aschhe bochhor abar hobe....

you know how people talk about their earliest memories...?i was trying to remember mine today,and i realized that almost all of them are inextricably linked with saraswati pujo....they don't form a coherent picture,just a few disjointed,unconnected bits and pieces which resurface from the abyss of forgetfulness...like that night in late january,my entire family(which amounts to close to 30 people)crammed at the back of a lorry,along with our saraswati thakur,towering majestically above half a dozen other diminutive idols(belonging to friends)the lorry thundering towards babughat,everyone screaming their respective heads off,and poor little three yr old me,sobbing my heart out on baba's lap because i was exiled to the front of the lorry by ma who thought i'd catch a cold in the open!...cut to another year(or was it the same one?)2 o clock at night,our drawing room full of people,thakur (the cook,not the goddess) bringing in cups of tea at regular intervals,the room reeking of homemade glue(flour boiled in water),everyone frantically cutting out patterns out of silver paper because the decorations were still incomplete and the pujo was in less than 5 hours,.....
i still live in that same eccentric joint family,saraswati pujo is still a huge affair,there is the same madness,pandemonium and reigning chaos,but every year i feel something slipping away...my jethus are mostly on the wrong side of 60,most of my cousins have shifted base to other metropolises..other countries even,so have my father's friends and their children,me and my battalion of friends still manage to infuse life in the pujo with our 'changramo'......dunno what will become of it after us...i mean maybe what was unimaginable to us ...9 no. bari without saraswati pujo...is slowly looming up as an inevitability.