Guest Contributor: Mama

Chris is in Malaysia this week for work: the 10th grade field trip this year is a week-long trip to Tioman Island, and Chris was invited to be a chaperone. Tough job. Not to be outdone, Kaya and I had our own adventure, a week with my parents and other relatives in Kolkata, India. It was a pretty amazing trip, so I thought I would share a few photos.

The trip was planned by my dad, who wanted the whole family to be in India during Durga Puja, the Hindu celebration of the goddess Durga. It is celebrated by Hindus around the world, but just as Rio de Janeiro is the place to be for Carnaval, Kolkata is the place to be for Durga Puja festivities. It is the biggest event of the year. The main attraction is the pandals, which are temporary structures that are built to house the statues of Durga and her family members, and in which the religious ceremonies take place. The main part of the festival lasts only five days, so one might think that the pandals would be very basic and reflect the temporary nature of their purpose. One would be wrong. Some may be pretty basic, but many of the pandals are bigger than peoples' homes. Many are multiple stories tall. Many are breathtakingly beautiful, artistic, and meticulously detailed, having taken nearly a year to plan and weeks or months to build. All of this for just a few days, after which they are dismantled and the planning begins for an entirely new and different pandal.

It's really impossible to describe the spectacle of Kolkata during Durga Puja -- despite hearing my father talk about it, I never imagined anything like what I saw -- but here are a few pictures. There are literally thousands of pandals in the city, and we saw just a few.

A pandal, easily four or five stories tall and covered top to bottom in tiny bits of glass. This was on the first of the five main Puja days, so we were told this crowd was "small." Note also the lights on the apartment buildings. The whole city was lit up like this, just for Puja.



Another pandal, huge and decorated with really fantastic paintings, with drummers walking around it. Everywhere we went in the city, there were drummers and music, starting at dawn and lasting well into the night. The drums were the soundtrack to our trip.


The statues of Durga and her family inside another pandal, attended by a priest (in orange). The statues are built from clay and then decorated, all by hand (again, only for five days!).

At the end of the five days, the statues of Durga are taken to the river, where they are immersed in the water so that she and her children can symbolically travel to reunite with her husband, Shiva. We went to the river to see the immersions, which was another incredible sight. There were trucks arriving constantly with statues from all over the city, and groups of people who had walked alongside the trucks, singing and dancing along the way, to bid Durga farewell.


The top photo is of trucks lined up (in the background) with statues waiting to be unloaded, and the bottom is of men carrying Durga down the riverbank.

Kaya was completely fascinated by Durga and can now identify her and name her children (Ganesh, Lakshmi, Saraswati, and Karthik), along with their attendant animals and the demon that Durga is usually depicted killing with a spear. Surely this knowledge will prove useful at some point.

Aside from all of that, we had a wonderful time with our family, and Kaya did really well. There will almost definitely be more trips to India in our future!