The Hand on the Shoulder
Oct 19, 2026
During the arati, when the dhak gets loud
enough to move the floor under the folding chairs, a boy of about six broke
away from his mother and ran the length of the hall with his arms out, weaving
between the rows, laughing at nothing in particular. An uncle caught him by the
shoulder, turned him around and bent to his ear with his face arranged into
that expression the diaspora keeps ready for its children, the one that means
you are embarrassing us. The boy's arms came down. He walked back and sat. The
dhak carried on, the smoke carried on, the queue for bhog carried on, and
nobody in that hall thought anything had happened. Something had. The most
important thing that happened in the pandal that evening was the hand on that
shoulder, and every adult in the room missed it because we were all busy
watching the idol.
The hall had taken two months to put
together. The booking, the sponsorship banners along the side wall, the
WhatsApp group with its hundred and forty members arguing about parking and
prasad, the committee photograph, the rehearsals that ran past ten at night,
the sarees pressed and the dhuti folded, the cultural programme typed up and
timed to the minute, the anniversary printed on everything. All of it built
with real labour by people who are tired and who did it anyway after work. And
at the centre of that enormous effort, the one person it was supposedly for got
a hand on his shoulder and learned to sit down.
The story we are telling in those four days
is a story about a child coming home. Uma arrives at her baper bari with her
children in tow, her mother has been counting the days since the last time, and
the whole emotional architecture of agomoni is a parent's longing, the ache of
holding a daughter for a few short days while the boat waits at the ghat.
Bengalis sing this with their eyes closed. Men who have not wept since their
own father's shraddha go quiet when the agomoni songs begin. Then the song ends
and a real child runs across a real floor in a real hall in Mt. Eden,
and we shush her, because the recording of the longing has become more precious
to us than the thing we claim to be longing for.
A child in a pandal absorbs very little of
the Devi Mahatmya and almost everything of the temperature of the room. He is
reading whether the adults' faces soften when he appears, whether he can get to
the front, whether anyone knows his name, whether there is food he likes,
whether a single person has asked him a question and then waited for the
answer. He is building the bodily memory he will carry of what it feels like to
be Bengali in this country, and that memory is made of hands and faces and
tones of voice rather than of shlokas. The boy caught by the shoulder learned
something exact that evening. He learned that the hall is beautiful when he is
still and becomes a problem when he is himself. In fifteen years he will be
twenty-one and he will have something on that weekend, and the committee will
sit in another room and say that the young ones have no interest in culture,
and they will put it down to the phones, or to this country, or to his mother.
None of them will remember the hand.
The savarna body is trained in stillness
from infancy, in containment, in cleanliness, in correct volume and correct
placement. Loudness is coded as the body of somebody else, the labouring body,
the Dalit and Bahujan body, the Muslim mohalla, the mela crowd on the other
side of the respectable street. When an uncle hisses at a six year old for
running, no word about caste is spoken and caste is precisely what is being
handed over. That is the first lesson, delivered years before the child has a
vocabulary to refuse it, and the second follows close behind: the quiet,
obedient, examination-topping body earns love, and the exuberant body earns
shame. By the time a Bengali child here is twelve she already has the whole
grammar of who may take up space and how much, and she can apply it to a
stranger in a supermarket aisle without being taught a word of theory.
The hall is booked from the council. A
caretaker checks the floor after we leave. There are neighbours who could
complain and a booking that has to be renewed next year. So the children are
told to be quiet, and the real message is addressed to nobody in the room. We
are the good migrants, our children sit still, our children top their classes,
we are no trouble to anybody, please let us keep the hall. Our children's
silence is the currency with which savarna migrants buy standing in a white
settler society, and we spend it freely because it costs us nothing we can see.
It is the same movement of the same hand that governs what we say at our dinner
tables about Māori, where the instruction to our children is to work hard, keep
your head down and do not turn out like them. The hand on the shoulder in the
pandal and the sentence at the dinner table are one gesture.
Children run the length of a wharenui while
a whaikōrero is underway. They climb over the mattresses, they shout, they fall
asleep sideways across an aunty's legs while the speaker is still standing, and
the speaker does not stop. The karanga does not pause to manage them. The noise
of children moving through the house is heard as the sound of the people
continuing, which is what it is. Children are seated where they can see. They
are fed early and fed well. They are spoken about in the oratory itself, which
turns again and again to the mokopuna and to the generations still coming, so
that a four year old asleep on the floor is a named reason for the gathering
rather than a logistical difficulty at its edges.
Kaitiakitanga is the word for the
obligation underneath that. It names a guardianship over what you did not
create and will never own, exercised on behalf of those who come after, and it
extends to the river, the maunga, the reo and the child alike. A child held
under kaitiakitanga is a taonga, a living point where the tūpuna and the unborn
meet, and the adult standing beside that child is a caretaker of a line running
in both directions through them. Savarna Bengalis carry another theory of the
child, as property and as proof: evidence that the migration paid off, a doctor
or an engineer in production, a line in a WhatsApp forward about results, a
performer who can be brought out at Pujo and put away again. Property can be
disciplined into silence without any loss, because the point of it is what it
demonstrates to other adults. A taonga cannot be, because the point of it is
the child.
Māori have been teaching this in the open
for the whole time we have been here, on marae that are opened to tauiwi who
have given them very little, in pōwhiri we attend without hearing a word, in a
politics of mokopuna that is spoken plainly at every hui. Savarna Bengalis take
the hospitality, take the land, take the hall, and return a lecture about five
thousand years of civilisation and a complaint about how these people raise
their kids. The lesson is free, it is repeated, it has been offered to us more patiently
than we deserve, and we walk past it every October carrying our own children by
the wrist.
A Pujo built for children is not a
difficult thing to build, which is what makes the failure so damning. It means
the children sit at the front instead of at the back behind the uncles with the
cameras. It means the cultural programme does not open with eleven minutes of
committee speeches and sponsor acknowledgements while five year olds are told
to stop fidgeting, and does not then bury the children's recitation at the dead
end of the evening, where the adults talk through it loudly before demanding silence
for their own song. It means a fourteen year old co-comperes and chooses two
items. It means the children are asked what they want in the programme and then
given it, even when the answer is something no committee member can pronounce.
It means a corner of the hall with mats and crayons and somebody's older cousin
in charge, food served to the children first, and an adult whose only job those
four days is to learn and use every child's name. It means that during the
arati, when a boy runs the length of the hall with his arms out, the dhak is
loud enough to cover him and every hand in the room stays where it is.
On the last day we carry the Devi to the
water and give her back to it, clay and straw and bamboo returning to the river
they came from, and we say she will come again next year. What goes into the
water is material. What comes back depends entirely on who decides to come
back, and that is decided in moments like the one in the hall, by hands on
shoulders, years before anybody is old enough to be asked. The idol is
replaceable and arrives by freight. The children are the only part of the Pujo
that cannot be ordered again. We get this backwards every year, and every year
we call it culture.