The Devi is made of pure anger and maybe some token tough love. She has a lion. I have a rusty car and an old dog. She has 10 hands and 4 kids. I have two hands and one human child and still stretched thin. I mostly have stress-related anger (and a lot of it). Helplessness related emotions. We have our own demons.
She gets to go home after her battles. I don’t.
She’s had reincarnations through centuries. I get to be everyone of the Mukherjee clan today- Provider to Protagonist to Protégé, Preparer to Priest, Scholar to Scoundrel. This is a year of change and deliberation. A year of setting transient traditions to stone, to brass, to glass. This year is a 50th in that house, a 4th in mine.
So, first I play my (kid) self and my aunt and gingerly make mental notes for flowers and fasting. I prep the brass vessels, the mustard seeds, the rice, the unknowns. Then I play my mom and cut the fruits and dress the sweets. Small plates for a small goddess. Small appetite for a small priestess with the smallest list of wants.
Then I play my grandmother and do everything else around the house. Clean and feed the dog, do the needful. Make the calls and check on people. Be the human, in the celebration of the divine.
I play hymns on Spotify, paint my toenails. She used to say it’s like a date with God and you act like it. I take a shower. I put on a crochet top my mother made me a billion moons ago when I was leaving for college some twenty pounds lighter and I drape my grandmother’s shari on my gym shorts, because how else could I tie all three generations together in a hug, through time and space, through myth and myrrh?
Then I played the most revered role- my grandfather and sit to read the chants I’m scared to touch. Shame rolls over me, like sweat beads and resentment too, a little self loathing, judgment, stray thoughts pass like clouds. “Am I doing this right?” “Am I saying this right?” “So many rules, so little space.“ “What does this all mean?”… So much judgment, memories of a girlhood shrouded in a culture of admonishment. So much that I forgot the subculture of love that was at home.
An hour of chants later, I lie on the floor remembering that Dada did just this. His back must have hurt too.
At some point in all of this, her voice has become my driving force and I have learned to unearth myself.
A prosad to Brownie, a call to a friend, an errand and a meal later I did what I always did with my proxy parent- Ai and I used to nap in the middle bedroom, sharis be damned.
So, midday rolled to afternoon and junk food beckoned the Saptami night.
There are no friends tonight, no chaos and laughter and no loud music and no bright lights… No Maddox, where everyone knows me. But also not the coziness of my own living room where strangers across cultures bond over the love of sugar, community and travel and all things strange. No one is strumming their ukelele, no teenager breaking into song, I’m not meeting anyone’s new bandmate, new kid, new dog this year. We’re not finding common connections and getting elated about small celebrations, my wandering eyes don’t find my girlhood crushes across the park, or childhood friends across the room today. it’s hard to not feel a little lonely.
There’s no family in the morning, no one to make me tea.
But my home smells of chandan; Birendra Krishna Bhadra sings Jago, there’s gurer sandesh in the fridge and goat waiting to be cooked and there’s a rebel grandmother that lives on in me.
No one was going to take this away from me.
No probashi low jokes.
No curious high brows.
No whitewashing my tradition.
No curve-fitting my story to fit the brown agenda.
No, not even eclipsing my motherhood by the mothers I hold close. Today my son and I celebrate. And tomorrow we do it again. And again and again until she goes back.
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