Last month, in Liluah, a few thousand mobile phones rose into the dark like obedient moons. Bageshwar Baba had asked for a show of lights. Bengal, he confessed, hurt him. Meat should not be sold near the Goddess; those who ate it on holy days were hypocrites. Then the phrase that gave the game away: Free Bengal, he said, this Navratri.The word sat in the sentence like a stranger at a family wedding: Correctly dressed, entirely wrong. Bengal knows Navratri. It simply does not live there. Bengal lives in Pujo: Mahalaya before dawn, bodhon under the bel tree, the long ache of Nabami night, the terrible clarity of Dashami morning. The two calendars overlap the way a map of Kolkata overlaps a memory of it. Roughly.AdvertisementWhat followed was farce with the weight of a referendum. Congress filed police complaints. Even the BJP’s own leaders hurried to defend the goat-sacrifice prasad. And Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari went to Kalighat on Kaushiki Amavasya and sat down to basanti pulao, fried fish and a fish head offered to Ma Kali. “As a Bengali,” he said, “I accept the bhog offered to Maa with fish.” A saffron Chief Minister eating saffron pulao to rebut a saffron sadhu. Bengal likes its irony slow-cooked.The quarrel was about something older than the plate.Begin with the arrival. Elsewhere, pilgrims climb to the Goddess. In Bengal, she comes down. She leaves Kailash, the ash-smeared husband with his ganja and uncertain income, and travels to her father’s house, where Menaka has been waiting since the month of Bhadro. She brings the children: Lakshmi, Saraswati, Ganesh with his belly, Kartik with his peacock and too-careful hair, all pressed into one ekchala like a family in an Ambassador on the way to the parents’ home. The icon is a family photograph before it is theology.Ramprasad and Kamalakanta sealed this intimacy in song: Agamani for the coming, bijoya for the going. Their Menaka is a Bengali mother who has heard that her son-in-law is a vagabond and her daughter has grown thin. She makes the oldest promise mothers make: This time, when Uma comes, I will not send her back. A society that married its daughters young and far gave its Goddess the itinerary of a naiyor (homecoming). Four days at her parents’. Then sindoor, tears, the river.AdvertisementAlso Read | Biryani, non-veg and Durga Puja – why food politics may backfire in BengalSo the Bengali in a pandal does not merely bow. He visits. He checks her face. Thinner this year? You do not critique a deity’s makeup. You worry over a niece’s.Yet the loudest sound in that pandal is the Chandi. At four on Mahalaya morning, Birendra Krishna Bhadra rises from the radio, and half of Bengal, most of whom have never opened the Markandeya Purana, knows every cadence of Ya devi sarvabhuteshu in the dark. At Sandhi Puja, in the 48 minutes when Ashtami bleeds into Nabami, 108 lotuses are offered as Chamunda bursts from the Goddess’s brow. The dhak enters a trance; so does the para. The same face holds a homesick daughter and a 10-armed fury with a trident through a buffalo’s heart.Bengal never felt compelled to choose. That is the Shakta inheritance of the delta: Annapurna in the kitchen, Kali on the burning ghat, no contradiction needing repair. The Goddess eats what field and river offer; fish, as the old joke goes, is a vegetable that swims. Nabami brings mutton cooked without onion or garlic, which Bengal calls, with a straight face, niramish mangsho. Vegetarian meat. The Baba called it hypocrisy. A semiotician might call it range.Look at what she is made of. Where other forms of the Devi endure in stone, Bengal’s autumn Goddess is river clay and straw, built to dissolve. In Kumartuli, tradition still asks that she begin with earth from a sex worker’s doorstep. The holiest body is incomplete without soil from a threshold society calls impure. A god with an expiry date turns worship into hospitality. You do not build a permanent room for a guest. You cook for her, and you weep at the gate.In much of the north the season is a fast: nine nights of vrata, ending with Ravana going up in flames. Pujo is a feast that happens to have a priest. Khichuri, labra, new clothes counted by the day, addas that outlast the drums. One ends in a victory parade. The other ends on a railway platform.Why, then, the guard dog at the gate? Because Bengal has lost much of what once certified its importance. The mills closed, the head offices took the evening flight west, and the bhadralok discovered that India could think without him. What remained was cultural capital, in Bourdieu’s sense, and when the money leaks away a class guards the last good silver. Go to CR Park on Ashtami: The Kali Mandir on its little hill and, a short walk away, the fish market roaring with bhetki and rui. An embassy, with its consulate. The farther the probasi lives from the Ganga, the more fiercely he insists on fish in his pujo meal.So when a sadhu calls Pujo “Navratri”, he is offering a translation, and every translation proposes an owner. Homogenisation rarely arrives as decree. It comes as kindly correction. Bengal hears in that kindness the soft click of a lock being changed.you may likeBengalis are not innocent. We have no business looking at garba with the condescension of people who read the menu in French. We cheer the slaying of Mahishasura and seldom ask the Asur villages of Purulia why they spend these days in mourning. Every family photograph has someone cropped out of the frame.On Dashami, the image will tilt into the river at Bagbazar, the children going with her. Women will smear sindoor on her cheek and then on each other’s, as if to keep a little of her. Someone will call out ashchhe bochhor abar hobe, as though it were a promise and not a prayer.She was never ours to lend. We only ever had her for four days.The writer is a senior advisory professional