My fondest childhood memory—the one I still hold closest to my bosom—is scooping up hoards of shiulis from the verandah of our ancestral property with my mother and grandmother in a remote hamlet of Assam's Barak Valley. These night-blooming flowers, with their hypnotic fragrance, would fall in a thick white blanket with a tinge of orange at the centre. I, whose daak naam (pet name) is Jue—another flower from the jasmine family—would rush to her like a hopeless lover smitten by its beauty. But shiuli was always more than just a flower. Its bloom marked the arrival of something, rather someone, divine. For us in Silchar, the second-largest town in Assam, it meant only one thing:
Maa Durga was coming home.