A Beautiful Goodbye

There is something peculiar about building something you know you will have to dismantle.

For months, bamboo scaffolds rise from empty plots. Artisans arrive with their brushes, their tools, their half-finished ideas. Streets begin to transform. A neighbourhood that was ordinary yesterday becomes something out of a dream today. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the city begins to make room for a presence it has been waiting all year to welcome.

Durga Puja, in all its grandeur, begins with a homecoming and ends with a goodbye.

We spend months waiting for it. We count down the days, plan our outfits, make lists of pandals to visit, promise friends we haven't seen in months that this year, surely, we'll meet. We return to familiar streets and discover unfamiliar things about them. For a few days, time seems to loosen its grip. There are no ordinary evenings, only nights that end a little too soon.

And then, just as we begin to feel at home in this little world we've built, the celebrations draw to a close, leaving us to find our way back to the ordinary.

Perhaps that is what makes Durga Puja so difficult to explain. It is not merely the joy of a homecoming, but the strange tenderness of knowing that some of our happiest moments are ones we cannot hold on to forever.

The pandals are perhaps the most beautiful expression of this contradiction. Every light, every carefully painted surface, every painstakingly assembled structure is the result of months of work. The people who build them pour their time, skill, and imagination into something that will eventually be taken apart. And yet, knowing this does not make the creation any less magnificent.

There is something deeply human about that.

We are forever trying to make permanent what was never promised to us. We hold on to people, places, versions of ourselves, moments we wish we could stretch just a little longer. We take photographs as if memory needs evidence. And when things begin to change, we mistake our inability to keep them for a failure to love them enough.

But perhaps love was never supposed to be measured by how long something stays. Perhaps some things arrive in our lives not to become permanent fixtures, but to make us feel something we had forgotten how to feel.

Durga Puja understands this without having to say it.

Every year, the goddess arrives. Every year, we welcome her with the same anticipation, the same devotion, the same familiar excitement. And every year, we accompany her to the water, watching the familiar form dissolve into something we cannot bring back.

The strange thing is how much of the festival stays with us. Long after the lights have come down, we remember the crowded streets, the late-night walks, the conversations that lasted longer than expected. We remember the people who made the celebrations feel like our own. Sometimes, it is not even the grandest pandal or the most spectacular evening that we miss, but a small, seemingly insignificant moment that has somehow found a permanent place in our memory.

Maybe that is what letting go actually looks like. Not learning to care less, not convincing ourselves that nothing matters, but allowing ourselves to care about things without demanding that they remain ours forever.

There is a kind of courage in that. The courage to participate fully in something temporary. To stop measuring a good thing by its ability to last and start appreciating it for having existed at all.

And perhaps, somewhere between the last night of celebration and the first ordinary morning that follows, we begin to understand. The streets return to themselves. The bamboo is taken apart. The goddess returns to the water, and the city begins waiting for her all over again.

We return, too, to the things we left unfinished, the routines we temporarily escaped, the lives that continued without us while we were busy celebrating. The world has not changed all that much, and yet something about the way we see it feels a little different.

Because every year, Durga Puja offers us the same quiet lesson: that we can love something deeply and still let it go. That an ending does not undo a beginning. That some things are not diminished by their impermanence, but made precious by it.

And maybe that is enough.

Maybe we do not need to hold on to everything that makes us happy. Maybe we only need to be present while it is here, grateful that it happened, and willing to carry its memory without trying to recreate it forever.

After all, the city will be built again. Until then, let us bid it a beautiful goodbye.