Tomorrow will be the day of Makar Sankranti; the end of month of Poush and the beginning of Magh. From tomorrow the sun will transit to Makar rashi that is Capricorn. It means the end of month with winter solstice.
From tomorrow, days will start getting longer and the days of longer nights are over. Effectively, in this part of globe, tomorrow preludes summer and epilogues winter. For us, the Bengalees, the Indians, tomorrow marks the beginning of a sad phase of time as we have to gear up for a long haul of sultry summer after a briefest spell of welcoming cooler weather and milder sun.
Bengalees will celebrate the day with pulee and pithe : home-made sweetmeats made of rice-powder and coconut scrapings. After a good harvest, this year, the Bengalees, no doubt, will stop at nothing to celebrate the occasion.
My town has a big bonus with the sweet delicacies. Tomorrow the whole of Burdwan will be up on the roofs of their homes the whole day to fly kites. After over a month of long tryst with suto-latai, tomorrow will wrap up kite flying with a mega kite-fair.
Kite lovers, in the age group from eight to eighty, of male and female, of Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs and Christians, of rich and poor, will be roof-bound with their kites soaring high in the sky while they control their flight with latai in hand.
Shouts of vo-katta will rend the air from the wee hours of morning, signaling the cry of a victor off a kite fight. The cut-off kite sails away across the sky to land up on where it only knows; to humans the far-sailing kites will land at nether lands. How these lands look like is what for the serious souls to ruminate.
The tribals will join the festival with immersing Tusu idols on the shrunken Damodar river. The ever-widening river beach will be home to thousands of Santhals dancing to the maddening beats of madol. They will sing songs which hover over the area with melancholic ring. Kite-lovers from town and surrounding areas will descend on the beach to give a last tug at the thread of kite for the year.
Against the backdrop of dridim-dim of madol, of cut-off multi- coloured kites, of sand-laden humanities, roaming around, ambling across, jostling ahead, hurrying away from stalls of burnt-out mud pots and pitchers to those of quintessential shankaloos, sun drops on the western horizon, marking the end of poush: the end of woolens, badminton racquets, cricket bats and picnics amidst frenzied whirl of sand under fanatic trample of foot on Damodar beach.