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In Delhi, I am often the person leading the way. I take friends through pandals I did not grow up visiting, explaining the rituals, the history of how Bengalis came to settle in the city, with something that is almost incantation. My fourth Durga Puja in the city is impending. And yet the last time I was in CR Park, a singular neighbourhood, my Bengali friends and I were jarred by yet another jewellery shop and ghugni stall we’d never seen. I have become a guide to a culture I am still discovering.
In Kolkata, growing up, I was the one being led: by friends, friends of friends, family, flings, neighbours who were near strangers the rest of the year. And we would scarcely know what to expect from the pandal, except Maa. On the way, we’d encounter traffic snags and hop over fences, powered by vodka shots in phuchka shells. Neon lights become a haze in long, headache-inducing yellow taxi rides. I suppose that’s one of the greatest differences between pandal hopping in the capital and the ex-capital as a Bengali. You tell grand, nostalgic stories in one and hope the food will further convey them; in the other, you graduate immediately to a postmodernist movement with a stream of consciousness.
There are fewer pandals in Delhi, of course. And I don’t blame anyone for not treading past CR Park, the city’s unofficial little Bengal. (I highly recommend checking out more, especially in North Delhi.) I routinely suspect that places grow smaller in our minds as we grow familiar with them, and every Puja, Delhi becomes a collection of dots on a map. This pandal for the food, that one for the decorations, another because somebody has promised it is worth the drive, or a restaurant is nearby.
Kolkata’s Puja remains boundless. I don’t just mean that numerically. It stretches beyond the pandals I have seen in the neighbourhoods I supposedly know into streets where strangers are making their own discoveries. There is always another place to go, another conversation to be had. Any Puja hopping veteran is comfortable with this madness. Paradoxically, it is familiar. The question is how many pandals you can cover in one night regardless of whether you even believe in religion.
In Delhi, the question is whether you can cover three without spending the entire evening looking for parking, and what you’re doing for the afterparty. Otherwise, you’re sorted, throughout. There are shortcuts to be quickly discovered through the not-so-lit bylanes, passes to be procured. Cultural programmes of music and dance tend to start on time, as compared to Kolkata, and are perhaps more endearing. Delhi has taught me that even devotion can benefit from being in smaller hands. And, I suppose, it’s mad enough off season.
Both cities demand that you elbow your way through the crowds. Everyone wants to pray, take a photograph, admire the decorations and move on, preferably at the same time. The roads become impossible. Kolkata’s road rage, amusingly, seems to boil to the peak as the evening progresses, the bamboo-bordered crowds and traffic feeding off each other. The Bengali stereotype of being passive and lazy must be shed at once, everyone collectively decides.
I’ve never struggled with travelling on road for a Noida or North Delhi puja. South Delhi traffic, meanwhile, has been preparing me for this all along. If anything, it has been my spiritual training. In CR Park, I have noticed something almost miraculous: a dimming of road rage. Delhi's drivers, who spend much of the year treating the road as a personal affront, seem marginally more forgiving here. South Delhi traffic, meanwhile, has been preparing me for this all along. If anything, it has been my spiritual training.
In both cities, of course, you can walk out of a pandal and find yourself in a queue for something fried before you have quite processed what you have just seen. In both, if you can manage a meal standing in a crowded pandal, you’ll know how much you’re physically capable of. In Delhi, though, the spots to hit for larger meals are obvious. In Kolkata, restaurants are rarely debated because as important as food is, there is already so much to plan, besides your para’s meals. One cuisine on Saptami for lunch. This bar on Ashtami night. It’s clockwork. It’s so strange: your palette ends up travelling further than you in your own hometown.
At pandals in most cities, you always have to lift your head above a forest of people for a glimpse of the goddess. A hot rush of adrenaline. You are not simply visiting a pandal. You are trying to get close enough. And emerge from the crowd with your phone, footwear and dignity intact.
This happens in a wildly experimental, politically argumentative pandal as much as a traditional one. Kolkata has the luxury, of course, to make pandals its arguments and creative professions: their themes drawing attention to the world outside the temporary walls. In Delhi, there is more of an impulse to preserve tradition: a very clear announcement system, dakar saaj on the goddess, a timely bhog. Experiments are wonderful, but there’s an argument to be made that there are triumphs here. A certain seriousness to the audience of a neighbourhood’s children’s dance, one that it deserves.
But I could get down at Kolkata’s Maidan grounds or from Delhi’s Kashmere Gate metro station and my professed atheism would frown upon me either way. I try to get closer, to see Maa Durga, to hold on to a moment, before the crowd carries me out.