Dear Pandemic,
You have opened a Pandora’s box of troubles for the world and created so much pandemonium everywhere.
You have taken away the joys of Durga puja Pandal-hopping this year. Because seriously, what is Durga puja without a visit to look at Ma Durga in her powerful, resplendent finery?
But guess what? I refuse to pander to the oppression that you have inflicted on us. I refuse to be so panicked that I will let this joyous season pass me by without ringing in a celebration.
Sincerely,
Durga Puja Enthusiast
I made this dramatic speech mentally to the Pandemic a month before Durga Puja. I had never NOT celebrated Puja-buying new clothes, pandal hopping, eating khichdi with beguni (batter-fried brinjal) and tomato chutney, the booming sound of drums, women performing dhunuchi dance in front of Ma Durga, visiting with neighbors and relatives –Durga puja is as much about reverence as it is about bonding with the community. The pandemic hit at the very heart of this community celebration.
I started thinking about how my grandmother celebrated this festival. She was a widow, never allowed to visit the Puja pandals, but she celebrated nevertheless. All the neighbours paid visits to her.There was lively laughter and chatting in the house all evening as the sound of conches and drums floated into my grandmother’s room where she sat on her cane chair and entertained the ladies from the neighborhood. Everyone was served three different types of home-made mishti (mithai) and hot vegetable chops with a tangy mustard sauce (kashundi) on golden-rimmed porcelain plates. My grandmother personally supervised all the mishti making that started two days prior to Ashtami Puja.
I decided that I would make my own mishtis this year for my neighbors and friends. This is what happens when you make foolhardy decisions without thinking through the ramifications. I needed to distribute mithais to 15 families in the neighborhood which meant that I needed to make atleast 100 pieces of mithai. After speaking with my mom, I realized that would mean making mithai with approximately 10 liters of milk! This may not seem like a big deal to many, but for me it was a humongous project. Should I just opt out?
But that would mean spending Durga Puja alone at home, feeling gloomy and lonely, letting the pandemic take away the celebrations of this season too. Hasn’t it taken enough away from us already?
So I decided to do it anyway. I narrowed down on making gurer shondesh (sandesh with jaggery) because it is the easiest. This is one mithai that doesn’t entail frying in oil and dunking in syrup. Because the very thought of doing that for 100 pieces of mithai is enough to send me running to the hills. All you have to do for shondesh is make fresh paneer from milk, knead it finely with jaggery and shape it. I had a black conch-shaped mould which my aunt sent me from Kolkata, so I decided to make conch-shaped gurer shondesh.
It took me 4 hours of work each for 2 consecutive days to make 120 pieces of shondesh. I overestimated the amount of milk, so I ended up making more than I originally planned, but I now had 20 pieces of extra shondesh that I could eat myself! My shondesh tasted good (not as good as my grandmom’s), though the shapes were amateurish. But this was my labor of love, I wasn’t deterred by the shapes.
Photo courtesy: Dreamtime.com
On Ashtami, I dressed up in my new saree, donned some kaajal, wore my mask and went from one house to the next distributing my home-made shondesh. Everyone was delighted. We remained socially distant, but a small box of my grandmom’s legacy bridged the distance. I would like to believe that my shondesh brought a sliver of joy to my friends in an otherwise quiet Durga puja. It did fill my heart in a way I had not known before. Maybe this is why my grandmother toiled so hard to make special mithais during the festive season. She couldn’t go out to celebrate, so she brought the celebration home to herself. Her fate and an oppressive tradition compelled her to remain socially distant, we have been forced to do so by a virus. In these strange times that we are caught in, I took a page out of my grandmother’s book–When times are difficult, design your own kind of celebration.
The End
Photo Courtesy: Pixabay
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