Pujo is Here But Not for Everyone | Festive Edition

Sanskriti Roy

Durga Pujo in Kolkata commences way ahead of its time. Long queues outside trial rooms, every shop filled with crowds, dark lanes lightened with dim lights. The urban landscape is further transformed with roads full of large hoardings and amplified advertisements from shopping complexes. There are colours all around the city. Big budget Tollywood films mark their release dates.  Simultaneously, digital platforms benefit off of this cultural momentum as Instagram pages of prominent brands produce and release promotional reels marketing their Pujo collections, while social media influencers fabricate relatable content around the festival to sustain engagement in the months to come. And for small business owners across all markets of Kolkata, this period marks the culmination of anticipation, as the influx of customers brace the local commerce and contribute to the city’s dynamic festive economy.

The accumulated frustrations of a lower middle-class Bengali household find a temporary release during this period. For corporate employees in their late twenties and early thirties, the festival offers something close to a respite from the vexations of professional life as they return to the city for those five days of celebration. Families are reunited, clothing and gifts are exchanged, and friendships that sustained through the time and distance are renewed in person. This is followed by the bittersweet rush of annual reunions that underscores the temporality of such encounters. Then there’s the joy of eating meals together—home cooked delicacies, bhog, your favourite restaurants and eateries. In this suspension of hardships, the festival assumes a role not merely as a cultural ritual but as a momentary reordering of social and emotional life.

But Maa’s arrival is only partial, because Pujo is not for everyone. I realise this while passing through the city’s restless traffic on a Rapido. As the bike halts at a red signal, I see a man in his late sixties moving from one bike to another, his frail hands stretching out packets of incense sticks, his voice thin, pleading under the impatient honks, as most turn their faces away. A little ahead, a madman wanders bare and unashamed through the local market. And far away in the south of the city, there is an asylum holding its inmates captive from the beautiful autumn sky itself. These people have not stood beneath an open sky for ages. In the north, there are women waiting in dimly lit alleys, with their faces that carry layers of rouge and resignation, as their eyes flicker with the same desperate search as the incense seller’s—seeking buyers, seeking survival, under the same festive sky that refuses to shine on them.

And so, the city glitters in borrowed light, its pavements echoing laughter and lament. Pujo becomes a mirror—of abundance and absence, of hands clasped in prayer and hands stretched in want. The goddess arrives draped in gold, but perhaps fails to see those who worship not with flowers, not with customary rituals, but with the endurance of surviving a life that is believed to be a gift from her.

Sanskriti Roy is a writer based in Kolkata for whom writing feels inevitable. She takes a keen interest in films and enjoys weaving the personal with the universal in her work. Eager to publish more of her writings, she explores the intersections of lived experience and broader human themes.

IG: @_sanskriti_r_; Blog: Typing out Loud

Featured photo by Arunalo Sinha Roy (Pexels)