Kolkata's Durga Pujas

From the Inside Out

- Shreya Sen-Handley

There is magic in the Kolkata air tonight. The autumnal night sky is lit in rainbow hues. These colours reflect off the pandals, those magnificent, glittering, multi-coloured marquees. Tonight, our pandal-hop starts from South Kolkata’s Selimpur and ends in Park Circus. The Gariahat Road on which we walk is long and busy. We see hundreds of pandals, big and small, all decked up as distinctively as can be. We spot everything from a giant-bird marquee to the slightly less fantastical South Indian temple. We stop at a pagoda-like pandal in Ballygunge. It is stately, not serene. Nothing is serene during the Pujas. Though the air is filled with loud music and voices, the pagoda is worth the halt and deserves a better look. But that’s precisely our problem. We—two little children and their diminutive mom—don’t think we will get that better look tonight. In fact, close to the ground as we are, even the magic in the air slightly eludes us. Air itself does too, hemmed in as we are by a large surging crowd, jostling and jabbering.

“Oh Mommy,” said my seven-year-old daughter, “it’s bootiful, but I can barely breathe.”

It was time for the Himshim Manoeuvre. Like the Heimlich Manoeuvre, Himshim brings escape from a particular kind of choking peculiar to Kolkata at Pujo-time. I was about to find out if I’d grown rusty from my many years living away in England. Gripping my children’s hands tightly, I ploughed through the palaver of people till we’d breathed refreshing air on a quieter side street. There were enough people there to fill a small hall, but still. Soon spirited home in our car down similar back streets, the children were relieved but also eager for more. “Shall we do it again?” asked our young man of nine.