There were pandals, goddesses, Durga’s idols, fair, food stalls, dance shows, literary readings, all running through this entirety of nine days. Nine days of festivities bookended by the final day marking the victory of light over darkness.īengali tradition celebrated it a bit more grandiosely. With the exit of summer season, to mark the onset of a pleasant spring season, we would celebrate the Hindu festival of Durga Puja. Even as a kid I could sense a remove in their existence, a kind of an anomaly in the otherwise Hindi-speaking heartland. As a kid, I spent at least two weeks of Durga Puja every year in the company of my parents’ Bengali friends. Apart from the shared colonial past, these two parts of India have also shared a thick Bengali population. I was my parents’ second born in the north Indian town of Kanpur (erstwhile Cawnpore). My partner M was born and brought up in Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta) an only child.
![learn bengali learn bengali](https://www.languageshome.com/Tamil-Bengali.gif)
![learn bengali learn bengali](https://cdn.exoticindia.com/images/products/original/books-2016/nae137h.jpg)
![learn bengali learn bengali](https://www.indovacations.net/english/images/bengalipic1.gif)
I, on the other hand, had barely started picking up the language after I moved in with my partner in mid-2018. In my head, I kept comparing myself to the wizard of words, Jhumpa Lahiri, and how she had legitimized her love affair with Italian, writing an entire book in it, giving interviews, going out in the world with so much gravitas about her love for the new tongue. BEFORE BEING EVEN five percent confident in uttering bare Bengali words, I thought they would come out too crude, funny, even gauche from my unpracticed mouth.