Coming home for Puja (illustrative)

The ticket is booked weeks in advance, and the suitcase is packed the night before, with a shawl folded on top and a box of sweets wrapped in newspaper beside it. For most of the year the trip home is an idea. In the last week of September it becomes a list: the train times, the bag of gifts for the cousins, the question of whether the car will be at the station or whether it is quicker to take the auto.

The train is slow in the way that only overnight trains are slow. The windows fog, the fields go by in the dark, and somewhere after midnight the call to the family group chat goes quiet because everyone is asleep. Someone in the next berth is also going home for the festival. You can tell from the bags, and from the way they keep checking their phone for a message that will say the house is ready.

Coming home for Puja is not one visit. It is a set of small returns. The lane outside the house looks narrower than it did. The room you grew up in has been turned into a storeroom for steel trunks, but a single shelf has been kept clear for your things, and it is dusted every morning. Your mother has already decided what you will eat on the first afternoon, and it is the dish you stopped asking for when you were twelve.

The pandals open in the evenings, and the family walks out together for the first night, slowly, because the lanes are full and the older relatives need the arm to lean on. There is an argument about which pandal to visit first and a second argument about whether to take a photograph of the idol or simply look. Nobody wins, and everybody ends up in the same queue.

The hardest part of the visit is the leaving. The bijoya embraces on the last morning are quick and awkward, and the sweets are handed over in boxes that are too heavy to carry on the train. At the station, the parents stand at the gate until the carriage is out of sight. The table at home will be laid again next year, and the year after, for whoever is able to come.