carried home to be used on special days. On the day of nabami, we derived great pleasure as we took turns to distribute khichidi (kedgeree) with labda (mixed vegetables- not the mixed veg we get in restaurants nowadays), plain rice, lemon, chilly, salt and water. What an ambrosia! The very thought salivates my mouth and mind equally. Again, there was a pot-belly gluttonous uncle who always brought a steel bucket from home to carry some extra khichidi back home, this was even when the devotees still ate on the stage.

The sacred yellow-coloured thread was distributed to the bhakts in the morning on Dasami and I fail to understand why this task was entrusted to the tallest uncle among the puja committee members. As soon as we spotted Goswami uncle carrying the sacred thread, the locality children would literally attack him, like a pride of lioness upon a deer, from all directions to get hold of just one. Once in the melee, 3-4 children jumping near uncle lost balance. The consequence was my inverted tombstone-like tooth left a gash on my friend Tikli’s forehead after all the pushing and pulling for the sacred thread among the unruly young devotees. When there is pleasure, there is pain! We also got to see a glimpse of Ma Durga’s feet viewed in a mirror placed on the ground. We carried a few textbooks from home all the way to the puja pandal (I carried Mathematics and Assamese for obvious reasons) and washed Ma Saraswati’s feet with it so that we scored good marks. I did so simply to pass in those dreaded subjects. It is strange I never prayed to Ma Durga to instil strength in me or to bless me with courage to face adversities in life. Dasami, the last day of Durga Puja, was incomplete without feasting on jalebis to our heart’s content.

The evening cultural show performed by various artists including solo and group dancers, singers, mime artists, natak etc. was the limelight for all the residents esp. for us. It was the time of the year when these artists got the platform to showcase their talent live other than on Rongali Bihu. During those days DD was the one and only T.V. channel so this was a good diversion for youngsters like us. All the good artists would be on stage only late at night and it was quite disheartening for us kids as we would often fall asleep when the show was on. We found an easy way out for this too- we joined three to four chairs in a neat row and slept for some time but woke up immediately when the main attraction of the evening started. On one such Durga Puja celebrations, Zubeen Garg came to perform in the cultural show. He was quite a popular figure in Assam then (but not  in the rest of India then) and I remember he sang his hits viz.- Maya, Anamika and one old Hindi song from my favourite actor Kamal Hasan starred Sanam Teri Kasam. Years later when I reached college, one day I heard from my elder sister that Zubeen Garg had shifted to the house opposite ours in Dispur Capital Complex, the same house where my sister-in-law once lived when her father was transferred from Jorhat to Guwahati. By being the next-door neighbour of such a talented artist we got the privilege of listening to Zubeen Garg’s songs even before it was released.

Every year Deota would take us in a car to see the other puja pandals in Durga Puja hot-spots like Maligaon, Pandu and closer still at Ganeshguri. Traffic almost came to a grinding halt in the evenings in those days but it was still fun to be temporarily lost in a sea of human waves with the illumination of rainbow hue and blaring sound of latest Assamese, Hindi and even Bengali hits.

Just like all good thing comes to an end, Durga Puja is also no exception. Dasami marks the immersion of the idol of Ma Durga in a river. Lorries and trucks are hired for bixorjan and the young and the old across both gender participates in the final adieu. In my 17 years of stay in this campus, I was allowed to see this only once most probably in Kachari ghat. As children I was never allowed to go due to security reasons as there were stray cases of drowning. Our rivers are equally polluted not just by effluents from industries and factories but a certain percentage is also contributed by immersion of idols which uses plastics and other non-biodegradable waste. Efforts by a few artisans to use green, non-toxic or biodegradable waste is commendable and must be encouraged.

Sadly during Durga Puja time very often young bikers lose their lives, as one did years ago from our neighbourhood and a young relative of mine a few years from now. Also, being a rational human-being first and an ardent animal lover second, I could neither accept nor support animal sacrifice to appease Ma Durga. How can a buffalo, pigeon or a goat, all Her creations, be made a scapegoat for the sins committed by sinful souls?

It is a pity that Indians have reduced Durga Puja only to idol worship when the Goddess stands as a symbol of strength, courage and victory. What I see is after every few kilometres there is a puja pandal richly decorated often with diverse themes. Should we confine such a worship only to idol worship when female foetus is aborted right in the mother’s womb, when the girls are stalked, teased, molested or ghastly raped, when innocent young girls become victims of acid attacks, when widows are hunted down in remote villages and burnt or killed brutally after labelling them as witches, when brides are tortured and ruthlessly silenced for not bringing in enough at their in-laws house, when wives are battered by their drunken and so-called ‘educated’ husbands, when married daughters are not welcomed to live in her parental home after separation from the spouse. There is a Durga in each living soul, either in Her dormant or active state, and it need not be only a girl or a women. These are people like Dr Birubala Rabha who is crusading against witchcraft in Assam, like Jahnavi Goswami who is an HIV-AIDS activist, like Purnima Devi Barman who is a conservationist, like nobel laureates Malala Yusafzai who fought the Talibans and stood for education of the girl child and Kailash Satyarthi who is working to stop human trafficking and is a voice against child abuse, like each and every one of us who is fighting a lone battle to bring goodness in not only their life but also touching other’s lives and empowering them with strength, courage, perseverance and wisdom. Merely blowing of the conch shell or the beating of the drums during such rituals to appease the Goddess is no true devotion when we commit crimes and sins and show no respect to all sentient beings created by Her. This Durga Puja bring out the dormant Durga in you, only then you can be truly blessed.

-By Karobi Gogoi Hazarika