Walking along the Juhu beach the day after the visarjan, you are struck by the number of distorted idols and its paraphernalia that you see strewn about in the sand. For miles along the coast, the only thing that you see is the debris of a festival gone by.

The morning after the visarjan, the after-effects of the great festival are clearly visible, and for many a ‘gleaner’ this is a great day to pick up discarded artificial jewellery and other re-saleable articles from amidst the remains. Some children on the beach re-enact the visarjan, picking up the idols that have been washed ashore to submerge them into the sea again, perhaps unaware of the fact that the ocean throws back whatever you try to discard in it. As a man surveying the scene, an amused look on his face put it, “samundar apne andar thode hi kuch rakhta hai, dusre hi din bahar phenk deta hai.” (The ocean throws back whatever you put in it; it doesn’t keep anything.) It is only with the passage of time and the corrosive action of the waves that the idols finally wear away.

Year after year lakhs of Ganpati and Durga are prayed to till they finally find their way to the shores of the city. Year after year they are submerged into the waters and are washed ashore. Year after year they lie on the sand, till all that remains strewn about are their carcasses. As a lady standing on the beach observing the broken idols remarked, “Dus din isse bhagwan ki tarah pujte hain, aur phir aise hi samundar mein phenk dete hain.” (For ten days they pray to it as if it were God, and then they just abandon it in the sea.)

In the wake of the festival, the sun sets upon thousands of idols lying deserted on the shores of the city, waiting, just as their predecessors did, to be wiped out forever.

Text by Manvi Gautam | Photographs by Sagar Shiriskar