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Invocation to a Goddess

Ranabir Ray Choudhury

THE Festival of Lights is over. In fact, one more Festival of Lights has passed into History. This is the `big picture'. The `small picture' is the one we see reflected on the faces of children, whose faces light up at the display of fireworks, decked ou t as they are in their Deepavali (or Kali Puja) best.

True, in Calcutta at least, the implementation of laws to control noise pollution kept the sound of bursting crackers this year at a bearable level (in fact, some of us would rather have had more noise because a `quiet Kali Puja' is a contradiction in te rms, among other things), but there is something in the air -- which cannot quite be grasped -- which makes the celebration of a puja (of any sort) a very special event, irrespective of the external trappings which, in certain circumstances, are sought t o be controlled by Man himself.

At least, as some see it, age is not a factor which determines the intensity of the experience associated with the observance of a religious festival. Indeed, this experience is perhaps one of the best examples of what is intended to be conveyed by the p hrase plus ca change, plus c'est le meme chose (the more things change, the more they remain the same). Which is perhaps why this aging correspondent celebrated this particular Kali Puja with verve and excitement not a whit less than the time when he wou ld be happiest sunning and airing his horde of firecrackers the morning before the `explosive' evening to avoid the unbearable disappointment of crackers refusing to go off or evaporating in a wisp of smoke owing to damp. Thursday, in fact, was even more enjoyable than otherwise in his three-decades-old professional life because of the holiday declared by his newspaper, which is not always the case elsewhere.

But that was Thursday. Friday dawned dark and windy, in high contrast to the evening before when light, noise and merriment had ruled the universe. The morning's papers did not contain any warning of the anti-climax, so to speak, but obviously, a depress ion had formed over the Bay of Bengal, casting its chastening shadow over Calcutta. But such is human nature that, after the noisy celebrations of the evening before, the transition was easily made, and one found no problem whatever sitting out on the ba lcony and indulging in the usual routine of reading the morning's papers with the wet wind blowing in the face laced with drops of rain from an uncertain drizzle.

Since I have an interest is matters historical, I was specially attracted to the report on the Bhattacharya family, nine generations of which have been conducting prayers to the goddess at the famed Kali Temple at Kalighat in Calcutta, since the early ye ars of the 19th Century. The report held a lot of interest for me not merely because of its association with the Goddess Kali so close to Kali Puja but also because to appreciate the importance of the Kalighat temple is to get to understand why the subse quent development of the city of Calcutta on the east bank of the Hooghly has taken place along a north-south axis along the old Pilgrim Road, which linked Kalighat and beyond in the south to another equally well-known temple in the north.

To me, delving into Calcutta's past has always given me a lot of pleasure because, somehow, getting to know about the city's past has always enriched my own identity of being a citizen of the city. And it was thus that I was enjoying a very untypical Cal cutta morning for this time of the year when I heard the plaintive bleating of a goat at a butcher's shop nearby. The image of the Goddess Kali flashed through my mind as I rose to leave the balcony. If this wasn't a celebration of Life and Death, what i s, I thought.