October, Pujo, and the Arithmetic of Empty Pockets

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October arrives in Calcutta like a loud, drunk uncle who has already spent your salary before he even knocks on the door. The sky performs that impossible blue trick, the kind of cerulean con-artistry that makes you believe, against the crushing weight of your bank statement, that the world is actually a benevolent place. The air smells of shiuli flowers and impending financial ruin. Durga Puja is still approaching, but Calcutta has already begun rehearsing for it weeks before the goddess formally arrives: bamboo skeletons, half-finished pandals, lights being strung across lanes, advertisements multiplying like fungal colonies after rain. Soon will come those five ritual days from Shashthi through Dashami, that annual carnival of pandals, polyester, perfume, phuchka, and deafening dhak drums, when the entire city collectively behaves as though money grows on trees. Trees which, in my case, have been dead for years.

I am told this is the happiest month of the year for the ordinary Bengali. I am ordinary, certainly, perhaps excessively so, but the happiness appears to have been shipped to the wrong address. While the neighborhood transforms itself into a glittering circuitry of LEDs, loudspeakers, bamboo and improbable architectural ambition, my internal landscape remains stubbornly overcast, a low-pressure system of dread and fiscal hemorrhaging. My poverty is not the sepia, consumptive poverty we learned to romanticize from old Bengali fiction, where thin, beautiful people cough elegantly while discussing love, duty and the metaphysics of suffering. No, my poverty is prosaic, digital and ruthlessly punctual. It arrives on the first of the month with the mechanical certainty of a guillotine blade, whispering its cruel mathematics into my ear: rent, electricity, internet, medicines, the occasional bourgeois extravagance of carbohydrates.

The cruelest joke, the real knee-to-the-groin of existence, is the timing. October is not merely about the goddess with ten arms and her annual visit to her maternal home; it is also the season when Bengal weaponizes literature against the financially weak.

The Puja Barshiki arrives.

Or rather, the Puja Barshikis arrive, plural, fat and magnificent and completely indifferent to my solvency: those Sharadiya numbers and annual Puja editions that Bengalis have been hauling home for generations, swollen far beyond the dimensions of ordinary magazines with novels, stories, essays, poems, illustrations, detective fiction, science fiction, travel writing, children’s adventures and enough printed temptation to constitute a separate psychiatric disorder. A normal magazine can be ignored. A Puja Barshiki sits there like a roast chicken in front of a fasting wolf.

Then come the books.

New novels, collected editions, reprints, translations, little magazines, attractive hardcovers whose designers have clearly studied the neurobiology of impulse control and decided to attack it directly. Publishers parade the living writers, repackage the dead ones, excavate forgotten pieces from archives, issue handsome editions of people who have been dead long enough to be safely called immortal, and somehow extract another five hundred rupees from the Bengali nervous system. The Kolkata Book Fair may arrive in winter with its hectares of stalls and annual stampede of bibliophiles, but Pujo has its own older literary appetite, and the Puja Barshiki is one of its great ritual foods.

And I, a man who considers books a food group more essential than protein, am forced to window-shop like a starving ghost pressing his nose against the glass of a bakery.

College Street is particularly dangerous for people like me. That long, argumentative republic of books, publishers, pavement stalls, university students, coffee, dust and human beings who can spend forty-five minutes debating whether a thirty-rupee discount constitutes an insult to civilization. Put me there during Pujo season and my remaining financial judgment begins leaving through the fire exit. My fingers twitch at the spines. A new Barshiki appears. Then another. A fat novel beckons from a stack. An old edition I have wanted for fifteen years suddenly materializes under a tarpaulin as if summoned by a malevolent librarian.

The rational brain says: electricity bill.

The Bengali brain says: first edition.

My wallet, that leather-bound tragedy, contains practically nothing but receipts, exhausted plastic and the phantom vibrations of transactions I cannot afford to make. Booksellers possess a particular expression for creatures like me. They know us. Men who pick up a book, turn it over, inspect the price, perform a tiny internal funeral and put it back exactly where it was. Men who want to consume literature but are conducting simultaneous negotiations with lunch.

I retreat, muttering apologies to nobody, my dignity leaking away somewhere between Bankim Chatterjee Street and Mahatma Gandhi Road.

And then there is the matter of my mother.

This is where the satire stops being entirely funny.

In Bengal we worship the Mother Goddess with red-bordered saris, flowers, lights, drums, food and enough electricity to make the local transformer contemplate reincarnation. Meanwhile, actual flesh-and-blood mothers can end up receiving whatever scraps their adult children are capable of sending through a phone.

I need to send mine something.

Not much. Just a token. A gift. A small piece of evidence that says, “Look, Ma, your son has not been completely defeated by adulthood.”

But a transfer requires money, and money generally requires work that pays in a currency other than exposure, promises, future possibilities and existential dread. The guilt sits in my stomach like a stone, heavy and cold, while somewhere outside somebody tests a dhak, and the beat travels through the evening air with the unpleasant accuracy of a second heart.

The Puja economy has other demands.

New clothes.

This is not technically a law of the Republic of India, although generations of Bengali children could reasonably testify otherwise. Pujo clothes occupy that peculiar territory between desire, tradition and social obligation. The shops fill. The malls fill. Gariahat fills. New Market fills. Online carts fill. Discounts breed additional discounts until percentages lose semantic meaning. Men and women hunt for shirts, saris, kurtas, shoes and dresses with the focused determination of an army provisioning itself before a winter campaign.

I walk through all this in my faded clothes, a walking advertisement for fiscal restraint imposed without consent, while mannequins in sherwanis stare out from climate-controlled glass like minor aristocrats who have never had to calculate whether the electricity bill can survive until Tuesday.

The pressure is not imaginary. Festivals make prosperity visible.

So, unfortunately, do they make its absence.

There is a specific kind of depression that becomes especially vicious during festivals: the depression of the excluded spectator, the man behind the glass watching everybody else appear to participate in life. Bipolar II does not suspend operations because the calendar has printed a goddess on itself. It is a disorder defined by depressive episodes and hypomanic ones—not some cute, diluted version of bipolar disorder—and the depression can occupy far more territory than the brief elevations ever did.

The city celebrates. The illness does not care.

The occasional hypomanic current that can make plans seem enormous, possibilities suddenly plausible and tomorrow suspiciously conquerable has retreated. What remains is the grey administrative department of the mind, stamping REJECTED across everything that arrives at its desk.

While Bengal stages the victory of Durga over Mahishasura, I conduct smaller and substantially less mythological battles: sufficient money versus insufficient money; electricity versus disconnection; appetite versus groceries; ambition versus exhaustion; book versus bill.

Mahishasura, at least, had the courtesy to appear in person.

I watch the pandals go up, bamboo scaffolding rising like the skeletons of enormous prehistoric animals, and I think about the engineering of celebration. Bamboo frames, fabric, plywood, lighting rigs, temporary electrical systems, crowd barriers, fire precautions, drainage, decoration, traffic diversions: an ephemeral city constructed inside the permanent one, occupied for days, photographed by millions and then dismantled almost immediately afterward.

This part always fascinates me.

A civilization can be broke at one end, wealthy at another, anxious almost everywhere in between, and still assemble giant temporary temples in traffic intersections.

Calcutta contains all of it simultaneously: people spending lakhs on decoration, people saving for months for one new shirt, people ordering restaurant meals at midnight, people counting coins for bus fare. To call it simply extravagance would be stupid. To call it simply devotion would also be stupid. Durga Puja is religion, art exhibition, neighborhood competition, family reunion, public theater, commercial ecosystem, courtship ritual, traffic catastrophe and temporary suspension of ordinary reality compressed into the same few square miles.

This is perhaps why the economics of it feel so deranged.

My own mathematics, unfortunately, is simpler.

Income minus expenses equals a negative number that stares back at me with the blank hostility of a cobra.

The variables include rent. Electricity. Internet, because without that digital umbilical cord I lose not merely entertainment but work, communication, information and a significant fraction of whatever remains of my economic existence. Then comes the aspiration tax: money I should be sending home, books I want to buy, Puja Barshikis that might as well have been printed specifically to taunt me, clothes I ought to replace before the existing ones achieve archaeological status, and all the little expenses civilization files under the harmless word “miscellaneous.”

Miscellaneous is where murder happens.

One hundred here. Two hundred there. Medicine. Tea. Food. Transport. Something breaks. Something runs out. Something becomes suddenly indispensable at precisely the moment the bank account develops a philosophical objection to numbers greater than zero.

The equation does not explode dramatically.

It leaks.

That is how poverty actually works most of the time. Not trumpets. Not foreclosure notices descending from heaven. Just subtraction. Small numbers nibbling at other small numbers until zero arrives and finds the place already furnished.

Yet—and here is the perverse twist, the cosmic joke that keeps the machinery running—I cannot help admiring the sheer stubbornness of October.

Bengalis have developed an extraordinary cultural technology for refusing to let hardship have the final aesthetic word. The roof may leak; somebody will discuss poetry under it. The salary may be late; somebody will still argue about whether a particular rendition of Tagore is an abomination. A family can spend the entire year complaining about inflation and then devote three weeks to debating the correct sequence of restaurants for Pujo.

And books somehow survive inside this madness.

That may be my favorite part.

The Puja Barshiki is evidence of something almost absurdly hopeful: that a mass festival can still arrive accompanied not merely by clothes and food and advertisements but by several hundred pages of fiction. Somewhere in Bengal, while retailers prepare inventories of shirts and sweets, editors are assembling novels, stories, essays and drawings because they assume people will want to spend part of their greatest festival reading.

What a magnificent miscalculation of human priorities.

What a magnificent civilization that keeps making it.

I cannot afford most of those books this year. Perhaps none of them. I may have to look at the covers online, read the tables of contents, calculate the price three times and close the browser like a Victorian gentleman refusing temptation in a brothel.

But I will know they exist.

For the moment, perhaps that has to be enough.

So I walk through Calcutta in October, this crumbling, glorious, exasperating, impossible city, watching bamboo rise over intersections and lights begin appearing above lanes. The great Pujo machinery is warming up. Somewhere shiuli flowers are dropping quietly onto the ground while electricians hang LEDs above them. Somewhere a printer is binding a Puja Barshiki thick enough to injure a burglar. Somewhere a mother is buying her grown son a shirt because sons remain twelve years old indefinitely in the maternal imagination.

And somewhere another grown son is trying to calculate whether he can send his mother anything at all.

I am poor. I am worried. I am depressed. I want books I cannot buy. I have bills that possess considerably more confidence in my future than I do.

And yet October keeps becoming beautiful without asking my permission.

The goddess will come.

The dhak will begin.

The crowds will pour into the streets.

The Barshikis will accumulate beside Bengali beds like brightly colored masonry.

Then Dashami will arrive, the idols will go to the river, the lights will come down, and Calcutta will stagger back toward ordinary arithmetic.

I will remain here with my bills, my mother, my illness, my internet connection and my ridiculous hunger for books—a permanent citizen of the Republic of Insufficient Funds, waiting for the city to become affordable again.

Which, being Calcutta, may be sometime shortly after the next Ice Age.