Navarathri Reminiscences

by The Fly@ Sulekha.com

Navarathri, one more fond memory of childhood, relegated to drunken reminiscences. And while I ranted about it, one of my friends was snoring, another was listening impatiently, waiting to tell me what he remembered about one of those Navratri (that's North Indian!) nights in Ahmedabad, when he managed to feel up a girl for the first time ever… expectedly, he forgot her name too, which he complained was due to “brain cells killed by alcohol…” I always thought that he was a bad listener -- you tell him a story and he would come up with something similar that had happened in his life, but I am sure some of them are made up or must have happened to a friend. This I found out when I caught him red-handed stealing one of my stories and narrating it vividly. When confronted, he said with a sheepish grin, “Just entertaining, yaar… what's the harm in it?” True, I do that too, I mean stealing once in a while... what's the harm? One must appreciate the sincerity, the vividness, and the extempore exaggerations we sometimes come up with. No wonder Ramayana has so many versions!

Well, I digress. My reminiscences are about the Navarathri of my childhood, when I lived in a tiny Brahmin hamlet in the beautiful hinterland of Tamil Nadu on the banks of the Cauvery river. Ours was a nice little village with parallel streets split by an irrigation canal, which was the source of a great many adventure back then. There were huge mango and coconut trees on both the sides of the canal. The streets had the familiar dry patches of brown-green color with the pleasant odor of cow dung (?), decorated with kolams (rangoli) in front of every house.

At Navarathri came the Kolu, or the festival decorations. Kolu is basically a display of clay idols of various gods in a staircase-like arrangement. Kolu is considered to be very auspicious if the display has nine steps, signifying the nine days (or nights?) of Navarathri. But it does not matter even if it is less. Our house had a comprehensive 9-step Kolu, which was promptly assembled on the day before Navarathri and covered with a white cloth. We had a great many idols: the whole Vishnu avatar set with idols of all the ten avatars, the Ramayana set with Rama, Seetha and the rest of the crowd. Our house's Kolu was undoubtedly one of the best in the village. There used to be a kind of competition, envy and petty fighting among us kids and between our mothers too in setting up the best Kolu. In fact, I have heard that in bigger towns there are real competitions with judges and trophies.

The Navaratri in Tamil Nadu is dedicated by turns to Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and enterprise, Saraswathi, the goddess of learning and wisdom, and Durga or Shakthi representing creation and valour. The nine days are dedicated to bonding between families and friends, and is also a celebration of womanhood. Nine steps for the nine days are constructed, decorated and arranged with dolls made of clay, painted and embellished with religious symbolism.

There is a tailpiece to this Kolu, which awakened the imaginative in us. They are called 'parks', for no apparent reason. They basically consist of a miniature setup of a town, with houses, mountains, temples and forests with wild animals. The park is created by spreading sand, and placing small clay houses, miniature cars, trucks, street-lamps (made out of plastic straws), small figurines of men/women in various postures. When my mom and aunt thought that I was old enough, I was allowed to do the menial labor, like fetching the sand from the backyard, protecting the park from the other children who visit us and so forth.

Creating the forest in our little town is really an art -- it had real greenery in the form of grassy sprouts from one of the daals. Among this grass we placed all the animals in a logical fashion, I mean deer and herbivores on one side of the mountain and carnivores on the other. I achieved my creative pinnacle when one day I rearranged the dolls to simulate a lion chasing a deer. My mom and aunt did not change that -- a sign of appreciation. A few years later, I managed to create a river in our park with the help of a tiny hose from a nearby tap. The river started from the mountain and flowed down to the lake (a plastic tray) below on the ground. The first test run with the river was a major fiasco -- it turned out to be a huge flashflood that eroded half the mountain carrying the lions, deer and tigers alike. Some kind of control was achieved later. But this was one of my major achievements that was praised by everyone in the family circle.

The curious thing about the parks is the size of the dolls. The house was sometimes smaller than the doll of a man entering it, and the stork bigger than the mountain. I used to hate this size discrepancy but could not do much about it. I almost lived in the 'park' for all the nine days.

Another ritual during Navarathri is the sundal (spiced boiled pulses) served to guests. Kids like us visited every house to get sundal, and with that stomach upsets as well. But girls, since they are considered to be the incarnations of Parvati, would some money/gifts just by falling at the feet of elders and by singing Carnatic songs (mostly out of tune!).

Later, when we moved to the town, we couldn't get all the dolls from our village, and also as the houses were much smaller, the number of steps were reduced to two or three. I forgot Kolu as I grew up, till I remembered it again on one of those drunken nights and called up my mom to ask her about the state of our dolls. She told me that more than half of them are broken, and this year too she could have a Kolu with only two steps. I hung up with deep nostalgic pleasure.

By the way, that bit about the river in the 'park' never happened -- one of those exaggerations!