Right. So yesterday was the weirdest day this pujo, and that's saying something. First I slept all day and was groggy when awake, so I accidentally brushed my teeth with my grandfather's Dabur Lal Dant Manjan. Then I got spat upon under the Park Circus 4 no. bridge, pan pik all over my shoulders. Both look and smell more or less the same, so I'm surmising that old people really use Lal Dant Manjan as an excuse, all they really want is to have their mouths smelling like khaini. Then it started raining and I happened to be unsuitably attired for both rain and neon pandal with UV lights. Then I rode to Gariahat on a bus where a woman's dangly bangle kept getting entangled in my hair. But was that all? Oh no, oh no, it is always my lot to be standing next to a fat mashima with all of her body pressed against mine. Nothing else compares. Nothing, I tell you. But this mashima yesterday had a furry purse that kept tickling my armpit. Purse. With Fur. Held up to the the very arm that's trying to hold onto a bus railing. You'd think the creator had some sympathy.

Following this I elbowed and was elbowed by several people while trying to find an auto to take me home. Found one finally. Git posing as driver said the fare was twenty-five bucks because he wasn't taking the main road. I agreed because there was nothing else to be done, but then the fun started. I guess forty minutes riding through tiny bylanes around Dhakuria, Selimpur and Garfa does that. I must've passed a total of twelve pandals, with people dancing to the dhak like crazy in each of them. One bright pink pandal was constructed across a tiny road, so we drove right through it, and there was a little kid tugging at the kola-bou with a manic smile on his face. Another pandal with the dhak and loudspeakers had a carrom club right next to it, and if you saw the faces under that overhead light you'd be be surprised at the isolation. Nothing deafens, nothing distracts, nothing matters but the board. It saddens me that I no longer play carrom, that look of concentration in people's eyes as they align, and pause, and strike, it beats everything else. Even the game.

It's strange how I never realised there are houses packed in this tight little grid well inside a city area. I mean, I know they must exist but it's not like they're everyday headlines, you can't possibly be if you're a good twenty minutes away from the nearest rickshaw stand or bus stop. But they still stand. I wish I could be more coherent about this. But the best way I can explain it is that there is a Dhakuria, and then there is an inner Dhakuria. One I pass everyday. The other's just a lot of bylanes, almost like a broom closet. Or a cramped backstage area. You pass through it and behind it and always in the dark so that you can reach the spotlight.

The spotlight usually sucks.