Ganapati bappa moriya!

Dear dedicated reader,

“Ganapati bappa moriya,” a mischevious Hitesh chanted under his breath as I passed his bench in my 9D class today. I stopped, turned to face him, intending to discipline him for joking around. Instead, as his twinkling eyes met mine with an elfish smile, I couldn’t help myself. My frown became a chuckle.

I mentioned that the Festival of Ganesh has been going on for the past ten days in our small hamlet of Kadod. Each night, Melissa and I have ventured out to see the ganapatis, snuggled away in their havens of glitter and flashing lights, prasad (food offerings) at their feet. We’ve snacked on ladoos (the favorite Indian sweet of Ganesh) and joined in the clapping at the nightly puja and arti. None of this, however, prepared me for what I saw yesterday.

The feeling I have today is one that every college student knows: that feeling of “What exactly happened last night?” and the waves of embarrassment that come when you run into someone who you saw in a previously compromising position: your eyes slide away and you pretend to look at the ground as you hurry past, knowing that you both remember that the other was there. Conjure up that feeling from your past, dear reader. Now, imagine this happening with every person you see.

The scope, I had known: I had been told by the students that there would be dancing as they took the ganapatis down to the river on the last day of the festival, that people would throw rang (colored powder) and generally fun would be had. All this I knew. What I had not been told was the scale: there were 25 ganapatis in Kadod alone, and 25 more in the surrounding countryside. Each neighborhood had it’s own belovedly decorated statue and was bringing it to the river in style.

‘Style’ in this circumstance means atop a large flatbed truck bedecked in enormous human sized palm leaves, surrounded by children handing out vats of sweets to passerby and followed by a huge procession of young men banging drums and wildly dancing to Hindi film tunes belted out by speakers the size of a small child traveling on the bed of the truck. The sight of one is enough to impress: the sight of fifty, one after another, was unlike anything I have ever experienced. For a party in a state that has banned alcohol, it was wilder than I could have ever anticipated.

Add to the image a misty, pink colored coating on everything as the rain beats down from the sky atop the parade. Twenty pound sacks of rang were carried for the occasion and handfuls were thrown festively and arbitrarily in the air create a pink haze and mixed with the light rain to create pink puddles running through the muddy streets.

Perhaps the image in your head now looks something like this.

Melissa and I were lucky enough to snag seats at the local phone shop where we go to make international phone calls. The family who owns this place invited us to join them as they saw us meandering about and it was from here that we saw the procession of town familiar faces parade by in pink. Some groups had had special Ganesh T-shirts ordered for the occasion, emblazoned proudly in orange or black. All sported headbands with the same slogan: Ganapati Bappa Moriya! It is the same words which were chanted by every group who came by while they stamped and waved their arms and danced wildly.

“It’s like a regular parade without any rules!” Melissa observed as we watched another firework explode in the middle of the street amid the crowd with no previous warning. As foreign teachers, we made easy targets. Every time a procession passed, our students would run up, prasad in hand, offering it to us. To refuse prasad would be unacceptable since it was the food offered to Ganesh, so we’d obligingly put out our hands, only to be covered in rang (the colored powder) by the hidden hand of our mischevious students! Soon my brown hair had acquired a pale pink color and the small granules of ground powder covered almost every part of my clothes and body. They pulled us out into the street to dance garba (the Gujarat traditional dance) with them, laughing as I stumbled through the steps, my inept feet treading on those of the woman next to me.

The earlier floats were tamer: a few dancing boys, a few drums, mostly older women walking along behind the trucks singing. It was the later floats that were riotous and rowdy, each one trying out do the one in front and behind. And like so many unregulated functions, it eventually turned ugly.

“Fight! Fight!” One of my students ran up to where we were standing by the tailor’s shop. “They are fighting, madam!”

“What?” I craned my next to look down the street where the procession had been held up for a few minutes. It was the first lull in about two hours, so I had assumed that things were winding down. I was wrong.

At that moment, the procession started up again, and I could see the discord in the approaching group written on their angry faces. They were shouting, and some men were holding others back as the ones entrapped struggled to break free and use their fists to say what their mouths were already busy communicating. As they got closer, I gasped. At first it looked like a trick of the light, but I realized that one man’s face was completely covered in thick, red blood. I turned away.

The men moved on as the sole Kadod policeman came and began to threaten to break up the fight with his stick. As the men ran off further down the road towards the river, the policemen was surrounded by revelers, unaware that anything was wrong, who danced to pulsating disco music being belted from one of the nearby flatbed trucks. He swatted at them playfully with his stick and they laughingly dispersed, changing the prevailing mood to a lighter one.

It was perhaps because of this that Melissa and I decided that it was time to head down to the river, away from the general craziness and towards the peace that we knew would come with people saying goodbye to their ganapatis going their final resting place beneath the waters of the Tapi river. We thanked the tailor and the phone booth family for their hospitality and set off down the road, weaving between flatbeds and dancers with the ease of well seasoned crowd navigators.

We were not prepared, however, for what met us at the fork in the road where the Kadod main square opens up towards the school. Hundreds of young men had crowded in, all straining to see what was happening up a small side street. We also stopped, blocked by the massive wall of bodies.

At that exact moment, something must have happened, because I watched as hundreds of straining faces looking away from me suddenly turned and looked straight into my eyes. Their bodies followed and they began to run frantically towards me, dispersed by some unseen force up the road. At that moment, I froze. I knew I had to get out of the way or I would be trampled, but my body wouldn’t move. Suddenly, I felt a hand pushing me towards a wall on the side of the road.

“Madam, go!” The boy shouted. He was one of the 12^th standard boys who stays in the Hostel. All the secondary hostel boys had been allowed out for the festival. I pressed myself up against the wall and my breathing returned, glad for the intervention and was jostled by the elbows of the runners, who had been dispersed by police farther up the side road. Apparently, police had arrived from Bardoli to direct the increasingly unruly crowd control.

The boy, named Bhavin, took Melissa and my hands and waded into the rushing crowd, shouting in Gujarati, “Get out of the way!” He pulled us along as people yelled and pushed and finally we came out on the other side of the marketplace, near the river.

“Thank you,” I said, as he embarrassedly let go of my hand.

“No problem, madam,” Bhavin replied, looking at the ground. He looked up, “Do you want to see those ganapatis in the river?”

We nodded and he led us through the accumulated street vendors, selling hot roasted corn and pani puri down towards the bank of the river. We had to duck around the flatbeds from which they were unloading the beloved statues and anywhere between six and twenty men could be seen hoisting them up in time to carry them down the slope to the river bank.

As we drew closer, I saw a rickety hand made raft waiting and watched curiously as they loaded an 8 foot statue on with ten or fifteen people to accompany it. The raft was tied to a tow rope, and they were pulling themselves out to the middle of the river and back again to drop the statue into the water.

After a few moments of watching, Bhavin turned to me, “Ma’am, do you want to go on the raft?”

“Uh, what?” I said.

A few other students who had spotted me and come over to watch with me chimed in. “Yes, ma’am, go on the raft!” They said encouragingly. I eyed the structure, sagging under the weight of the giant statue and too many accompany people. I looked over the loose ended ropes which had been used to lash it together and the cracking planks that indicated its architect’s temporary structural vision.

The pressure became greater as more people joined in. “Go on the raft madam! Go on the raft! Ganapati Bappa Moriya! You know how to swim, right?”

While I would love to say that in the name of adventure (and subsequent blogging), I went on that raft and will forever preserve the memory of playing a key role in such an incredible festival, I firmly declined in favor of preserving my life.

Which means that I am here today, to field such embarrassing questions from my students, “Madam, you dance?”, “Madam, you play rang?” and random cries of “Ganapati Bappa Moriya!” as I walk by.

Best,
Cat