And the memories

This Navratri we are not doing anything, a year we will not be participating in any auspicious occasion. But long before we heard about Navratri, we celebrated Basanti Puja in our very home.

And this time of the year Baba misses it for the most, last few years it was an annual trip to Kamakhya temple. And long before that the annual festivities at home.

And the four days meant a lot to the entire family. Ma Basanti is the keeper of our home, giver of our lives and protector in all seasons.

My mind is filled with memories of our home where the preparations would start to deck the Puja room, to get arrangements done for the Pujas and the aunties pouring in for helping Ma.

Arranging flowers and fruits, deciding the menu for the Bhog and attending to everyone who came home. We even had times when people who we did not invite turned up for the Puja.

And add to that our cousins, our games, having lunch together or saving some special Prasad for ourselves are all what will never come back. It's so so fresh in the memory.

Ma's role was wonderful, she did everything that was needed to. The quiet person that she was, she demonstrated such patience that only she and only she could handle these proceedings almost single handed. I sometimes would be angry at her for may be paying me a little less attention those days but now when I think about it, here was this lady who held on to family, culture without questioning.

I don't know how much of what she did we could give her back, surely never enough....but wherever she is today, and as they say the soul knows it all, may she know that she is missed.

Basanti Puja

The other Durga Puja! We celebrated it at home for 4 days and it was more than 4 days of festivity and get-together for us!

Memory is still fresh with the smell of those early mornings when filling water for the Puja activities was the first chore of the day. We did not have a water storage back then and whatever we could collect in vessels and buckets would be consumed for the Puja. Of course we had those cemented tanks where the rest of the water is stored even now in our Shillong home.

Then Ma would begin her normal day-to-day work followed by a bathe and then ensuring that the Puja rituals got taken care of! Same with Baba! Two of our very close family friends would be the first to come. Jethi and dida(aunt and granny) would be the first to come, do the preparations in time, rest a while, go to their homes and come back again. They did this year after year, extending that kind of support sometimes your kin fail to provide.

Then the aunts followed and other relatives followed. We would have mouth watering lunches, specially prepared, the main bhog prepared by Ma and the others by my Pishis and we even had cooks.

It would seem exaggerated if I say that we did not know the count of people who could come home to have the prasad because this far outnumbered the people who we invited. And there would be frequent complains from people if we happened to miss someone in our invite list. Over the years Ma and Baba thought of making the whole event  simple because of the difficulty in managing everything, difficulty in getting help, difficulty in getting priests etc but it was a blessing for us that every year we had the blessings to have all these people in our homes just for a simple prayer or a simple prasad.

And there are other stories too of some of our specially talented neighbors, who specialized in emptying an entire 'handi' of  Khichdi much above their capacity and walking up and down the Umpling roads for most of the night just to digest. And yes this is true!

Then we and the cousins use to have awesome time eating, feeding, playing and being happy with everyone around.

With passing time comes several constraints and we had finally to shift this Puja to Kamakhya temple where dad visits every year to witness the proceedings being done.

Memories remain...