pongala ,......2012

Pongala

  The first first was that this was the very first time, that i had travelled all alone from mumbai to anywhere out of mumbai...without any family friends or acquaintances...ekta jeev sadashiv kind of journey....only concession i gave myself was that i booked tickets on 2nd class AC instead of regular second class.

since it was a working day, and i left for the railway station from office, hubby offered to get my luggage-just one small bag, btw.... to the railway station...

Lallu's Garib rath gave me wonderful AC, but no blankets..and since i cant bear AC draft i had to make do with my old stole to steal some warm moments for myself.

Okay, now the reason why i took a week off to kerala:

it is about a particular local temple festival that happens at during holi.

a devi's 'attukal' temple, where apparently due to tradition, women throng from all neighboring areas and cook rice 'nivedian' and payasam(kheer) to please the 'devi' on newly baked virgin clay pots, the stove being just three bricks, and firewood being twigs from coconut trees. u are also supposed to be dressed in fresh new pure cotton sarees.

well, guys, this year, the women who thronged to Trivandrum was 37lakhs( all in a six km radius)! they apparently also hold the genius book world record for maximum congregation of woman at a particular place or something like that some two years ago.

i was making this trip the first time, (i learn t of this festival only last July) just to know what it was all about.

so there i reach Kerala, to my inlaws place and from there to trivandrum (with my teacher sis-in-law and her 5 teacher friends) to celebrate 'pongala'. the train needless to say was filled with women of all ages, sizes and shapes

the festival is such that,the fire is first lighted at the temple, at about 10.15 am, after which we are supposed to light our individual fires and cook the prasad for the devi.on an empty stomach btw( i cheated with a cup of tea). All is fine, except that there was no way i was even remotely prepared to face the heat and smoke and smog of the collective fires from the individual kilns, and the daunting 10.30 heat of the sun.....suffice to say, within the first 10 minutes, i had already decided that i wasnt doing this again(i didnt go this year)...the smoke, the fire, and the sun... all i can remember vividly is the stinging and burning of the eyes......... there was just no way i cud keep my eyes open in order to push the firewood which was supposed to help heat the water in the pot, which was supposed to overflow(pongala)..(.that is supposed to be the offering by the way, the overflowing of the pot....)

somehow the pots overflowed, and by 12 all of us finished our respective cooking..

i almost felt like how Edmund Hillary Tensing wud have felt when he conquered Everest...a sense of achievement, at having done the impossible, also a nagging doubt, whether all that trouble was worth it!

or maybe he did fell a sense of achievement!.

.but what i felt was a niggling doubt.. was I insane to have traveled all the way to cook a square meal with just three bricks and two clay pots in a starched cotton saree, but from past trekking experiences, i was also sure that tomorrow i wud be feeling like i had conquered Everest!...