Tejaswinee Roychowdhury
Mum tells me that when she was little, she would sit with her knees to her chest all day, watching the God-makers at work.
Mana di adds a detail, “She wouldn’t even blink!”
Mum protests, “I was afraid I would miss out!”
They laugh.
I turn my gaze outside Mana di’s bedroom window to catch the God-makers again. A God-maker—an idol-maker, to be more specific, is called ‘kumor’ in Bengali. The ones I’m looking at do not reside in the photographer-loaded lanes of Kumortuli in a bustling Kolkata; they instead make Gangetic clay and hay into idols on Mana di’s father’s modest property in the quiet rural lanes of Kumorpara, right behind the lanes my mother grew up in.
In passing, I’ve seen idols-in-making before. In all of their forms across cultures, Gods and their stories are the biggest evidence of human imagination, spun over centuries to make sense of the universe and our place in it. Still, some people fight over which story is more “authentic”. While I am unable to solve that problem, I’ve documented the idol-makers or kumors of Kumorpara, hard at work on a mid-September afternoon before the Durga Pujo of 2022.
Tejaswinee Roychowdhury resides in West Bengal, India, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Law at the University of Calcutta. One of the founding editors of The Hooghly Review, she generally writes fiction inspired by the strange and mundane. Incarnations, her collection of micro and flash fiction, is part of the Mythic Picnic MPTSP V11: Collections. She is also editing The Bare Book Bones of Speculative Fiction, scheduled for 2026.
X @TejaswineeRC; IG @tejaswineeroychowdhury
