Pujor Raat – Part 2: The Pandal Lights

Abhik led her away from the main road, down a side lane where the noise softened to a distant hum. The air was cooler here. Strings of small coloured bulbs hung between the houses, and an old woman sat on her doorstep, shelling peas into a steel bowl and nodding to them as they passed.

"Where are we going?" Rimi asked.

"Somewhere the crowd can't follow." He grinned over his shoulder. "And my grandmother's sweet shop. It's open late, because she refuses to close for anything, including earthquakes."

The shop was tiny and bright, with glass cases full of sandesh, rosogolla and something golden and sticky that Rimi did not recognise. An old woman with silver hair and a sharp eye looked up from behind the counter.

"Abhik," she said, in Bengali, folding her arms. "You are late and you have brought a girl. Good. She looks like she needs to eat something."

Rimi laughed, startled, and answered in her careful Bengali. The old woman's face softened at once.

"She speaks like a Kolkata girl, the tongue of an aunt," she told Abhik. "Marry her before she goes back to wherever she came from."

"Dida," Abhik said, pink to the ears. "Please."

They took two clay cups of milky tea and a plate of sweets out to a low wooden bench on the edge of a small square. Across it, a single pandal glowed, smaller and quieter than the grand ones on the main road, its goddess lit by a dozen hanging lamps.

Rimi sat with her cup in both hands and watched the light move across the painted face of the goddess.

"Tell me about your grandmother," she said.

Abhik talked about her for a long time. How she had taught him to cook fish in mustard, how she had bullied him into learning Tagore and the Ramayana, how she had once chased a thief out of the shop with a rolling pin. He spoke with love and a little exasperation, and Rimi listened with her chin on her hand.

Then it was her turn. She told him about her father, who had wanted her to be a doctor, and her mother, who had quietly bought her a paint set when she was twelve. She told him about the small studio she had rented last year, with its cracked window and its view of the railway, and the paintings that no one had bought yet.

"Show me," Abhik said.

"What, now?"

"Yes. Tell me the one you're proudest of."

She hesitated, then described it: a woman standing at the edge of a crowded platform, her face turned toward the empty tracks, the crowd blurred into colour behind her. It was about waiting. It was about wanting to be seen.

Abhik was silent for a long time.

"I'd buy that," he said at last.

She looked at him, and her throat tightened unexpectedly.

"Thank you."

He reached over and brushed a smear of sugar from the corner of her mouth with his thumb. He did it casually, as if it were nothing, and then his hand stayed there, resting against her cheek, and she felt the warmth of his skin all the way to her toes.

"Rimi," he said, very quietly. "I didn't come out tonight to find my cousins."

"No?"

"No. I came to find someone to be lost with."

She smiled, slowly. "Then you found her."

He leaned in, and this time she met him halfway. The kiss was sweet and tasted of milk and cardamom. It was not hurried. It was the kind of kiss that asks a question and waits, and when she answered it by curling her fingers into his kurta and pulling him closer, he made a low, startled sound and deepened it, one hand sliding into her hair.

The festival went on around them, drums and laughter and distant fireworks. Here, in the small square, there was only the lamplight, the taste of sugar, and the steady beat of two hearts that had both decided, at the same moment, not to be sensible.

When they finally drew apart, her cheeks were hot and her hands were shaking a little.

"Dida is going to ask," she said breathlessly.

"Dida is going to be insufferable," Abhik agreed. "Shall we give her something to talk about?"

Rimi laughed, and let him take her hand, and they walked back through the quiet lanes toward the lights of the main road, neither of them in any hurry to find the cousins at all.

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Next: Amritsar Di Raat, a wedding, three nights of celebration and a man from Canada.