Para Pujo

There’s no way you can sleep peacefully in our house during the Pujas. The dhak starts playing from 5am. And since the puja pandal is right in front of our house, we get to hear all the special sound effects up close and personal! When the dhakis stop after a while, tollywood takes over the ownership of the loudspeaker. Gradually, as the day proceeds, the soft Bengali old songs (sometimes shyama sangeet) give way to more recent ones. And finally, at around 11am Bollywood takes over. In the brief time it takes to change cassettes or cds in the player, the para young guns try out various experiments with the mike mouthpiece. Various sounds, like those of not-yet-discovered birds and animals, Amitabh Bachchan’ji, Shahrukh Khan’ji prototypes could be heard. Lots of personalized messages like ‘Haru, please get up from sleep and come to club immediately, else we are going to eat the chicken leg piece kept for you’ are also aired. The point is, since they are paying for the mike and loudspeaker for 24 hours, they make the best use of it.
For some reason, must be technical problem, the mike had stopped blasting for around an hour in the afternoon today. I took this opportunity to get some sleep. Now, my ‘sleep’ has a personality of it’s own. It doesn’t come when I need it most and beg for it to come. My eyes would be tired and begging for want of sleep, and yet it would not come. Anyway, after trying for quite some time, finally I fell asleep. Not even 5 minutes had gone when the mike again started blasting. This time, not with dhak or music or any tomfoolery. A polished voice, with perfect pronunciation started announcing, the contents of which on being translated from Bengali to English would be: ‘On behalf of the club, I take this opportunity to invite all the respected residents of the locality to a very special evening arranged specially for you all, on the eve of Maha Shashthi. In the role of the two protagonists, we present you Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen. Music arranged by Hemanta Mukhopadhyay. Songs to be sung by Manna Dey, Lata Mangeshkar, Kishore Kumar and Asha Bhonsle. Entire show will be compered by Mukesh Kumar. We request you all to grace the occasion with your presence’. Heaven knows where they get such ideas from! Even though this woke me up from my much needed sleep, I was really amused. The mike is again back to belting popular numbers now.
I went and checked from our pandal-facing window just now that they have actually made a small stage! Seems like it was not all a joke!