Guest post by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Poila Baishakh, or Bengali New Year's Day, was always a special festival in my childhood. On this holiday, connected to the spring harvest festival, we would travel to my grandfather's home in the countryside of Bengal.
My grandfather lived in a remote village named Gurap about three hours by train from Kolkata. At that time, the village did not have electricity or running water. We had to light kerosene lamps in the night and fetch water from a tube well in buckets. I thought it was a great adventure, and I imagined the village in Grandma and the Great Gourd to be very much like my grandfather's village.
My grandfather was an avid gardener – just like Grandma in my book – and I remember helping him pick many vegetables, including gourds, from his vines. On Poila Baishakh, we would wear new clothes, do a prayer ritual with lamps, flowers, chanting, and a delicious food offering of payesh (a rice pudding made from jaggery, new harvest rice and fresh milk from my uncle's cow).
Afterwards, there was a feast, and then the neighborhood children would come over to play with us until the sun went down over the woods that bordered my grandfather's yard, and where sometimes in the evening I would spot a fox. When writing this piece, I realized that I'd used the woods and the fox, too, for Grandma and the Great Gourd. I guess our lives and memories get interwoven into our writing almost subconsciously!
I have many happy memories of this festival. Now that I live in the United States, I try to re-create some of the rituals and that special feeling for my sons. It's extremely important, I believe, for our children to connect to their cultural roots--and that, too, is one of the reasons I write books like Grandma and the Great Gourd.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's latest book for adults is Before We Visit the Goddess, a novel about mothers and daughters. See more books by her here.
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Your view of missing the vacations at the grandparents in rural India would resonate with a lot in our generation. Would love to read your book