Buses and trams

Kolkata's buses — state-run and private — keep going through the five days, and the state transport corporation typically runs additional night services on the busiest routes during Puja. They are cheap and they go everywhere.

The problem is that they are on the roads, and the roads are subject to the police traffic plan. Routes get diverted around the pandal areas at short notice, stops move, and a bus that normally passes a puja may this week go three streets around it. Ask the conductor rather than trusting the board.

For a visitor who does not read Bengali route boards, buses are a difficult first choice during Pujo. For anyone who already knows the routes, the extra night services are genuinely useful.

Kolkata ran Asia's oldest tram network and, for most of the last decade, has been steadily withdrawing it. Very little of the network still operates and its future has been repeatedly and publicly contested.

Do not build a Pujo evening around a tram. If one turns up on a route you are walking, take it for the pleasure of the thing — but treat it as a lucky event rather than a transport plan.

Metro between clusters, feet within them, and a bus only where you already know the route. On the peak nights that ordering is not really negotiable.

The one place buses come into their own is the run home late at night on a main road when the Metro has stopped and no cab will accept the trip.