Ron­gali Bihu is a fun time for us Assamese peo­ple. Luck­ily for me, I landed in the thick of action. The sec­ond day itself I was whisked off for a Bihu gath­er­ing by my dad. Appar­ently it’s a tra­di­tion for his group of friends (going way back to 1957!) to meet dur­ing Bihu and spend some time together. So a group of his friends was there along with their bet­ter halves in some cases, mak­ing it a mot­ley col­lec­tion of about 20 odd 60+ year folks rec­ol­lect­ing their school days and still bond­ing so many years later. It was a rather nice sight to see.

It’s been a while since I’d actu­ally vis­ited a Bihu cel­e­bra­tion so I thor­oughly enjoyed myself. There were sev­eral dif­fer­ent types of per­for­mances from the Bihu dance, to Manipuri to Jhu­mur to a Pun­jabi dance (not the bhangra though!). The CM of Assam also made an appear­ance along with sev­eral Black Cat com­man­does and a rea­son­ably big entourage and also shook a leg on the merry occasion.

Ron­gali Bihu is also a time for food, not that we ever need an excuse. So I helped myself to large doses of pitha, sira (puffed rice) with fresh cream, yoghurt and jag­gery (which I love!) and all kinds of fish del­i­ca­cies. I was out nearly every day vis­it­ing friends of my dad. It seemed more like a trip where I was social­iz­ing with his friends. Not that I minded since I didn’t have too many folks on my list anyways!

So over­all, I had spent a really hec­tic week. And except for a few alter­ca­tions with my mom on her favourite topic that I referred to ear­lier, I actu­ally had a rather nice time. I had some inten­tion of vis­it­ing the Kamakhya tem­ple at some point of time. But the weather played spoil sport with heavy rains almost every day. And very over­cast skies, so it wasn’t exactly ideal to take any photographs.

I was left off with the air­port by mom and dad with no so veiled sug­ges­tions. Just as I was about to leave, board­ing pass in hand, my mom tells me that one of her friends knows a guy… (I feign igno­rance and look to the ceil­ing) and dad tells me that next time I need to come back next time with a “com­pan­ion” in tow. I rather liked his choice of the word. If only com­pan­ions were like veg­eta­bles and read­ily avail­able at Food­world, I’d have sev­eral vari­eties on my plate : aspara­gus, let­tuce, spinach, beans for exam­ple are some of my favourite.

In my best som­bre expres­sion, I promised to get Kit Kit along next time I visit.

~~ A few more pho­tos from Ron­gali Bihu