The 'Come September' feelin'

It's that time of the year again - the only time when I feel the potency of the season in my veins. I can't really explain why this happens. But even as August turns to September, I start dreaming of blue skies with billowy white clouds. And no, I'm not in Kolkata or its neighbourhood - but I still feel the ambience of "Durga pujas" all around me. I'm sure I can't explain this feeling to anyone but other Bengalis, who've lived in Bengal and felt the monsoonal season slowly change to a mellow autumn. "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;...that's Keats' Autumn - and mine too in many ways.
I remember lazy September afternoons on campus at Jadavpur University which slowly turned into light, hazy (Kolkata isn't misty, it's smoggy instead) evenings. It was puja vacations and most of my friends at the JU women's hostel had gone home - I would too in a few days. My father and mother - who were in Durgapur - had sent me a generous allowance to buy myself new clothes for the pujas. And I had treated myself to a shopping spree at Dakshinapan - Kolkata's only 'shopping mall' in those days. Actually it is a shopping complex with various government emporia under one roof - but for us in those days, it was the ultimate retail experience. And Dakshinapan has an outlet of the Gujarat emporium - Gurjari - which provided us with all our needs of ethnic chic apparel. I had just bought my new festival clothes but couldn't wait till the Pujas to start preening in them. I still remember my long red kurta - with elaborate embroidery and mirror work that I was wearing as I strolled around the huge JU lawns and the football field, waiting for at least one of my friends who lived nearby to turn up. Our on-campus 'subaltern' cafes, which were actually dingy tea-stalls were all shut for the vacations. There was a sense of desolation all around which perhaps was symbolic of the end of our heady campus life in a few months from then.

Going back to Durga Puja - it's that time of the year when the farmlands outside Bengal's city limits are overflowing with the yearly rice crop - ready for harvesting. So when you take a train ride from say Kolkata to Rabindranath Tagore's Santiniketan - your eyes can feast on the green fields and the blue skies, truly an artist's palatte. At many places the landscape is carpeted with the almost symbolic 'Kash Phul' - silky white blossoms on tall green stems growing amidst the grass which have been immmortalized by Satyajit Ray visually in his Panther Panchali, the first of the Apu Trilogy. Besides Tagore's own poetry that captures the beauty of the season, a novel called Nilkantha Pakhir Khonje in Bengali- set in Bangladesh before the partition of India also epitomises for me the understated and nostalgic beauty of Autumn in Bengal.
This is a season that doesn't have the exuberance of spring and the underlying tone is one of sadness and the onset of winter. Most Bengalis are part of revelries for the week-long Durga Puja celebrations - but Goddess Durga whose advent we are celebrating will soon be going back to the home of her husband leaving her parents behind in tears - that's the significance that the Pujas have mythologically. The season captures that feeling of loss and also brings with it a coolness all around with occasional light winds and showers - one can sense that winter is on the way, just waiting around the few coming weeks. But where I am now in Delhi, there's no such cooling down, it's still very warm, muggy and uncomfortable. But yet my senses tell me that things are about to change soon.
My birthday is usually close to the celebrations for Goddess Durga and my aunt, parents and grand-parents named me after her - so perhaps it's a kind of bond that I have with the Mother Goddess. My father, too, was born in September and so this year, the intensity of my memories is almost all engulfing. I have always felt that I looked like my dad and did quite a lot of things like him because we shared the month of our birth. Now I feel the pain of separation and a bond with him that runs far deeper than my life and his death...