We’ve been up all night, trying to ignore the thud thud thud of wetted newspaper balls ricocheting off our Over the Rhine (OTR) windows in Cincinnati. We have a whole bank of windows and we let in the light even when it is inconvenient. To feed our idiosyncrasy, we leave the shades up all night. This is FOMO in real time, giving us unobstructed views of our newly-discovered cityscape–where people come and go at all hours of the day and night. We have committed to living in our sun-drenched OTR apartment for half a year in between the sale of our Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired home in pastoral Indian Hill and the remodeling of our condo in urban East Walnut Hills. But this is getting far ahead of our story.
I want to say that everything is connected, sometimes, willy nilly. Even when things don’t seem to add up, in some faraway place and time, they do, shazaam, and one is left wondering how one might have missed the connectors in the first place.
So, just past Taft Brewery on the way to the FC Cincinnati football stadium, we see two young men in a black, 4-door sedan, in their early 30s, Caucasian, wearing baseball hats, one with scruffy facial hair and the other clean shaven, dark sweatshirts and khakis. They are dressed alike not unlike typical Ohio kids of a certain socioeconomic strata. Ohio parents tend to dress their Ohio kids alike when they are growing up. So when the District 1 police shows up six hours later, the identifiers are convenient beyond reason, a pass given to us without the asking. We have observed these two since 12.30 a.m. and we have begun to construct a narrative of who they are. They are baseball-bat wielding angry young men who hide their firearms under their sweats? Or ax murderers avenging past vendettas? After all, they’ve been watching us through our open window and have begun to build their own case history of who we may be. We live out our story all night long, looking through tiny portholes in the slats of the window shades, now pulled down for partial anonymity.
But fast backward and it is just after midnight. We are padding around like swaddled babies in our billowy jammies. We are just back from the Cincinnati Durga Puja, a celebration of the goddess force that draws a thousand people from all over the Tri-State area of Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. Returning past midnight in Over the Rhine is a no-no, and it doesn’t help that I look like a lit-up, Dan Flavin neon sign in my richly embroidered teal Benarasi silk sari. I am wearing gold and filigreed jewelry called kundan which is worn particularly during auspicious celebrations.
Somewhere, through an open window we hear a raspy woman’s voice breaking the night quiet, “Sir, will you stop ringing my bell. I am not expecting anyone at this hour.” The whole experience is surreal—the goddess, midnight in the OTR, two young men in a black sedan, how does the calculus tally.
This is when we decide that’s its safest to go to bed. In a few hours, we must rise for our journey to New York and London and New Delhi and Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). This is the season of Dussehra and Durga Puja and it is the Super Bowl of all Indian festivals. Dussehra is to Indians and Hindus what Christmas and Eid-al-Fitr and Hanukkah are to the monotheistic religions of the world. We are traveling to our family home in Kolkata to witness the festivities and not having seen it for many decades, our excitement is close to electric.
So when the alarm goes off at 6.30 a.m. and our lights switch on, we smile. But the familiar refrain of thud thud thud is disquieting. This time, the taillights of the black car are on. A couple of honks and then an yell in acknowledgment of our burning light: “For God’s sake, will you let us in?” And this is when the District 1 Police is summoned. Suspense follows, hearts palpitate, finally, the results come beeping in: license plate-check, license numbers–check, storyline–check. The youngish police officer tells us that we can let these fools into the house if we wish. These are in fact salt-of-the-earth Canadians driving into Cincinnati for the Sunday afternoon Bengals-Seahawks football game. They are weekend lodgers in # 201 next door. In their excitement to hit town the night before, they broke their key in half and, of course, it is only reasonable to question why they would carry their phones with them when they could very easily leave them for safekeeping in their AirBnB rental.
We let them in the front door and the story should have ended there…but what I want to say is that the foolish wanderings of two young men about town was hugely inconvenient for me. Singlehandedly, they made me forget my tidy bag of jewelry — my favorite earrings, my pearls, my gold bangles. Thus, I missed every future opportunity to look glamorous during the Pujas in Kolkata. It was my turn to shower inglorious blame on these guys for all the inconvenience that they caused me.
Dussehra and Durga Puja were observed in late October 2023. This is when Durga, the consort of Shiva, comes down to earth on her annual visit, to cleanse the world of all its evils. This she does symbolically by overwhelming the demon buffalo Mahishasura. Durga, along with her four children, reminds us of the daily goodness that surrounds us. Her four children are a constant presence in the lives of all Hindus: Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, removes all obstacles in our path; Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, showers us with emotional, material and intellectual riches; Saraswati, the holder of all knowledge and wisdom, grants us understanding; and Kartika, the god who represents the balance of beauty in body and soul, keeps us whole. Every year, Durga reminds us that goodness conquers evil and this simple faith sustains us through the year.
Since 2021, UNESCO has named Kolkata and its season of Durga Puja as a World Heritage Site. As a result, the Pujas have exploded in artistic ingenuity and brilliance.
It is almost impossible to recognize our daily sources of abundance when war rages in the Middle East and lays bare the lives of thousands of innocents. Human beings suffer viciously all over the world. But in all of this, I am given the quiet reminder that it is risky business to confront the unknown. It goes against our grain to let in strangers in the dark. But if we are brave enough to do so, our ‘enemies’ can become new friends with a history. Sometimes, this understanding is given to us on our own doorstep. And it is handed to us on a platter within our very grasp.
