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Chaturthi 2025 pt 1

#devipaksha diaries #pujo ashchheeee #chaturthi 2025 #pujo 2025

Age is slowly fading into me as childhood draws out. It is autumn now and the dragonflies dance with euphoria in the morning air. I gaze at the scattered bushes of kaash springing up in and around the suburban area as I pass the rush-hour traffic. I’m returning home – a place I know not the whereabouts of.

It is autumn and the start of the devipaksha. Within minutes, houses across neighbourhoods would reverberate with the hymns of Mahishasuramardini. For that fleeting 1.5 hours, autumn floats over the mortal surface, placid like a sleeping child. Whatever human’s idea of time is comprised of, these minutes span the autumn of 12 years ago and all those before it. The autumn of today is restless, derailed, sordid. But it’s not the autumn that has changed. It’s not the season we lose. In all the autumn that hardly slept, I’ve gradually lost pieces of myself in the souls I mistook to be made up of flesh.

On Mahalayas, I remember to wake up at 4 o’clock and turn on the radio. I want to believe I have only woken up to Supreeti Ghosh’s voice in “bajlo tomar amar benu” and fallen back into the blissful sleep that is only found when one is young. The sound of agomoni travels from far afar, like the resonating conch, carrying announcements of some divine proceedings. The sound voyages across dreams and lulls me back in its warmth. Grandpa has turned the radio on, so I will not have to wake up for it. In some memory, his bed lies empty; I try to imagine him lying there, slowly waking up with the sun. it remains empty, but I can remember his damp soft smell of his aura. This time, I turn the radio on and ask him to go back to sleep.

The Mahalaya is the only morning in a year I sleep in perfect stillness.

With every arrival of the Goddess, I think of ghosts. Such great fallacy it is to call them dead entities. With our every attempt to remember them, they become more living than us. My ghosts stay on as transcendent memories of people, with and without flesh and bones, who still carry pieces of capillaries of my heart with them. In autumns, we sing with the ghosts in unison. Year long, grandpa sits with us each night for dinner and check up on me on my all-nighters. Only now I say, “Sleep well, Ta”. Let this be my tarpan to you.

#my writing #frankie's chaotic blurry blr #devipaksha diaries #mahalaya #on memory #childhood nostalgia