The Kali puja fire that almost killed us

Kali puja is Durga puja’s emo cousin. Kali puja takes place at night, the second it turns midnight and it goes on till the break of dawn. Hindu scripture is pretty complicated and there’s about a dozen different ways to interpret the ancient Sanskrit text, so each house just adopts its own style of worship. At my grandma’s house, some of the men fast for several days before the day. The statue is brought to the house about a week before the festival and we get to watch the guys from the shop decorate and dress her. Kali is a frightening looking lady, with inky blue skin, fiery eyes and her tongue hanging out like a slip of red meat. She’s my favorite, she’s so badass.

The story says that she was born when two demons were raiding the heavens, from the fire in Durga’s third eye, a murder machine of a goddess. Her statue is made in the scene where she’s rampaging around, stabbing, and murdering people and nobody could stop her, so her husband Shiva lays down in front of her and she accidentally steps on him. And that does her in. What a story. Kali has four arms. Two have weapons. The other is holding the head of a dead demon by his hair and the one below it holds a bowl to collect the blood that’s dripping from it. How fucking awesome is that. From her necklace of severed heads to her sharp white fangs to the curly mane of thick black hair under her crown, she’s the stuff of nightmares. 

For Durga puja we get to wear new clothes and play boardgames all day and eat sweet things, but for Kali puja we spend the day making fireworks. No contest. 

The day starts around 9am and we fight for the shower. Dad already left around five am to go do puja stuff with the priest. We’re not concerned with that. We get dressed in our rattiest clothes, the stuff at the very bottom of the dresser that comes out only twice a year (the other is for Holi). We pack a change of outfit for the evening. Packing for three children isn’t easy, there are combs and baby powder and kohl pencils and new earrings and shoes and ribbons and clips and barrettes and spare socks and sheets of teeps. I wonder how my mom doesn’t lose her mind. 

We pile into the car, having begrudgingly downed some breakfast (cereal is unimportant because today we’re going to stick our hands in some goddamn gunpowder). When we arrive, the scene at my grandma’s is chaotic and chirping. The party is happening out front in the courtyard, on the floor. One of my uncles has brought over everything we need. As we get older, we’ll be allowed to go to the market with him and watch him haggle with the shopkeepers. Everything is laid out on sheets of newspaper. There are gleaming piles of aluminum powder, clouds of black carbon, yellow piles of sulfur and a hundred other mysterious things. Several stations have been up and we argue and shout over who gets to do what. Most of the cousins, except Didiana who’s always fashionably late (we later find out it’s treat-resistant depression), are here already. Dada and Tia are mixing and pouring out metallic dust. We’re under strict orders to do exactly what the adults tell us to do – this is a matter of life and death. It might be, but we don’t care, we just want to run get as mucky as possible.  

Sometimes I’ll recognize something from my chemistry textbooks – is that copper nitrate – wow – that burns bright blue yknow – yeah I read it in my textbook. Even though they keep telling us that there’s no task too little, I know that mixing the gunpowder for the tubris is a big job. My uncle is in charge of that station so I finagle my way into it. Gunpowder is made from mixing up charcoal, sulfur, potassium nitrate and iron shards. He mixes it with his hands, pausing to weigh it carefully on one of the kitchen scales and adding this and that. I stick my greedy hands into it, feeling the crumbly shards of iron prickle at my skin. 

Every so often my grandma or an aunt will come around with a box of sweets and pop them into our open mouths and click her tongue at the mess we’re making, with our carbon handprints and dusty black noses. 

Somebody has connected the speakers and they’re playing classical Bengali songs, usually Rabindra Tagore songs (my family, like most Bengali families, are hardcore fans of the Nobel Laureate). The sun is golden and just as softly warm as is perfect in November in the tropics. The garden is reserved for testing and the bougainvillea and magnolias suffer many blasts of aluminum and sulfur. It’s a perfect day, for the perfect festival. 

We gossip as we work. The day of Kali puja is a peaceful, a quiet island before things kick into action in the evening. It’s the core group: me, my sisters, Tvisha and Roudra, Honey, my two older cousins, Dada and Didiana, with guest appearances of Tia, and later on Basil. Tia and Basil don’t live in the city so we only get to see them during the pujas, but when we do it’s an absolute blast. Tia is a dancer. She moves like no one I’ve ever seen before. She’s graceful, but can bend her arms and legs in amazing ways. It’s like she’s underwater, the currents moving like silk across her skin. She’s older than us, but you’d never know it. Basil is hilarious and we riot with him. He’s in college and very grown up but is always down for a good old fashioned pillow fight. He’s the standing head of the tubri station (being the oldest of us) and I hand him baggies and cups of powder with the respect you reserve for your commanding officer. 

“So do you think we should make bets on who’s going to make the biggest tubri?” asks Dada. Put a bunch of children to work making fireworks, and they’re going to turn it into a competition immediately. A tubri is made by shoving a bunch of dirt and gunpowder in a little clay pot with holes in the top and bottom. One of the errand boys had spent several hours that morning lining the dirt into the bottoms of the pots, but it was up to us to pack the gunpowder in there. This is a tedious, but crucial step. The better and more evenly the gunpowder is packed in there, the taller and crazier the explosion. The adults take advantage of our competitiveness and let us stuff most of the pots. We mark our initials on the ones we make with a little black Sharpie. 

“Look, just look at this technique,” says Basil, his face red as he presses his thumbs into the clay shell. “It would be a losing bet, I really couldn’t even let you do that.” 

“Oh please, we’ll just see about that,” I say, encircling the bunch of them crouched around the big pile of gunpowder. There’s only room for three people to be stuffing tubris at a time. 

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