Kali Pujo 2005

The Diwali of 2005 will be a day to remember for the rest of my life. It was the second consecutive Diwali that was spent away from home and also celebrated as Kali Pujo, and not as Diwali. Welcome to the land of Bongs – West Bengal – where people drive also on the right side of the road, not because their rules are different but because there is no space to drive. The place where intra-city buses look like match boxes on wheels and inter-city buses looked like intra-city buses of other cities. Normalcy is an asymptote to reality, yet there is joy in everyone’s heart expressed through a language known as the ‘sweetest language that you can ever hear’ – a testament it borrows, probably because it just looks like Hindi being spoken with a Rosogulla in mouth.

NIT Durgapur would have been empty if it was Durga Pujo, but not for Kali Pujo, a.k.a. Diwali. The crowd was still present in the hostel and then during the late evenings, the competition between the hostels started – the competition of who has the longevity in bursting crackers. Don’t consider the fact that we were causing damage to the green campus, we were from that era in a college that thought that grass is more legal than the drink that is saccharification of starch.

We were in our second year and as a norm of “Rectification” of our juniors, we thought we will break the monotony of spending Diwalis fighting with the other hostels and rather have some fun. The time must have been 11 p.m. and we were a group of five second years – Sangeet, Arun, Nithin, Shankar and me, with two bakras (first years under “Rectification Period”), – Deepu and Sumeet. The seven of us marched to The Oval, the main cricket ground behind the Academic building around the corner of PMC (Piya Milan Chowk). PMC is the famous place where guys bid their girlfriends good night and came back the next morning to wait until they would come out. The Oval is this magnificent ground which should have awarded me the degree rather than the Metallurgical department of NIT Durgapur. Roll No. 04/319 spent more time in Oval than any other place in those 4 years. On one boundary of The Oval is PMC and the Academic Building, the second side by the gymkhana and the third side by REC School. The fourth side belonged to the girls’ hostel. This is how The Oval, PMC and girls’ hostel are connected.

With Diwali-rockets that we imagined to be bazookas, we marched to the corner of The Oval that was the closest to girls’ hostel. Shankar had already given up on the idea and ran back to hostel. So, it was the four of us guiding two juniors. Nithin, the valiant hero, lighted the first rocket. “Zoom” it went, and it just missed the girls’ hostel. Followed by each one of us, one after the other we launched them into the girls’ hostel. Least expected of the lot, we started hearing cheers from inside. With more ammunition and more launches, we believed ourselves to be the kids who shared the sense of achievement in the “October Sky”. We were overjoyed and within those moments we were out of our ammunition – that was when we started hearing the whistles. The whistle sound started coming from all the sides and we were in a fix.

As I mentioned before, we never knew what was legal and what wasn’t. We knew that nothing would happen to us if we were caught red-handed in this launch, but we couldn’t afford to be caught with juniors. When you panic, all you can do is run. We all ran, in different directions. Some of us ran so fast that we outran a few of the dogs. Later observing their free-flowing fur tail, we realized that we mistook the foxes who came for their night prey to be dogs. One god-damn night, we were having! We lost breath and finally reached LH Mode, the market place where faculty, girls and boys meet up quite often. In the small semi-open hall that accompanies LH mode, Kali Pujo was on. Who on earth would celebrate Kali Pujo at night? Sangeet and I were the ones who reached LH mode and we had no idea on who else of our gang were caught by the security. Were the juniors fine? No idea! Camouflaging ourselves to be worshippers we went to the pandal, paid our tribute to Kali mata and were about to leave, when I was caught by my HOD. “Ekhane Kano?” was the dreaded question and I started blabbering while I saw a guard watching us closely from behind. He asked me to meet him the next day in his office. Sangeet, being from ECE, escaped and I dreaded what would happen the next day.

The next day when I went to college, there were stories floating around saying that someone launched rockets into girls’ hostel. I went to meet my HOD in his office, only to find him completely oblivious to what had happened the day before. Whatever the reasons were, I was saved. I went to Back Canteen, near LG14, only to find a group of girls surrounding Abbas and praising his valour for launching rockets into their hostel. Slowly sipping my cha, I listened to the conversation and thought to myself “Oh God! How many dates have I lost here!!!”