These docile, naive, and submissive mothers to their sons can also be the first agent of patriarchy in their daughters' life.

I can’t see aspirational value in Diwali labour or any form of domestic labour, because all I have seen of it is exhaustion.

In a rapidly westernizing country, this piece is a call for action. A call to remember and tell these slowly disappearing tales and keep lighting those lamps. So the spirits AND our culture, even though invisible and formless, can be content, that they haven’t been forgotten. Kalighat painting of a Pari As a Bengali who grew up in the early 2000s — perhaps the last pre-internet generation — I grew up with ghosts. And October meant huddling with my dadu under a blanket on the