Poila Baisakh is doing fine

Journeying across the country in search of livelihood, you take pleasure in the ability to integrate, assimilate. After a few years in Delhi, I thought I did quite well with my spoken Hindi, only to realise later the shopkeepers smiled not because they were impressed but because they were amused. So, in Bangalore I thought better not to murder Kannada but to get by with banking on most people having a bit of English.

Although over time I have realised that linguistic divides are overrated, and it has become equally clear that festivals with strong local roots are difficult to fully embrace. The result is that in Delhi Baisakhi came and went without my noticing it overmuch and Ugadi in Bangalore was more of a holiday on the calendar than anything else.

So when I approached Poila Baisakh, the Bengali new year, in Kolkata again after over a quarter century, I did it with a bit of curiosity. Will I be an outsider here too, because of unfamiliarity with current mores bred by my long absence? Or will I get to discover what roots mean, no matter how neglected and untended?

"One India" loomed large when in the run-up to the day newspaper supplements kept splashing all manner of bumper sales. How much of a losing battle those who were opposing FDI in retail were fighting, I mused with satisfaction. It is bargain hunting in organised retail chains that is increasingly keeping us together as a nation, I thought with relish.

But as the day approached, something peculiarly local also emerged in the same newspaper supplements. Leading restaurants known for their Bengali cuisine began to unveil special menus that were not just fit for kings but also did not miss out on what mother and grandmother served up best. Wife and I studied them endlessly and finally decided it was greater fun conjuring up visions of feasts in the mind rather than actually landing up and subjecting aging constitutions to the risk of excesses.

That time had not stood still became clear from what the club had lined up. There would be an international food festival over two days with an Indipop and rock band in attendance. But on the big day itself, food and music would both be quintessentially local. While the menu for the special dinner was a sensible truncated version of what the speciality restaurants were flaunting, the music promised was distinctive. In keeping with the revival cemented by the songs in the hit film Moner Manush, the evening would be adorned by the folk wisdom and simple melodies of Baul songs.

The day itself passed with paying obligatory visits to elderly relatives. Since we no longer live on a main road, as we used to when we were children, I cannot say if businessmen in cars and taxis still took to the Kalighat temple red-covered account books for the new year to be blessed. But one look at the picture on the front page of the paper the next day of the massive crowds at the Dakshineswar temple, there to ensure that the new year went well, said that some of the nicer traditions lived.  

In the evening, though, when we set out for the club, I could not help but remember how as children we looked forward to visiting with our father a couple of the shops where he was best known and there be greeted with boxes of sweets. On this one day in the year, the shopkeepers gave something back to their customers who had stood by them for the whole year.

When the day ended, I realised that, as with all living traditions, this one had morphed even while surviving. But there was one regret. Climate change had deprived us of a hallmark of this time of the year: the classical kalboisakhi, nor'wester with thunder, lightning and rain, driven by gusty winds. There were none so far this summer.

Then, two days later, nature more than made up. A massive nor'wester hit the city with winds in a five-minute period rising up to 116 km an hour, faster than the peak force of the cyclone Aila, which had devastated West Bengal and Bangladesh over a decade ago, uprooting hundreds of trees in Kolkata alone. It caught us when we were in the car on a railway overbridge. I stopped driving and parked by the side as the wind buffeted the car, shaking it like a toy, and rain lashed the windscreen so hard you could not see a thing. There was an incomparable beauty in the raw fury of nature that was perhaps telling us with a vengeance that it still remained king.

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