Bodhon, Kalparambho and the opening of Shashthi

Durga is being worshipped out of season. The autumn puja is akal bodhon — the untimely waking — a rite performed, in the Ramayana as Bengal tells it, by Rama before his battle with Ravana, because he could not wait for spring. Every Shashthi begins by acknowledging that.

Kalparambho sets the vow and the frame of the days ahead. Bodhon wakes her. Amantran invites her, and adhibas consecrates the objects of the puja — often under a bel tree, since the bel is where the rite places her.

Until Shashthi the idol's face is covered. The unveiling is the moment the pandal becomes a puja rather than a construction site, and in a para puja it is a genuinely emotional few minutes with most of the neighbourhood standing there.

Committees announce their own timing and it varies. If you want to see it, ask at the pandal a day earlier rather than trusting a schedule found online.

Everything is finished and almost nobody has arrived yet. The lighting is on, the artwork is intact, the volunteers are fresh and cheerful, and you can stand in front of an installation for as long as you want to look at it.

By Saptami evening the same pandal is a moving queue. If your interest is in what the pandals actually are — and for a great many visitors it is — Shashthi and the two days before it are worth more than Ashtami.

The city knows this perfectly well, which is why a great deal of Kolkata's own pandal hopping happens on Chaturthi and Panchami, before the festival has formally begun. Local families with small children, anybody who wants to photograph an installation, and everyone who has to work through the peak nights all go early.

The days leading up to Shashthi are their own thing if you are staying in a neighbourhood rather than visiting it. The pandal goes up over weeks — bamboo first, then the skin of it, then the lighting — and the last forty-eight hours are a scramble of artisans, electricians and volunteers working through the night.

The idol arrives from Kumartuli, usually on a handcart or a small lorry, and is carried in and installed. In a lot of paras that arrival is a small procession in itself, with the dhak meeting it at the corner.

If you have any way of being in a neighbourhood on the day before Shashthi, take it. It is the least photographed and most affectionate part of the whole festival.

Pick one neighbourhood and walk all of it, slowly, in the evening. On Shashthi that is genuinely possible in a way it will not be again for four days.

Go back to the two or three that struck you the next morning, when the light is different and the rituals are happening. Shashthi evening and Saptami morning together are the best twelve hours of the festival for a first-time visitor, and neither of them involves a queue.