Vote Puja
Sumana Roy ‘Since 1979, we have been celebrating Kali Puja in our house. But there is a history behind this tradition. … One of my brothers was born on a new moon night on Kali Puja so he was named Kali. … We always use a small idol that Kali makes himself or at least puts some finishing touches on.’ ‘I started getting this recurrent dream where I saw myself offering puja at Tarapith. … now people know and expect me to go to Kalighat every Poila Boishak’. Mamata Banerjee, My Unforgettable Memories * Where had the ram-dao1 disappeared? The general consensus that emerged from the tin-roofed houses was that it was all because of Shokti Haldar. He had switched to the Trinamool Congress Party. That had been a mistake. While no one asked ‘How could he …?’, since they had all voted for Didi, they were angry that he had ‘changed’ parties. It was one thing to be a voter and another to become a ‘party-man’. Where was Shokti Haldar? Had he really gone to Kolkata to seek Didi’s blessings before his first Charak puja as a TMC councillor? They laughed at the possibility – their religion had taught them that virgin women in widow’s white saris were powerless. Didi could be a Brahmin and powerful, but ‘Ma Mati Manush’ was one thing and Ma Kali quite another. So they preferred to believe Shokti Haldar’s nephew: ‘Shokti-kaka is taking swimming lessons …’. Shibu, now an immigrant, working as a driver in Siliguri, had come with his wife and eleven month old daughter to Trimohini two days ago. Like everyone else, he too was beginning to worry: what if the ram-dao really did not emerge from the pond? The ten thousand rupees saved over the last ten months, ever since the birth of his daughter, the difficulty in getting leave from his employer, and the overnight bus journey with a bawling infant – all this would come to naught if the ram–dao was not found. Today he had planned to get his dala ready: he had already brought four kinds of fruits from Siliguri, where they were far cheaper, and a dozen lyangra mangoes from Malda, the bus having made a thirty minute halt in that town. His offerings of fruits to Ma Kali would be better than everyone else’s, even Shokti Haldar’s: that thought made him happy and proud and even nervous. The sweetest mangoes from Malda, oranges from Mirik (so what if their skins were a little shrivelled in the heat), apples from Kashmir (the Bihari fruit-seller must have cheated him, but so what?), Singapori bananas, and grapes from a place he had never heard of – who in Trimohini could offer such a basket to the goddess? Now only the earthen lamps and joysticks needed to be purchased. He didn’t worry about the flowers: there were enough in Chhoto-mama’s backyard. (Only city people bought flowers. The gods and goddesses preferred fresh flowers that came free, not those bought from the marketplace. Two things could not be bought, he was certain: flowers and ululation.) With these thoughts, Shibu went to look for his daughter. He hadn’t heard her cry for some time now. ‘Mamata,’ he called out her name, walking out of the room that Chhoto-mami had arranged for them to stay in. There was no response. ‘Lokkhi.’ There she was, his wife, talking to a group of people near the bamboo gate. ‘Where’s Mamata?’ he asked her, pulling her by the anchal of her sari. ‘Mamata? In Kolkata, where else?’ replied an elderly woman, laughing and revealing her betel leaf stained teeth. For Shibu this had become the difference between the villager and the city-bred: he hadn’t noticed how white teeth could be – or perhaps should be – until he went to live in the city. Paan, biri, nosshi, khoini – they marked one as a villager. He ignored the woman’s words. ‘She wasn’t with me,’ he said, looking at Lokkhi. ‘Mamata tor sotin?’ the woman asked Lokkhi now. Most of the people in the gathering laughed at her words. It embarrassed Lokkhi and made her worry about her husband. What if Shibu flew into a rage? She had suffered enough to learn how to measure her words with the man. It made her angry too. Shibu, in spite of the occasional violence, had been a good husband to her. He had been loyal, where was the question of sotin, the other woman? Also, it embarrassed her to think of Didi, a woman she liked and admired, as the other woman in her marriage. ‘Mamata aamar meye,’ she replied, walking towards the house. Though Lokkhi had initially argued with Shibu against naming their firstborn after the Chief Minister of the state, she had gradually come to like the name. Her first choice of name had been Satabdi. She had seen the actress in many Bangla films and later in the travelling jatras, and had heard that she was now a politician in Didi’s party. ‘Why not Satabdi?’ she had demanded of Shibu. ‘It’s the name of the fastest train in India,’ had been her husband’s answer. It was Shibu’s secret ambition to be a train-driver, and so he had created an inventory of second hand knowledge about trains and the railway ministry. ‘Have the Japanese built a railway line to the moon?’ he had asked his employer, Dr. Sen, when the latter had told him about Sputnik and Apollo. Lokkhi did not want her daughter to be named after a train. She was superstitious about this: her parents had named her youngest brother ‘Saheb’, after a popular Tapas Pal film, and now her brother was in Dilli, working as a man-servant to a Punjabi family. When Fokla-da had gone to meet him in his paara, a village probably famous for gur, jaggery, because it was called Gur-gaon, he had found Saheb saying ‘Ji Saheb’ to everything that the turbaned Punjabi man told him. Lokkhi