Diwali: The Festival of Togetherness

Diwali is here. So? So, I am supposed to hyperventilate with super-excitement, jump with joy, go shopping for clothes, jewellery, gifts, sweets, crackers, blah, blah, blah…….But I do none of that. And why is it so? I could be getting old, of course, but nothing seems to be the same anymore. Is it just time and age that has brought about this drastic change?

Now it seems more a festival of commercialisation than celebration- with the unending spurrings to spend- gold biscuits, gold-threaded sarees, innovative jewellery and gifts. The markets leave no stone unturned to woo you into loosening your purse strings and somehow leaving you with a feeling of guilt if you haven’t shopped till you dropped like everybody else, read, burnt a hole in your budget.

Diwali was so much fun when we were kids. We had much less but the genuine excitement more than made up for what we lacked materially. Was that long gone Diwali really better or does it only seem so because our memories of events are better than the actual events?

A typical Diwali went like this. Literally morning showed the day. Interesting how no school made all the difference. We woke up but didn’t get out of bed until our innocuous pillow fights showed initial murmurings of turning serious and Dad had to intervene.

We then ran off to the garden. Mama would call us for breakfast at regular intervals. We never gave her a heed, jumping off walls, climbing thorny, fruitless trees for whatever reason, digging directionless tunnels through the dry stony beds and scrambling onto rooftops, not realising until we got there that there was no way down. Mama’s strident calls would gradually turn concerned for our safety. Of course, we ignored it, but what sweet music it was to our ears. Perhaps we played monkey as much for the fun of it as to hear her voice, sick with worry and thick with love.

We didn’t wear new. Our brood of three had already had new clothes for Durga Puja that had just gone round the corner. But who cared. Diwali was a blast and would remain so irrespective of what we did or didn’t wear.

After lunch we would go shopping for crackers. That was a prevailing trend then, at least in our household. Dad and by default the rest of us, were under the impression that crackers were cheapest on Diwali day with shopkeepers eager to sell off all they had at whatever prices possible. With that gem of insight into market dynamics, we trooped into the shops. Dad was quite magnanimous, giving us an open invitation to take what we liked. And we liked everything, especially the sparklers, the coloured pencils and matches, the charkis and the spouts. But no rockets, missiles or bombs. We were happy, we had three bags full of crackers. Dad paid up a bill totalling Rs 50/-. And he was happy too. Today crackers worth Rs 50/- would get lost in your back pocket.

In the evening we arranged the deeyas in lines on the verandah, the sit-out, the gate. There were no candles back then nor litchi lights. But the yellowish, flickering, unsynchronised flames of the basic earthen deeyas were more than mere sources of light. They had the heady smell of home, hearth and the carrying forward of a thousand year old culture. Half the evening was spent tending to the temperamental deeyas- pouring in more oil and pushing up the bathis. Once in my eagerness to keep them alight all evening I had overlooked a soft sputtering whisper but the accompanying pungent odour was not so easy to ignore. My long flowing locks had caught fire.

Early on in the evening the whole family got together holding ‘Kaunria kathi’. These were thin sticks of a jute- wicker type plant that we were supposed to light and then beat against the ground calling out to all our dead ancestors. This was not just the celebration of the return of Lord Rama. It was also a ritual that connected us with our past –an acknowledgement that our ancestors were always around playing guardian angel.

We went berserk with the crackers. Each one concentrated on his or her favourite cracker, mostly colours and lights. But dad had slightly relaxed the norms for our Ramu Kaka who could be seen firing rockets into the cold night sky. He looked so brave daring the missiles.

Mom had made ‘pitha’, varieties of pancakes with innovative stuffings. Normally that was grandma’s domain, but mom had taken over in her absence saying ‘people don’t endure, traditions do’. Wonderful smells wafted from the kitchen and it was full of goodies Mom had literally cooked up. She was making up for all the past years, probably wanting to prove that you could do whatever you really wanted to. We had gone overboard too and invited all our friends, in keeping with the generous Diwali mood.

She laid out the spread and we fought each other to get at them. We dug in our teeth eagerly and “EEEEEEKS!!!”, we screamed in pain holding onto our jaws. They were so hard they nearly broke our teeth. Those who had already stuffed two or three in their pockets were looking for inoffensive ways to put them back. Soon we all burst out laughing, despite the colossal waste of all the material, labour and good intention that had gone into it. They looked like the little ‘stone bombs’ that burst when thrown hard against the floor, so we called them ‘stone pithas’ and threw them all around.

Initially we felt bad that Mom couldn’t cook as well as other mothers. But we were proud that she was brave enough to try something she had never done before.

We slept happy, with our lessons of love and good intentions, of trying and not being afraid of failing.

That’s the kind of Diwali I wish for my children, my family and myself.