Sambeet Dash
I starkly remember a homeowner chasing us urchins away after we stealthily managed to jump into his front yard to steal his flowers. In the haste, his LUNGI (a piece of loincloth worn by males which can conveniently removed for multiple purposes) slipped off his waist. In the commotion that followed he spent the next few seconds lifting the LUNGI from the ground and tying it back, giving us precious enough time to jump off the walls and flee.
Back home, time to decorate the foot-long statue made out of clay and pedestaled on a chair. We decorated the strings tied to the hands of the chair extended to the corner of the room with triangles of color papers, known NAALI, NELI KAGAJA with the help of glue made from ATTA (flour).
After a quick shower, it was time to wear a pair of new dresses and wait for the ordeal of pushpanjali (offering of flowers) to be over before eating the BHOGA (or Prasadam) to quench our already starving stomachs. An integral part of it would be the Laddoos of Rashi (TIL) made by my grandmother. My father did the Puja in our house, chanting the SLOKA (hymns) in praise of Goddess Saraswati.
Post noon, it was time to go to BJB College near our house and sample the BHOGA served by different Departments – each hosting their own Puja, eager to outsmart the other. It was mostly a mixture of sweetened CHUDA (parched rice) with fruits and if luckier dosage of lumpy, oil-soaked BUNDI along with it. It was enough to fill our stomach till the evening when we would venture out in bicycles to view Ganesh Pandals.
Those days Bhubaneswar was a sleepy township with hardly any traffic. The arteries of the roads were not clogged yet, so no bypass was needed. It was perfectly safe for us to bike our way from BJB flats to Saheed Nagar amidst funnel-shaped loudspeakers from pandals blaring out the contemporary hits. One of them was “MEIN HOON DON” from the Amitabh’s hit movie Don. Another one I can’t forget was this Akshaya Mohanty’s Odia number,
“LANDA MUNDIA DIVER
GADIKU TIKE THIA KAR
GADI JIBA PHULBANI
SANGARE ACHHANTI GHARANI
GHARANI MUNDARE KHIA
UKUNI KARANTI BASA”.
Roughly transliterated though the fun can be lost in translation…
” O bald-headed driver
Stop your vehicle for better,
Phulbani is the destination
My better half is with me in person,
Bob tied pigtail has my wife
It is filled with lice”…
and so on.
There were many outstanding pandals but the one by USHALA CLUB at Master Canteen, Unit 3 stood taller (literally too) than the rest. After a long tiring meandering around the city, it was time to munch some PURI, ALOO DUM (curry) and sweets before hitting the bed. Gone are those days. ZINDAGI NA MILEGA DOBARAA (That Life won’t come again).
Sambeet Dash is an Odia technocrat living in Georgia ,US