Pujor Raat – Part 1: The Crowd

Lost in the Durga Puja crowd, they hold hands.

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On the last night of Durga Puja, Kolkata does not sleep. The whole city pours into the streets to see the pandals, the huge temporary temples built from bamboo, silk and clay, each one lit up like a jewel box. Drums thunder from every corner. The air smells of incense, sweet sugar and frying oil from a hundred stalls.

Rimi had come with her cousins, and within twenty minutes she had lost them.

She pushed through a wall of bodies toward a pandal she could see glowing above the crowd, but the current kept shifting her sideways, away from the light. Someone's elbow caught her ribs. A child darted between her feet. A man with a dhak drum beat it so close to her ear that she felt the vibration in her teeth.

She was laughing and a little frightened, and she had no idea which way was north.

Then a hand closed around her wrist.

"Don't move," said a voice beside her, calm and close. "The crowd will push you into the stall if you fight it. Let it carry you, then step sideways."

She did. The current eased, and a space opened up, and she found herself standing against a low wall beside a tall man in a white kurta, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, his hair ruffled by the crowd.

He did not let go of her wrist straight away. She noticed that, and noticed that he noticed her noticing.

"Thank you," she said. "I'm Rimi."

"Abhik." He smiled, a quick, friendly smile that reached his eyes. "You're welcome. You looked like you were about to be carried off to Howrah."

"My cousins are somewhere in there."

"Then let's find them. Or the pandal, which is also a good place to be lost."

He let go of her wrist at last, but when she stepped into the crowd again, his hand found hers, and his fingers wound through hers with the easy confidence of someone who had done this a hundred times before.

She should have been annoyed. Instead, she felt her heart skip, the way it did at the first drop on a fairground ride.

They moved together through the throng, stopping at a stall to buy hot jalebi in paper cones, eating them as they walked, sugar sticking to their fingers. They passed a family dancing to a loudspeaker, an old man selling roasted corn, a group of boys in glittering waistcoats singing a Tagore song off-key and with tremendous feeling.

"Do you come every year?" Rimi asked.

"Every year since I was a child. My grandmother used to bring me here on her shoulders." He glanced at her sideways. "You?"

"Only when my cousins drag me. I think I prefer the quieter nights."

"Ah, a quiet girl in the biggest crowd in Bengal."

"I'm not quiet. I'm observant."

He laughed, and she felt the warmth of it all the way down her arm.

At the next corner, the crowd thickened again. Someone shoved from behind, and Rimi stumbled into Abhik's chest. He caught her easily, one arm around her waist, and for a moment they stood very still in the middle of the noise and the light.

His heart was beating fast. So was hers.

"Sorry," she whispered.

"Don't be," he said quietly. "I'm not."

She looked up at him. The drums were pounding somewhere behind them, and the lights of the pandal were turning his face gold and shadow. He was watching her the way people watch a fire, as if they can't quite look away and don't want to.

She stayed where she was.

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Next: Part 2, The Pandal Lights. A quiet corner, a shared sweet, and the moment they stop pretending they came here for the festival.