Homecoming

For many of us, the days before the annual autumn festival are probably the best time of the year. At least for Bengalis who stay away from home for most part of the year. Some of my friends also change their Orkut identity to “Pujo@Calcutta”, or “Only a few days away”.

When i was a boy of 12/13, i could see black-gray clouds making way for white ones even as we were busy preparing for revision test or half-yearly exam. The day the revision test ended, i used to pack our bedding and books as soon as possible and keep on waiting for my mother to take me out from the place we call hostel to an open place what people call WORLD.

Ours was a small world inside the high walls of Ramakrishna Mission Vidyalaya, Narendrapur. When we took the bus either to Sealdah or Sonarpur (the nearest big railway station), i could feel that something had changed in the past three/four months: one or two new residential complexes, some new shops (mall culture was not there like it’s now), and moreover the bustling markets at Gariahat and Sealdah where Puja shoppers browsing shirts and skirts alike.

I used to go for countdown, like most of us. It usually started about 25/0 days before the day we were scheduled to go for a month-long vacation. Yesterday, my nephew Sabaan (real name Rajarshi) told me: “Mamai, ar aat din (It’s only eight days away).” Sabaan stays at Santiniketan and he knows like the past two years his D-Day (D= Departure from routine life) would be the night of Mahalaya when they organise Ananda Bazaar at Gourprangan. For a nine-year-old boy like him, there is no pressure of revision test, but the fun of going home and enjoy the best time of the year with his mother and grandparents.

Sabaan reminds me my days or years away from home. On dewy mornings at Narendrapur, i could smell Shiuli — the same flower that used to bloom with its unique fragrance at our Barasat home. On misty late afternoons at Santiniketan, i would watch in wonder the colours a sky could offer even after sunset like that in Dattapukur. In September 1999, i was returning home soon after the floods that devastated Birbhum, Burdwan and other south Bengal districts. From the train i could see huts still submerged, one or two makeshift boats carrying flood victims and the grim scenes that would etch in my mind forever. But amid all these, two frames that i still carry with me is one that of a boy flying kite from the roof of his deltaic single-storey house at low-lying flooded Guskara, and the other were the branches of Kash kissing the Santiniketan Express near Khana. I could feel Durga Puja was near.