We started with notebooks and graduated to lavatories, self defence classes, laptops during the lockdown... And, every Ganeshotsav, the contributions increased, says Ananya Chincholikar.
Every year, around the same time, our home changes shape.
The furniture shifts a little to make room.
A corner that usually holds nothing more than a side table becomes the most important corner in the house.
Marigold and mango leaves show up at the door before anything else does.
And then, right on muhurat, the seventh member of our house arrives and, for the next several days, our home feels fuller.
Bringing him home has never been one person's job in our family.
It's always been all of us, my brother and I alternating deciding on the idol, my father running for the last-minute needs, my mother and grandmother fussing over the modaks, my grandfather testing the lights on the mandap for the third time even though they worked fine the first time.
These small, seemingly insignificant things have quietly become our favourite traditions.
Ganpati Bappa comes home to us every year and, every year, without meaning to, I notice the same thing happening to the whole city outside our door.
Mumbai changes shape in these 10 days. You feel it before you can name it -- more marigold sellers on the footpath, more dhols practising in some galli at seven in the evening, more people carrying idols home on two-wheelers with one hand on the handlebar and one hand steadying Bappa in the seat behind them like he's a child who might fall asleep.
The whole city seems to soften a little.
Traffic stops for a procession and nobody honks.
There's something about a city as impatient as ours suddenly making room, again and again, for this one big-eared, elephant God.
And I think that's because of who he actually is.
Ganpati isn't complicated. He isn't the God you need years of learning to understand or elaborate rituals to reach.
He's the one you go to first, before an exam, before a wedding, before signing a lease, before anything at all begins, because he's simply the God of New Beginnings. Of hope that things can go well. Of obstacles quietly moving out of the way if you just take the first step with an open heart.
There's a reason that a two year old and a 90 year old can both fold their hands in front of him with the same ease.
He doesn't ask anything difficult of anyone. He just asks you to begin.
A home that isn't just ours
This is the part of Ganpati I love most, and the part I don't think I appreciated until I was older -- during Ganeshotsav, our home stops being only our home.
The door doesn't really close.
People we know well and people we barely know wander in for the evening aarti, to see the decorations, because someone brought them along.
Nobody's checking a guest list.
Everybody's welcome.
Somehow, by the time visarjan comes, our home has quietly held half the neighbourhood inside it.
I think that's the real magic of the festival; it takes something private, something that belongs to one family, and turns it into something shared.
Bappa doesn't seem to mind that the house gets crowded and a little chaotic. If anything, that's the whole point of Him being there; that's where the festival started.
The God of New Beginnings doesn't want a closed door.
The quiet shift
We noticed something that happened every year without anyone really saying it out loud.
All the sweets people brought when they came for the aarti, box after box of them, more than any house could eat in a week, would just sit on the table by the door.
By the time visarjan came around, half of it had gone unused. It always felt a little wrong to us.
We live a life of contrasts -- nothing seems enough; a lot always seems like so little.
But shift context and you realise so many children don't have what we take for granted. Hope. Hope that Bappa gives all of us. Hope that comes from knowledge, which comes from education.
It comes from a simple thought: How can someone who doesn't have the same privilege as us feel the same love, warmth and hope that the Elephant God provides beyond just this week?
So, one year, we just started asking for something else instead: If you're coming for the aarti and you want to bring something -- and everyone wants to bring something, it's how we've all been raised; you don't walk into someone's home during Ganpati empty-handed -- bring a notebook.
Bring a few pencils.
Something that would still be doing some good long after the 10 days were done.
Nobody blinked. If anything, people seemed to like it more.
A box of sweets is nice but it's gone in a week either way. A notebook in some child's school bag stays a lot longer than that.
That first year, notebooks and pencils just became the thing we did. Nobody sat down and planned it out; it simply carried on the next year, and the year after, until it wasn't new anymore; it was just part of how our Ganpati went.
It never mattered how much or how many; that's the power of the collective.
We added to it ourselves too, putting aside a bit of what we'd have spent on the festival, gathering a little more from whoever wanted to join in, until it grew into something steadier, something we now give properly every year, to support children's education through Apni Shala, which works with kids from low-income communities here in Mumbai.
We started with notebooks and graduated to lavatories, self defence classes, laptops during the lockdown... But it never stopped feeling like what it started as -- a house full of people who wanted to bring something and us just finding them a better place to put it.
And, every Ganeshotsav, the contributions increased. More people joined this journey, people who had heard of us from relatives and friends and wanted to help make a difference. Each year, now, we ask Apni Shala what they need and year, with Bappa's blessing and everyone’s contributions, we find a way to get there.
Today, it's strange to sit with a number like '10 years'; that's where we are at; that's when all this began.
When we started, it was just something we hoped we'd stick with. Now it's simply what Ganpati means in our house.
It is the festival, as natural as the flowers, the noise and the neighbours coming through the door.
There's something quietly powerful about a tradition that repeats. A single act of generosity is lovely but it's a moment. Ten years of the same act, returning faithfully with the same festival, every year without exception, that becomes something else entirely. It becomes a promise kept.
A second kind of prayer, made not with folded hands but with a little bit of what we have, given consistently, one Ganpati after another.
We didn't do anything extraordinary. We just decided, once, that our joy shouldn't exist entirely for itself and then, with the help of everyone in our lives, we kept that decision alive for 10 years running.
The visarjan, and what doesn't go with it
On the final day, when the whole family carries Bappa out together for visarjan, there's always that bittersweet moment -- the drums loud, the crowd joyful and still a lump in the throat as He goes under the water.
A week of a fuller house and suddenly it's quiet again.
But something always stays behind. What stays is the knowledge that somewhere, a child had a notebook, a school fee paid on time, a chance at a classroom they might not otherwise have reached.
Bappa's visit is a week long.
What we hope it does, though, lasts far beyond that, when it comes to a child's education, in a future being built one year at a time, every year, with the help of many hands and an open door.
I'm not writing this because we've done something remarkable; plenty of families do far more, far more quietly than us.
I'm writing this because I think festivals are at their best when they stretch a little. When a God who welcomes everyone into your living room also gently reminds you that hope shouldn't stop at your front door either.
If this has taught our family anything, it's this -- you don't need a grand gesture to make a festival matter beyond your own walls. You just need a home willing to stay open, to guests, to neighbours, to a stranger who wandered in once and never really left and a decision, made quietly and kept faithfully, year after year.
This year, as Bappa comes home for His annual visit, our house fills up the way it always does -- with family doing 10 things at once, with neighbours who don't knock anymore, with children who aren't ours running through the hall as they belong there because for these days, they do.
And quietly, alongside all of it, we'll do the other thing too. The thing that's now simply ours and, we hope in some small way, someone else's beginning too
Ganpati Bappa Morya. Pudhchya Varshi Lavkar Ya (Come again soon next year). And when He does, and so do you, may you find our door still open and our small, steady effort still standing, 10 years turning into 11, and 11 into many more.
