Over the next few days, complete strangers will wish me a happy Diwali. I know, because it happens around this time every year. At the newsagents, on the tube, in the office: “Happy Diwali!” And why not? I am of Indian origin, there is one huge Indian religious festival happening around this time … ergo I must be delighted it’s Diwali. And I am – for those celebrating it. But for my family, as Hindus from the eastern Indian region of Bengal, the biggie was always Durga puja – and we’ve just had it. Durga is the wife of Lord Shiva, and the puja celebrates her return to Earth. As a child I harboured mixed feelings about her. Pluses: she rode a tiger and had 10 arms cradling various weapons, including a trident with which she has pierced a demon. Clearly, a woman worthy of admiration. Minuses: if this festival was the Bengali equivalent of Christmas, where were my presents?
In Kolkata, Durga puja induces a city-wide standstill: days of gift-giving and eating and pandal-hopping, or tours of neighbourhood pujas. Nothing so grand happens in London, where Bengalis are few in number. But still a wave of excitement slowly rolls over a string of tiny communities – like the tide at last coming in to an archipelago.
At a supermarket checkout last week, my mother hailed a fellow shopper in English: “Have you been to any pujas?” In Bengali he gave a detailed report of the ones he’d been to across London. It took a quarter-hour for me to realise that the two didn’t even know each other.
Unlike our new retiree friend, I only visited one puja, in a suburban community hall. On stage were Durga, Ganesha and Saraswati, the goddess of learning. Milling about in front were four-year-olds in flashing trainers, old men in baggy blazers and their wives in silk saris. Since Indian dress isn’t best suited to autumn nights in Britain, the finery was typically camouflaged with M&S anoraks.
When I was younger and harder, I had little time for such ceremonies. Now I find them almost impossibly moving: these glimpses of a small network of often-elderly neighbours and friends expressing and maintaining a tradition from 8,000km (5,000 miles) away. Discussions of migration rarely bother to gauge the opinions of the immigrants themselves. But to look in on that puja was to see the effort of keeping intact a thread of diasporic connection against all the other callings on one’s time and identity.
Leftier than thou
In Kolkata they worry that the pujas are getting too big, too glitzy, too commercial. But Bengal has a long way to go before it goes full capitalist. It regularly elected a Marxist government for nearly four decades. Recently my bank manager there grilled me on what exactly I wrote about. Well, I spluttered, Britain and Europe and a bit on America sometimes. A long silence. “I see,” he sniffed at long last, “Capitalist economics.” Imagine the manager of your local NatWest judging you insufficiently leftwing. Imagine, for that matter, ever meeting the manager of your local NatWest.
Modern man
The second-best kind of conversation is obviously one that’s overheard – and of those the best is the snippet that leaves space to sketch in the rest. Two other men in a sauna (no, not what you’re thinking), not obviously close friends.
Man A: “Are you pretty physical?”
Man B: “No, if anything, I’ve got less physical.”
What kind of relationship gives rise to such a question: the workplace, five-a-side, a dating app? Days later, I’m still wondering.
