Nobody in Bengal needs a calendar to know that the Puja is close. The monsoon thins out, the sky turns a hard, clean blue with heaps of white cloud, and the light changes. This is sharat, early autumn, and the Puja is so tied to it that one of its names is Sharadotsav, the autumn festival. The signs arrive one by one, and most Bengalis could list them in their sleep.
Kash in the fields
Kash is a tall wild grass that grows along riverbanks, field edges and railway embankments. In autumn it puts up feathery white plumes, and whole stretches of countryside turn silver when the wind moves through them. Seen from a train window, a field of kash is as clear a sign of the coming Puja as any poster.
It has a famous place in Bengali memory. In Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, released in 1955, the children Apu and Durga run through a field of kash to see a train for the first time, the plumes rising around them taller than their heads. Generations of viewers cannot see kash without thinking of that scene.
Shiuli at dawn
Shiuli, the night-flowering jasmine, is the other flower of the season. Its small white blossoms, each with a bright orange tube, open after dark and fall before sunrise, so in the early morning the ground under the tree is covered in them. Children collect them in baskets, and they are offered to the goddess. The orange part of the flower was once used to dye silk, and the shiuli is the state flower of West Bengal.
Its botanical name, Nyctanthes arbor-tristis, means the sad tree of the night, because the flowers seem to weep to the ground each morning. Bengalis tend to hear something happier in the scent: the Puja is coming.
The puja annual
Every autumn Bengali publishers bring out special editions of their magazines, the pujabarshiki or sharadiya issues. These are thick volumes, often hundreds of pages, full of new novels, short stories, poems and comics, and for many families they are as much a part of the holidays as new clothes. There are annuals for adults, and children wait for the puja issues of magazines such as Anandamela and Shuktara.
A good deal of modern Bengali writing first appeared in these issues. Several of Satyajit Ray’s Feluda detective stories, for example, were first published in puja annuals before they came out as books, and reading the new Feluda over the holidays was for decades a ritual of its own.
New clothes for every day
For weeks before the Puja the markets are packed. Gariahat in the south, Hatibagan in the north and New Market in the centre fill with shoppers buying notun jama, new clothes, and many families buy a fresh outfit for each of the main days. Tailors work late into the night to finish orders in time, and the streets around the big markets are as crowded in the evenings as the pandals will be a few weeks later.
Songs of the homecoming
In Bengal the goddess comes home as a daughter. In the agamani songs of autumn, Uma, married to Shiva and living far away on Mount Kailash, returns to her parents’ house in the Himalaya for a few days, and her mother Menaka waits for her. The bijoya songs that follow the Puja are about her leaving again. Shakta poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, among them Kamalakanta Bhattacharya, wrote many of them, and they are still sung.
Then comes Mahalaya, the radio plays before dawn, and the countdown is down to days.