First probashi Pujo — and the dhak I heard in a Berlin basement

The address was a community hall in Kreuzberg. I climbed down a stairwell that smelled of damp concrete — and then suddenly there it was. A small Durga idol on a folding table, twenty Bengalis singing agomoni in slightly off-key German-accented Bangla, and the unmistakable sound of a dhak being played, badly and beautifully, by a man who had clearly learned it from YouTube last week. A jethima I had never met before put a plate of khichuri in my hands and said, "Eat, you have lost weight." I had not, but I cried anyway. Travel does this strange thing — it takes you ten thousand kilometres away and then drops you, gently, into your own childhood living room. Pujo is wherever Bengalis decide it will be.