Nine Days of Worship and a Never Ending War (against Patriarchy)

The fainting heat brings with it the scent of fall and October falls largely at the juncture of several goodies. For many of us, it's a nostalgic reminder of mornings wafted in armour of camphor, caramelised in a ceremony of light and melody of mum’s voice. A morrow bulged with some calm and sweet sound of aarti bells. The call to home shrieks the loudest every time you hear the strange sound of flutes coming from a distance, almost alarming a trance of whether it's true or just in your head. Durga Puja embodies a huge chunk of my childhood and a good part of teenage years. It is strange as I would hardly consider myself religious.

Truth be told, I am not particularly sure if god exists, but I have witnessed hints of divinity in the temples of my mother’s face, on her impeccable ability to look for joy in an ocean of sorrow. In retrospect, those nine days was just a little child admiring her goddess of a mother vacillate through work, chores and a full fledged Pujo with a perpetual smile plastered across both chins. We all have such memories, a particular festival and definitely a female figure in our lives who is laced in awe and inspiration. However, as the nine days passed, the lights came down, the sound of the bell was naturally replaced with whistles of a pressure cooker, and my mother was demoted from goddess to an earthly being (not for me, for me she will forever be a God). This is the exact contradiction that we see at play in the larger picture of Pujo, where we indulge in a grandeur of celebration to welcome Goddess Durga and immerse our values in the same water where we immerse the idols.

**Some Protests, Some Partakes**

14 years. Highlight that figure in your head. It's been 14 years since the heinous case of Nirbhaya unfolded on the streets of Delhi. Those are the exact number of years Lord Rama was in exile, upon whose end he was garlanded and crowned. And what we weaklings got is a Netflix series displaying the efficiency of Delhi Police. One of us built an epic out of patience and penance. The other built prestige television out of a crime we never actually solved the way the credits suggested.

I don't say this to be cruel to the show, it was well made. But there's something almost farcical about a city watching its own worst night turned into award bait while the women who still walk that same stretch of road after dark haven't gotten a single extra streetlight for the trouble. We love our stories about justice far more than the inconvenient, unglamorous work of actually delivering it.

**Nine Nights for a Goddess, None for the Rest of Us**

And this year, almost on cue, as if the universe were daring me to write this piece, SFI activists have been out protesting near the Delhi Secretariat, demanding action on rape cases and improved women's safety, at the exact same time the city is decorating itself for Durga. You could not script a crueler coincidence if you tried. Even CR Park, Delhi's beating Bengali heart, has gone and themed its celebrations around women's rights and sustainability this year, eco-friendly idols, feminist messaging painted across the very structures built to house the goddess. Which, credit where it's due, is a lovely gesture. But here's the argument underneath the gesture, and it's not a subtle one. We spend nine nights bowing to a ten-armed goddess who rode in on a lion and slew a demon nobody else could touch, and then we spend the other three hundred and fifty six days of the year failing, spectacularly, routinely, to protect the women who actually have to walk home from that same pandal at eleven at night. One corner of Delhi garlands a goddess with eighteen arms and an appetite for demon blood. Another corner, a stone's throw away, holds up placards because the women who live here, with their far fewer arms and far more vulnerabilities, cannot make that short walk home without calculating risk the whole way. The contrast basically writes itself, which is exactly the problem. We've had an entire mythology handing us the blueprint for righteous feminine fury for centuries, and somehow we still haven't built a single street that lets an ordinary woman borrow even a fraction of it after dark. We are extremely good at symbolism. We are comparatively terrible at substance.

**The Smoke We Breathe Instead of the Fire We Need**

As if the city hadn't set up enough contradictions for one October, Delhi's air has joined the drama too. GRAP has been tightened, half the workforce told to work from home, schools gone hybrid, the seasonal ritual of hazardous air returning right on schedule, like a relative who always knows when the good food is being served. So here we are, lighting incense for Durga while choking on smoke no amount of camphor can romanticise. We've normalised toxic air the same way we've normalised the discomfort of women after dark, a seasonal inconvenience instead of a structural failure someone should be held accountable for.

It's almost poetic, in the most depressing way possible, that a city capable of building a ten day spectacle of devotion, intricate idols, elaborate lighting, logistics most corporations would struggle to pull off, cannot muster the same energy toward fixing its air or its streets. We can engineer wonder. We apparently cannot engineer basic safety.

**What We Immerse When We Immerse the Idol**

Here's what nobody tells you about Bisarjan. The ritual isn't really about the goddess leaving. It's about us symbolically letting go of whatever she represented for those nine days, strength, protection, the fierce, undiluted feminine rage that slew a demon nobody else could touch. And every year, like clockwork, we dunk all of that into the river along with the clay and the straw and the garlands, and we go right back to a city where that same fierce feminine rage gets called hysteria, where women reporting assault get asked what they were wearing, where the men who should be doing the protecting are too busy organising the next big religious spectacle to notice the irony standing right in front of them.

My mother was never garlanded for the nine days she spent holding an entire household together with nothing but sheer will and a stubborn, unglamorous kind of grace. Nobody built her a pandal. Nobody played a flute for her the way the universe apparently plays one for me every time autumn rolls around, calling me home to a festival that worships an idea of womanhood it refuses to actually protect once the lights come down.

So maybe the real Puja, the one that should matter more than the ten day performance, is the quieter, everyday kind. The kind that doesn't need a loudspeaker or a themed pandal to prove its point. The kind where a woman gets to walk home at whatever hour she pleases, breathe air that doesn't actively work against her lungs, and exist without having to first prove she deserves safety. Until that Puja gets celebrated with the same grandeur we reserve for Durga's nine nights, I suppose we'll just keep immersing idols and calling it devotion, while the actual war, the never ending one, carries quietly on in the background, unwitnessed, unresolved, and entirely too familiar.