When the Goddess comes home

Durga Puja arrives every year as sure as the autumn itself. And yet, each time, it feels new. Never the same. Maybe it’s the shiuli flowers, scattered across the dew-wet grass like tiny stars. Their smell hits me. And suddenly I’m back in some half-forgotten corner of childhood. Or maybe it’s just that first sound of the conch shell in the morning. It announces the Goddess’s arrival, reminding us that the divine can live in our homes, our courtyards, our very breath. Divine ma steps into our homes.

When I was growing up, I never really looked at a calendar to know the season. The signs were all around me… the beat of the dhak floating in from a distance, the pandal slowly rising in the neighbourhood with its bamboo skeleton and bits of coloured cloth, the pile of new clothes waiting on the bed days before Puja. These were my markers of time. Even today, when the sky turns that sharp autumn blue and white clouds float like gentle sholapith decorations, I feel the pull of Puja in my bones.

Durga, in her regal dress with ten arms raised, has always felt to me like more than just a picture of victory. She is Shakti… strength, resistance, resilience. But also a reminder that women can hold both softness and power together. Our old texts put her high on a pedestal, as divine. And yet, in daily life, so many women still live quietly with pain. Every Puja this thought returns to me: how do we bow before the Goddess and still deny respect to her own daughters?

But, Durga Puja is also about joy in its simplest forms. The delight of biting into a syrupy ledikeni, the crunch of a freshly fried beguni, or that one extra cup of coffee after a long day at the housing puja premises, these are the rituals of love I seek, as much as I seek books, dresses, or the warm laughter of friends. Love, in its many small disguises, comes alive during these days.

I remember once, during my college years in Kolkata, we set out with friends on Saptami evening determined to see “just three pandals.” We lost count after fifteen. Feet aching, hair damp with sweat. We still laughed, clutching paper plates of chowmein at a roadside stall past midnight. At that moment, it wasn’t about grandeur or religion.It was the feeling of being together that felt almost divine.

Another year, far from home, I ended up on Ashtami morning in front of a simple Puja put together by a local community. The idol was small, the pandal a simple hall, but when the priest handed me a flower for pushpanjali, I felt the same lump in my throat as I did back home. The Mother, after all, comes wherever she is invoked with faith.

Maybe that’s why every year, when I catch the Goddess’s eyes… calm, fierce at once, I don’t know if I feel like a child or an adult. Probably both. All I want is that eternal mother who doesn’t turn anyone away, who gathers us in with our confusions, our longings. And when I stand there, before I even notice, the same words slip out of my lips, whispered as if to no one in particular: let people be happy, let people be at peace.

Durga Puja is never only a festival. It is memory, food, music, faith. It is the smell of incense and frying batter in the lanes, the heartbeat of the dhak carrying through the air. It teaches that life keeps slipping between the ordinary and the extraordinary. That love hides in gestures we almost miss. And even in a world of endless contradictions, the Mother goes on giving… strength, a little hope, and sometimes a sky so blue it hurts to look at it.

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