An Ode to Autumn

Santanu Saraswati

Once more, the East Wind is sweeping the sunflower fields of Bengal and autumn is looming large. The kaash flowers are dancing in joy — like they have always done to herald the advent of Durga. The old mummers of distant drumbeats, that same unmistakable silver tinge to the moist, languid clouds, that rosy afterglow in the evening sky. Some things in life won’t change for Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya. They never will.
When the mayor of this big, bustling city unwinds after a long day’s grind, his mind wafts back in a trance to a long-lost childhood when his father would recite from Jibanananda or Sukanta to make the little boy fall asleep.
Unlike his more boisterous, happy-go-lucky friends, who hopped around from pandal to pandal during the Pujas, Bikash would stay at home and listen to his father recite ‘Chul taar kabekar andhakar Bidishar nisha’ or ‘Cherapunjir ekphali megh dhar ditey paro Gobi Saharar bukey?’
“For me poetry was always more precious than new clothes,” the Mayor recalls.
The boy, who grew up to be a renowned lawyer and then the first citizen of Kolkata, never had a pampered childhood. The family simply didn’t have enough money to buy him costly Puja gifts. “There were five of us — brothers and sisters. I was my parents’ third child. Uprooted from what was then East Pakistan, we had moved to our humble tenement at Kalighat Road. I still remember how hard my father found it to make both ends meet and manage two square meals for all in the family. I was too small to miss anything and father was too dignified to crib. But I instinctively knew I would only hurt him if I pressed for gifts.
“So I would say —Baba, tomar kabita aamar kachey notun jamar cheye onek beshi dami (Father, listening to you recite poems is much more precious than having new clothes for the Pujas). Father would smile a distressed smile, take me on his lap and then start, “Madhu, Bidhu dui bhai chotachuti korey tai anandey duhaat tuley nachhey”. After some time, the murmur of his gentle voice would lull me into a sweet slumber and transport me to a land of fairies you see only in dreams.”
It was only as a student of Class VI that Bikash began going out with friends to see the Pujas. “It was probably in the late 60’s when one of my aunts bought me a new shirt for the Pujas. I still remember the excitement.
“I had gone out with four of my friends to see the city lights and the idols of Sahajatri, 23 Pally, Satadal and Muktodal. Father had given me a 50 paise coin. We all had kuler-achar and peanuts. It can still feel in my veins the thrill of this outing. Each mandap had something distinctive about it. The clothes that went into making the pandals had a raw scent. I can still close my eyes and have its smell — as though it was only yesterday.”
Bikash’s father was an atheist. For him, Durgoutsav was a rare and happy opportunity to meet and be with more people — across all cultural, linguistic and economic divides.
“Ever since I was a child, the autumn breeze, the azure sky, the smell of wet earth and the first layers clay on the straw-and-bamboo structure of the idols have meant more to me than the offerings to the goddess on Mahaastami or the hymns chanted in the evening with the priest. There are many who wouldn’t feel the same way. But Rabindranath’s ‘Jadi tor daak suney keu na ashey tabey ekla chalorey’ has had a far greater impact on my life and the way I am than ‘Ja devi sarbabhutesu matri-rupena sangsthita’. I would be the last person to stop people from believing in God and performing pujas. But I believe in humanity and will stand by the poor. I know how hard the poor toil to make a living. Because we, too, had to go through it all when we came over from East Pakistan, leaving everything behind. My father always told me not to aim too high. “See, my boy, there are thousands living around you, who have much less than you have.”
A staunch communist since his college days, Bikash would spend much of his time during the Pujas at the bookstalls put up by the CPI (M) outside the mandaps — browsing through Marxist literature.
He still remembers how, as an active member of the SFI, he would man these stalls and sell the party’s publications and Soviet literature. “Around this time, I read deeply into Marx, Neruda, Chekov and the reports on the Sandinista government of Nicaragua and the songs of Bob Marley.”
“Often I had Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee for companion. We had nothing much to eat and survived on muri and endless cups of tea. Do I remember those days? I do — with pride.”
The Mayor also remembers the days after he got married. “On one such day, I was passing through the lanes of Potuapara in Kalighat with my wife when I caught sight of some half-starved dmrit-shilpis (clay-modelers) slapping the first chunks of clay on the straw-and-bamboo structures of Durga idols.
“I don’t really have anything to say against the pomp, grandeur and fireworks that the Pujas have come to mean nowadays. But nobody seems to spare a thought for these poor clay-modelers, their dying art. Something needs to be done for them.”
I lot of time has gone by since the wide-eyed refugee boy came to settle in a city that would make him its first citizen one day. Kolkata has changed. So, too, have its Pujas. How does he spend the festive days?
A bookworm when he has the time, the Mayor goes back to his old passion of reading up the puja numbers. “I love reading Sunil Gangopadhyay, Samaresh Mazumdar, Buddhadeb Guha — in fact all contemporary writers.”
But this Puja, it should be different. The Mayor is scheduled to be in the Yuzhong district of the People’s Republic of China to attend the 5th Asia Pacific Cities Summit on ‘City, Man and Nature’. The loudspeakers, traffic snarls and the insane rush of pandal-hoppers won’t drive him mad.

santanu_saraswati@hotmail.com