Bipattarini Pujo arrived in our childhood home wrapped in red.
Red hibiscus lay heaped on brass plates, their petals dark and velvety. Vermilion glowed in a small silver container. Beside it, alta waited—a small pool of crimson, luminous with ritual and remembrance. And there were coils of sacred red thread, waiting to be knotted thirteen times before being tied around our wrists in a silent covenant with the Goddess.
And at the centre of it all was Maa.
She would rise earlier than usual that morning. Long before the household had properly stirred, the rooms would begin to fill with the muted sounds of preparation—the rinsing of fruits, the clink of brass utensils, the soft swish of her sari as she moved between the kitchen and the thakurghor.
There were thirteen fruits.
Dada and I would count them repeatedly, touching each one before being sharply told not to disturb the arrangement. Mangoes and bananas, guavas and coconuts, perhaps a pineapple, a pomegranate, a pear—whatever the season and the market allowed.
There were thirteen luchis too, pale and round, swelling briefly in hot oil before settling upon the offering plate. And thirteen sweets, counted with the same solemn precision. Thirteen flowers. Thirteen knots. The number seemed to follow Maa everywhere that day, as though repetition itself could build a wall against misfortune.
As children, we understood little of danger.
Calamity belonged to fairy tales, storms and distant kingdoms. We waited mostly for the pujo to end, for the fruits to be distributed and the sweets to become prasad. We watched Maa fast, pray and listen to the Bipattarini brotokotha without comprehending the fears that must have lain quietly behind her folded hands.
Only years later does one begin to understand the private anxieties of a mother.
Every child stepping out of the door carries a fragment of her heart into an unpredictable world. Every delayed return, every fever, every journey, every silence on the telephone becomes a small confrontation with the unknown.
Perhaps that is why Maa prayed to Bipattarini—the Goddess who carries her devotees across bipod, across danger.
Her worship was not superstition in the careless sense in which the word is often used. It was an act of resistance against helplessness. When life offered her no guarantees, she created her own rituals of protection. She gathered thirteen fruits, fried thirteen luchis, arranged thirteen sweets and tied thirteen knots, binding together faith, fear and hope.
The red thread around our wrists seemed insignificant then. We wore it until it loosened, faded and finally fell away unnoticed.
Yet some threads never really break.
They remain tied somewhere beyond the visible—between a mother and her children, between memory and home, between those we once were and those we have become.
Maa is in Kolkata now. We are in Bengaluru, while Dada lives in faraway San Francisco—too distant for her to tie the red thread around our wrists.
Yet whenever I see red hibiscus, vermilion or a length of sacred thread on a rain-blessed morning after Rathayatra, I remember Bipodtarini Pujo. I remember Maa seated before the Goddess, in silent conversation, asking for nothing for herself.
Only that her family be kept safe.
Perhaps that is the oldest prayer in the world.
And perhaps every mother, in her own way, spends a lifetime tying thirteen knots against the unknown.
The thread may have faded long ago, but the shelter of those thirteen knots still travels with us.
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