There were 3 people on the stage in the park, in front of the idols, who performed the Aarti; it was done 9 times, and a different item was used each time. Usually, in aartis, it is typical to use lamps, but over here, in each round, a different item was used – single lamp, multiple lamps, broom, mirror, lotus, dhoti, etc. I didn’t know the significance of the items, but I’m sure there was some history behind this.
After the Aarti, we went to Balaram Mullick – a famous sweet shop in the neighbourhood. We had the mishti doi and stuffed ourselves with a few more sweets before leaving. While walking around, we landed in another pandal at around 10:30pm; we didn’t spend much time but clicked a few snaps and headed back to our hotel.
Back in the hotel, we continued our research for rooms for tomorrow because our other booking was cancelled. Deb suggested some alternative places – one unique place was called Floatel (a hotel on a ship). But fortunately, at midnight, we discovered availability in our existing hotel itself! Made sense to stay put rather than shift just for a day.
Deb messaged, “We missed Kumartuli. I heard the theme was intergalactic connections, and the mandap is space-themed.”
I reminded him, “Still not missed. We have two more days!”
By 12:30 am, we dozed off – you’ll definitely have a sound sleep after walking so much in the day!
Day 4 – Sunday (6th October)
Kshitij messaged that from the 7th to 10th days of the puja, the crowds will be crazy. So it’s good to start pandal hopping on day 6 (this was the day after we landed when we covered many pandals). After day 6, the best time to visit pandals is early morning. The peak time tends to be from the afternoon to late at night, as we discovered yesterday. Kshitij sent a few links with images and videos of what’s there in some of the major North Kolkata pandals – space theme in Kumartuli, Muhammad Ali Park had recreated a Murugan temple from South India, Ahiritola had recreated the Somnath temple in Gujarat, College Square had based it on Umaid Bhawan in Rajasthan, Santosh Mitra had an idol made using 50 kgs of gold.
Seeing the list, I definitely wanted to do the North Kolkata pandals that we missed due to the crowds yesterday; since it was already late when we woke up today (8:30 am), today was ruled out. And Aaron had got tired of seeing so many pandals as well!
We shifted to another room on a different floor in the morning and then headed to St. Paul’s Cathedral in an Uber. The place was beside the Birla Planetarium.
This is a really old church constructed in the 1800s. A beautiful, well-maintained, lush green lawn in front of the church welcomes you. Inside the church is a huge hall where sermons are delivered. There were rows of benches and cushioning at the bottom in front of each row so that people could kneel down to pray if they wanted to. A few people were praying when we entered the hall. We sat for a few minutes in silence. After being amongst huge crowds, we appreciated the calm and quiet over here with barely a dozen people inside the church. Aaron clicked a snap in the main hall, and within a couple of minutes, a security guard came running in, asking for Aaron’s phone. “Delete the photo, delete the photo,” he kept repeating. No photos are allowed inside. We spent about 30 minutes in the church premises before heading to the Victoria Memorial, which was at a walkable distance.
There were two counters for purchasing tickets to enter the Memorial’s grounds; one counter had 20 people while another one on the side, at an awkward diagonal angle, had just 5. Did seem strange that as people came to the place, they automatically went to the longer queue – it seemed like people thought the shorter one was for something else. We got the ticket within 5 minutes and walked inside. There was a pebble path and a vast lawn. One side of the Memorial was undergoing renovation, so we had to walk all the way around the Memorial to get to the backside. The building looked impressive from the outside, constructed using white marble similar to the Taj Mahal.
