A few months ago, I paid a visit to my favourite nursery in Delhi to pick up some plants for my balcony. Walking through the rows of spring blooms, I came across a plant that looked very familiar indeed. “Yeh shiuli hai, na?” I asked the gardener who was assisting me. “Nahin madam,” he said, shaking his head. “Isko parijaat kehte hain.” I was unconvinced by this explanation. So, I took a picture and uploaded it into an app that helps identify plants. And what do you know? Both of us were right. This plant is called parijaat in north India; but in east India (where I grew up) it is called shiuli.

As a child growing up in Calcutta, I was always told that the shiuli plant was very auspicious because its flowering – which happens only once a year – heralds the beginning of the Pujo season. Every October, without fail, the white and orange blooms of the shiuli tree burst forth, reminding us that the Goddess Durga is on her way and will soon be among us. These teeny-tiny flowers fall from the shiuli tree every night, carpeting the floor and exuding a heavenly fragrance that I have always associated with Pujo festivities.

So, even though the parijaat/shiuli available in the nursery were just small potted plants, I decided to take a couple home with me. In a couple of years, I thought to myself, they would grow strong and high and maybe, in time, they would start to flower and remind me of those heady pre-Pujo evenings I remembered from my days in Cal. So, I transplanted them into roomy pots and resigned myself to a long wait.

Well, guess what? Just a few months down the line, as October began to rear its head, these small little bushes that I had been watering faithfully began to throw up little buds on their branches. And in a week or so, my plants were redolent with the shiuli blossoms, exuding their trademark perfume and putting me in the right Pujo spirit. Sure, the flowers were tinier than I remembered from the tree in Calcutta, and they wilted far sooner, but for a little baby plant, my shiuli was doing very well in its role as a harbinger of the Goddess.

But while this gladdened my heart, injecting it with a dose of rose-tinted nostalgia for the Durga Pujos past that I had celebrated in the city of my birth, it also left me a little bit sad. And that’s because this year, Pujo will not have the same resonance in Calcutta. By all accounts, everyone is still shattered by the RG Kar rape case, and the Pujo spirit has been diluted with both anger and sadness.

And while I know that it will be hard to enjoy the festivities quite as we did in the years gone by, the flowering of the shiuli reminded me that the Goddess will keep her appointment with us this Pujo as well. Now, it is up to us to give her the kind of welcome she deserves and to pray that her avenging spirit does right by the young doctor who has, so far, been failed by the system.

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