Durga Puja in Texas: Between memory, migration and belonging

What is an immigrant autumn, if not the feeling of standing in one place while part of you wanders elsewhere?

Here where I live in North Texas, autumn arrives gently. The fierce summer heat finally loosens its grip, the mornings carry a hint of coolness and the sunlight takes on a softer, honeyed glow. The oaks and pecans slowly turn shades of amber and bronze and we look forward to those fleeting weeks when the world seems bathed in gold.

Yet as the season settles over Texas, it awakens another autumn within me, one where the rains lingered, the humidity persisted and the heat was often reluctant to loosen its grip. Most of us city-bred Bengalis rarely encountered the sweeping fields of kashful immortalized in poems and paintings. But autumn announced itself in other ways.

The shiuli tree in our neighborhood knew otherwise. Each morning, fresh flowers lay scattered beneath it, only to be flattened or swept away by the next spell of rain. Yet their fragrance lingered in the air. Mingling with the warmth and dampness of those early autumn days, it became one of the season's most familiar markers. Long before I understood calendars or rituals, those tiny white flowers with their saffron stems told me everything I needed to know. Durga Puja was near.

The excitement arrived gradually, then all at once. It lingered in conversations about shopping plans and family visits. It hid in the rustle of newly purchased clothes tucked away for the festive days ahead. It drifted through open windows in the familiar strains of agomoni songs. As children, we watched bamboo scaffolds slowly evolve into magnificent pandals, and with each passing day we knew, without needing to consult a calendar, that Pujo was near. (Picture)

Durga Puja was, and remains, Bengal's greatest festival. Yet when I look back, it is not any particular pandal or performance that returns to me first. It is the anticipation itself. The feeling that the world was subtly transforming. The certainty that something joyous was on its way. The season felt charged with expectation, as though Bengal itself was preparing to welcome a beloved daughter home.

The excitement arrived gradually, then all at once. It lingered in shopping expeditions that stretched across entire afternoons, with clothes tried on, rejected, reconsidered and finally purchased after much deliberation. It continued through repeated visits to the tailor, accompanied by passionate disagreements over a hemline, a sleeve or a fit that never seemed quite right. The anticipation found its way into family conversations and festive plans, into the rustle of newly purchased clothes tucked away for the days ahead and into the familiar strains of agomoni songs drifting through open windows. As children, we watched bamboo scaffolds slowly evolve into magnificent pandals and with each passing day we knew, without consulting a calendar, that Pujo was near. Soon came the inevitable debates: which pandals to visit, what to wear, whom to meet and how much of the city could possibly be covered before exhaustion finally set in. And then there was food, a subject capable of provoking more debate than the pandals themselves. Between arguments over the merits of a leisurely traditional meal, the obligatory plate of bhog or an itinerary built around biryani, rolls and phuchka, the festival became as much a culinary expedition as a cultural one. No matter how ambitious the pandal-hopping plans, they inevitably revolved around what would be eaten, where and when. Pujo, after all, demanded not only to be celebrated but also to be savored.

For some others, though, Pujo was as much about doing nothing as it is about doing everything. There were afternoons spent languishing at home with friends, conversations wandering from one subject to another, cups of tea appearing and disappearing and adda that refused to acknowledge the passage of time. The frantic and the unhurried, the carefully planned and the entirely spontaneous, all woven into the enduring memory of Kolkata Pujo. The festival is not merely something we attend; it is a way of inhabiting the days around it.

Perhaps that is what makes these memories so difficult to reproduce elsewhere. In Kolkata, everyday life bends around the festival. The city itself becomes part of the celebration, its streets and neighborhoods transformed by pandals, lights, crowds, and a collective sense of anticipation. Pujo is not something one seeks out. It is impossible to avoid. It becomes the backdrop against which life unfolds.

The immigrant experience often involves inhabiting two calendars simultaneously. Around us, the rhythms of American life continue uninterrupted. Yet within our homes and communities, anticipation gathers steadily, shaping conversations, schedules and expectations. We curiously carry a season that is invisible to most around us. We bear witness to department stores getting filled with pumpkins, skeletons, and Halloween decorations, and yet with every display of pumpkins and candy corn, Pujo seems to grow larger in the space of our imagination. We find ourselves inhabiting parallel seasonal worlds, one unfolding in the public landscape around us, the other gathering force within our homes, conversations, and communities. How we learn to navigate these overlapping realities, to celebrate one season while outwardly participating in another, is perhaps a subject worthy of greater scholarly attention.

We move between these worlds so often that the transition becomes second nature. The world outside does not pause or transform in recognition of Maa Durga's arrival. Workdays continue. Schools remain in session. Ordinary responsibilities persist. But even when Pujo is no longer governed by the rhythms of the Bengali almanac, its significance remains undiminished. It is no less profound, no less joyous, and no less capable of filling the heart with anticipation.

Within those carefully demarcated spaces of community lies an extraordinary amount of collective effort. Months before the first dhaak is heard, conversations begin around planning, fundraising, logistics, programming, food, and worship. Countless volunteer hours are devoted to imagining, organizing, assembling and sustaining a celebration that lasts only a few days but carries the emotional weight of an entire season.

In my tenth year of celebrating Durga Puja in the US, I have come to realize that my relationship with Pujo has changed. Alongside my nostalgia for Kolkata has grown a profound appreciation for the dedication, labor and collective goodwill that make these celebrations possible so far from home.

Pujo lives everywhere in the heart, even when it cannot occupy every street outside our door. The Bengali community becomes a meaningful gathering place for seeking to sustain a cherished tradition far from home.

Like many Pujo celebrations across the United States, ours takes place within the confines of a local high school complex, a setting far removed from the streets of Kolkata that live so vividly in our memories. Yet I have come to find in it an echo of the very spirit it seeks to uphold: the warmth, intimacy, and collective participation of Kolkata's para pujo.

There is certainly no shortage of enthusiasm. Here, hands that spend most of the year navigating computer keyboards turn to the work of building a pandal, arranging lights, managing sound systems, decorating stages and keeping time with the rhythm of the dhaak. Some assume the role of purohit, performing the rituals that anchor the celebration. People accustomed to professional routines come together to create, through their own labor and ingenuity, a space for a tradition carried across continents.

For a few days, the school becomes something more than a school. It is transformed into a place of devotion, memory, music and fellowship. Friends reconnect after months apart. Volunteers move tirelessly from one task to another, ensuring that every detail contributes to the larger experience. What emerges is not merely an event but a community strengthened through participation.

What these celebrations lack in scale, they make up for in intention. In Kolkata, Pujo surrounds us. In immigrant communities, we build it together.

And we build it not only for ourselves, but for our children.

As they weave through the celebration, they watch their parents run helter-skelter, juggling work, family and countless responsibilities, only to throw themselves wholeheartedly into the festivities. They see decorations take shape, hear familiar music fill the halls and witness a community gathering around something it loves. Perhaps, in watching all this, they learn something that no ritual alone can teach: that amidst the demands of adulthood, making time for joy matters too.

We want them to grow up hearing the beat of the dhaak, anticipating the arrival of Maa Durga, recognizing familiar faces year after year and understanding that they belong to a community bound by shared heritage and affection. Every volunteer hour, every planning meeting and every carefully assembled decoration is, in some measure, an investment in that inheritance.

Of course, nostalgia has a way of burnishing the past. We remember the shopping expeditions, the tailor's endless adjustments, the ambitious daily itineraries and the afternoons of adda, while the inconveniences and frustrations gradually fade. Measuring what we have built here against those memories is ultimately an impossible task.

In my tenth year of celebrating Durga Puja in Dallas, I have come to understand that a tradition survives not by remaining unchanged, but by being carried into new circumstances and given room to grow. I still carry the Kolkata Pujo of my memories: the shopping expeditions, the daily plans, the leisurely adda, and the city that seemed to belong to the festival as much as the festival belonged to the city. But I have also come to value the Pujo we create here, with its countless willing hands and its particular blend of hard work and celebration.

Perhaps this is the peculiar gift of probashe Pujo: learning to hold on to the place we remember while embracing the life we have built elsewhere. Our children may never know the Kolkata of our childhoods, but they will carry their own stories of Pujo: of parents working late into the night to make the celebration possible, of friendships renewed each autumn and of a tradition that crossed oceans to become part of their lives.

In that sense, Pujo is more than a celebration of home. It is an act of homemaking.

And perhaps that is the true gift of an immigrant autumn: suspended between memory and belonging, absence and return, it reminds us that home is not only something we inherit or remember. It is also something we create.