Everyday Musings > Happy Diwali

As a child, my brother and I would wake up early, wear new clothes, and rush up and down the apartment stairs to gift our neighbour’s thaalis that our mother covered gently with patterned napkins and filled with a variety of homemade sweets. We’d gleefully ring the bell and grin, jointly declaring ‘Happy Diwali’. The aunties would feed us ladoos and would send their children to gift my mother sweets as well. In the evening, as mother and father did the Diwali puja, my brother would be busy admiring his collection of crackers, and I would light diyas all over the home and make a Rangoli outside the door, with as many colors as I could find, and light lamps around it. And then friends would start screaming by the window, and we would all rush down to celebrate with everyone in the apartment.

Diwali was and is a beautiful time of the year. I especially love how the whole city glows. It’s different from New Year lights, warmer and more traditional. Balconies and stairways and verandas lined with tiny diyas, some colourful and glitzy, some plain clay with a red stripe running across the rim; some filled with ghee, some with til oil, all glowing, like tiny beams of hope and joy. Even the poorest house in the neighbourhood looks warm and well.

I sat last night and looked at all the windows and balconies and saw parents and children stringing up lights, hanging up coloful paper kandils. I saw my neighbour’s rangoli, colourful and playful. The doors were all dressed in garlands and touches of turmeric and sindoor. Lamps were placed, and incense sticks burnt, it all looked so welcome, like you knew if you rang any doorbell that day, they’d welcome you with smiles and sweets.

Diwali is a great time to meet all those people you haven’t met for so long. Smses come in and make you think, gosh has it really been so long since we met. Friends call and invite you over for card parties. Everyone’s dressed in Indian clothes, probably the only time in a year that some of them do. And all revel in the show of fireworks in the sky or the sweets they indulge in with an ‘its ok, its Diwali’. Relatives call for sweets and sharing crackers with their children.

My maid was telling me of the sweets she’s been making for her children. Karanji, Ladoo, Kheer. There are so many kinds you get to eat, and the dry fruits that keep coming. Mother would stock for an entire year just with Diwali gifts. And fruits as well, large generous baskets of fruits, and later, there were even chocolates and wine and Kiwis and Rambuttans. Diwali is such a giving festival.

But there is something that I don’t look forward to in Diwali. The firecrackers. The pollution. The smell of gunpowder and the particles floating around that choke my throat. My brother and his friends loved them. Bombs. The bigger the better. Atom bombs, Laxmi bombs, string crackers etc etc. Each year, there’d be something that outdoes last year. I’d sit in a corner with cotton filled in my ears, and fingers in it, just in case, sound came through. The only I’d come out would be for the finale. A round of firecrackers in the sky. That was beautiful, like fairies with stardust, sprinkling it in a mad dance. I’d think of that and go to sleep that day, all the excitement having made me drowsy.

In the morning, on the way to school, the road would be covered with thousands of tiny paper bits, abandoned bottles with singed mouths that launched a few hundred rockets, burnt zameen chakris that left tell tale marks on the verandah, sparklers that melted into the tar. Memories of celebrations, spent, sizzled and sleeping. To joyfully rise again, after a year. Happy Diwali.