Selective Nostalgia in the Durga Puja Season // Sanchari Sur

Being asked to write about nostalgia bang in the middle of Durga puja season seems almost counterintuitive. Ten days of goddess Durga’s visit to her earthly abode to slay the vicious demon, Mahishasur, with her gleaming trident, riding victorious on her lion. I spent my early years in Kolkata, India—then, Calcutta—gearing up for the 10-day festival, schools closed for a week. New clothes, pocketful of loose change, the incessant loud speakers blasting film songs throughout the day, the beat of the dhak, coupled with the smell of flaming dhuno—slow burning coconut husk. Young men held the dhunos skilfully in both hands, dancing in tandem, their heat adding to the redness of the men’s faces. It was a festival of madness; at least the way my 32-year-old old brain still conjures it from the memory of a nine-year-old. Durga puja here is a watered-down version. It is a temple, or a hired hall (depending on which part of Toronto you end up in), filled to the brim with Bengali aunties decked out in their finest: the flamboyant sarees, coupled with the gold jewellery that leave the safety of their lockers for this one occasion. Puja is strategized to be held on the weekends, nobody keen to take leave for this. There is no dhak, or dhuno; burning dhuno, a fire hazard. It’s also October in Southern Ontario, so you catch Bengali women in socked heels, sharing gossip and comparing clothes, heading out later to partake in Chinese or Indian food either at a restaurant or somebody’s home, and drinking and laughing into the night. I don’t partake in the second version, because it affects the memory of my memories. Most years, I choose to stay home, the crowded temple not my scene. I miss the open space of my birth city, also crowded, but a whole city moving in unison for the few days of celebration. It is easy to romanticize a memory which cannot be verified through reality, for I also choose not to visit. Some things fare well only in memories. Instead, I let nostalgia hit me this one time every year.

Sanchari Sur is the recipient of a 2018 Lambda Literary Fellowship in fiction, and her work has been published in Toronto Book Award shortlisted The Unpublished City (Book*hug, 2017), PRISM International, Room, Arc Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate in English at Wilfrid Laurier University, and the curator/co-founder of Balderdash Reading Series (est. Jan 2017). More: http://sursanchari.wordpress.com