Dear Friends,
It’s been an interesting and long week. My first festival was a blast, literally and figuratively. Whole groups of people got together and carried 15-foot-tall statues of Lord Ganesh, decked out like he’d had a blast in Mardi Gras, through the streets. The statues are a riot. They paint the face and body flesh-colored, add strand after strand of glass beads, and use battery-operated Christmas tree lights to really kick it up a notch or two. This is still going on and makes traveling hazardous.
I’ve come to realize there are two joys associated with living on Ulsoor (pronounced “ulcer,” ironically enough) that I’ve become acquainted with, thanks to the elephant God. The lesser of the two is that the Muslim temple next door believes this festival is the perfect recruitment time and counters any noise with their own particularly screeching brand of prayer. They do this every hour on the hour, lest they lose a wayward soul who, at 4 a.m., was thinking to himself, “If only I had a sign about what religion to join…” I know this because the temple is using loud speakers to broadcast their faith. It’s kind of like being at a high school football game, where the announcer is really loud, the speakers break up and you don’t care about the score anyway. Even my cats run into hiding when they hear that telltale crackle of a P.A. getting ready to broadcast.
The extra special bonus of living on Ulsoor Lake, and something I’m very sure the real estate agent neglected to mention, is that a large part of this festival involved the entire population of India coming to my backyard and ceremoniously drowning a terra cotta statue of Lord Ganesh. The delights that accompany the marauders are too numerous to go into. Besides, like the all too familiar smell of human waste that is now hanging like a gaseous cloud over my apartment building, the pungent smell of onions roasting is omnipresent.
Villages have set up camp on Aga Abbas Ali Road. They brought supplies and I think they are planning on staying for a while. Joy of joys! I learned the hard way why they brought goats. Alert National Geographic, because the art of animal sacrifice is alive and well. There’s nothing like a good throat-slitting of a goat to start of your morning. And FYI, they don’t die right away. Needless to say, I’ve stopped having breakfast until the goats are back on the farm.
The cherry on the Ulsoor Lake cake is the revelers’ lighting of endless streams of fireworks, firecrackers and what I suspect may be cannons, all night long! Not even the dying cat wailing on the loudspeakers can drown out the “rat-tat-tat-boom-bang-KABOOM” that has become my lullaby. I’m usually the first to sign up for cultural heritage day, but this is excessive. And apparently this four-day fest is extending for another four days. It’s like a very terrorist Chanukah.
If the noise is the cherry, then the vegetation has to be the icing. Throwing spinach, flowers and vegetables into the lake is, I don’t know, a healthy birthday present or something. He’s an elephant God, why they don’t give him peanuts, I don’t know. Well, the extra vegetation in the lake is too much of a temptation to the 50,000 water buffalo that have come to Bangalore for the monsoon season. It’s like a buffalo buffet at my house. – Meredith
Check back next week for Part 2 of this adventure.
Meredith Billman-Mani was married earlier this year, and moved to Bangalore, India with her husband. She’s a former staff writer for the Hudson Reporter.