A tiny tot and a gran’pa left home with a lot of plans on Sunday afternoon but had to keep feeling for rain with outstretched hands to take a call on whether it would be safe to venture out of the shade and into a pandal. Picture by Amit Datta

Calcutta, Oct. 5: Eight-year-old Anasuya Chakraborty wanted to strut around Salt Lake’s FD Block pandal in her pink frock and equally pink shoes on Day One of Durga Puja.

A sudden shower this afternoon, though, left the lush ground and her spirits wet and her mother forced her into a glaring blue raincoat.

“It is my best dress, but no one can see it,” the girl said, standing on the edge of the pandal with her father and waiting for the rain to relent.

The hour-long rain across central, north and eastern Calcutta led to waterlogged pandals and slushy streets, forcing many potential pandal hoppers to stay indoors.

If the Met office forecast is to be believed, tomorrow will not be much different. It has warned of scattered thundershowers in Calcutta and adjoining areas on Monday and the remaining three days of Puja.

“The monsoon is still there and there is ample moisture in the atmosphere. Moreover, the trough of low pressure is sucking in loads of moisture from the Bay of Bengal leading to rapid development of thunderclouds and rain,” said G.C. Debnath, director of the weather section at the Regional Meteorological Centre in Alipore.

If the forecast is bad news for pandal hoppers, Puja organisers are losing sleep on how to minimise its impact on footfall.

Although caught unawa-res by the sudden shower, a broom brigade of the College Square Sarbojanin Durgotsav Committee swung into action to remove slush from the approach to the pandal this afternoon.

“We’ve also arranged for two pumps to flush out rain water,” said Bikash Majumdar, the general secretary of the 61-year-old committee.

The organisers at Mohammed Ali Park have ordered five truckloads of sand to tackle waterlogging.

“Rain is the biggest concern for us as it affects footfall. We are trying to make the best possible arrangements… Police commissioner Gautam Mohan Chakrabarti visited our pandal in the evening and he was happy with the preparations,” said Vinod Sharma, the Puja committee general secretary.

But Biplab Samadder, a Class X student who had come from Howrah with his friends, was not happy as he had to go back to his Andul home before sunset.

“I had left home around 11.30am and planned to go to some of the big pandals. It took me over one-and-a-half hours to reach College Square, then again I got stuck for another hour or so because of the rain. I am going back,” said Samadder, rainwater dripping from his denims.

Had Samadder chosen to start his day from south Calcutta, his experience would have been different, as that part of the city remained dry.

“I just got a call from my sister, who was in the Esplanade area. She told me it’s raining heavily there. But look, the weather’s so nice here. I hope it continues and the weather improves for the rest of the city,” said Mala Bhattacharyya, 54, a homemaker, at Maddox Square.

The weather office said all parts of the city were unlikely to get a uniform amount of rain “as it is being caused by local development of thunderclouds”.