Locomotoring

I am starting to develop new traditions and fungi has a role to play in that development.

For those of us who leave home to migrate elsewhere, whether by choice or not, the traditions can never be what they once were. I have finally accepted the loss of my yesteryear Bengali traditions. One of my favorite was to wake up with my mother and years later, with my grandmother to tune into Mahisasurmardini at the advent of Durga Puja. We would tune into All India Radio at 4 am from the comfort of our bed to listen to Birendra Krishna Bhadra chant the prayer(link). Mahisasurmardini goes back to the dawn of Hindu religion and Birendra Bhadra’s voice goes back to 1931. Back when I was a child, sleep was precious and yet, the connection I felt with my elders pulled me into joining the family ritual and Bhadra’s primal vocals, chosen to wake up goddess Durga year after year, invariably woke me up. Now, my elders are no longer close to me and sleep is no longer precious. The powerful and moving voice of Bhadra gives me the goosebumps still. One year I experimented with tuning in when it was 4 am in India, in order to join million others in Bengal. The wakeful of the mid-afternoon California, with its bright lights and busyness, took me even further away from the pre-dawn experience.

The traditions co-evolve with the environment – like the fungi to its terroir.

We all have rituals. What are traditions if not rituals that we celebrate together as a community. In the last few years of exploring the in-between spaces, I have developed rituals. A new ritual for me is carving pumpkins during Halloween with themes borrowed from my yesteryear traditions, Durga Puja, and Dussehra, festivals that occur around Halloween. Durga Puja is a ten day festival in Bengal and coincides with ten days of Dussehra in the north India. They both celebrate good over evil but originate in very different arms of Indian mythology. Durga Puja celebrates a specific incarnation of the goddess Durga, where she takes the form of a ten armed slayer Mahisasur Mardini (literal translation of Mardini is slayer), to kill the impossible demon, Mahisasur. Dussehra on the other hand celebrates Rama, of Ramayana fame, slaying Ravana, the brilliant king gone evil, depicted with ten heads, who ruled Sri Lanka. Durga Puja also marks a fiercely competitive period in Kolkata where neighborhoods compete on creative pandals, the temporary structures that are purpose built to gather together during the puja. Last year I carved the ten headed Ravana (link). The year before it was Kumropotash (link), a fantastic fictional character from Sukumar Roy’s book Abol Tabol who can show up in Bengali psyche anytime, but the same year, one of the Kolkata neighborhoods, Nabin Palli Durga Puja Committee in Hatibagan, created an entire pandal around Sukumar Roy’s book.

As I have grown older, I have also found myself envying those who choose to grow up, live and die on their ancestral land. Even before I immigrated, I had no connection with mine. During partition, my grand parents were forced to leave what was their ancestral land, Bangladesh, the delta where Ganges joined the Indian Ocean. My father, due to the nature of his Central Government job, moved from one region of India to another, a nomadic lifestyle that stretched between the Godavari basin to the Aravalis and yet he got close to calling Kolkata his land having spent half his life there – the first and last two decades. For me, it was only after moving to California Bay Area, the rolling stone that I had been, stopped long enough to grow moss. And in time, I had stopped long enough to explore what roots might feel like. I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing more rooted than the connection that native people had, and a lucky few tribes still do, with nature, the mountains, the rivers, the animals and the trees.

Did you know that the mycelium of fungi, the equivalent of fungi roots, grows around its preferred trees? Some like Douglas-firs, other the Monterey cypress, and some others, the Redwoods.

Unlike traditions, that can be developed in one lifetime, it takes many to build connection with the land. I have started my engagement with the land that once was the ancestral land of Ramaytush Ohlone people. I have planted a number of native plants and trees. I catalog the blooms in my garden and in Edgewood County park, a preserved ecology in my neighborhood. I accompany my partner on bird photography walks along the Bay. He accompanies me on hikes in the mountains. We are part of a local CSA in the Santa Cruz county that grows food ethically. We enjoy foraging and hope that it will lead to familiarization of small patches of land and their reaction to the weather.

Fungi are also known to be patient. They can go dormant for years and come back from dormancy when the conditions are favorable again. Some even survive wildfires (link). Even in hard years, they show tenacity by pouring all their energy in one localized flush. And isn’t that a life lesson!