As a child, the two most important events
in my calendar were my birthday and Diwali.
Weeks before Diwali my mother would go to
the Blind School fair and buy candles. My sister and I would both get new
clothes for each of our birthdays and for Diwali. I recall how we hovered over
our mother as she mapped out the cloth on a newspaper, cut and stitched it on
her Singer machine.
For us, what mattered most on Diwali was not
the crackers and the evening lights, but the mornings. One would have to wake
up at four am, and have an oil bath. My mother would arrange our new clothes
with a lamp, rice, and a coin on a silver tray. We would scramble to find
textbooks to place on the tray for the Saraswati puja. By dawn, however, we
would all be bathed and ready. Then, as
on all Sundays (also the weekly hair wash day), we would breakfast on dosas with MS Subalakshmi’s Bhaja Govindam and Vishnu Sahsranam playing in the background. A round of visits
followed. Since neither of my parents are originally from Delhi, there were few
family members around. But my father’s uncle, Prof. K. Swaminathan, lived in
Naoroji Nagar, from where he edited the collected works of Mahatma Gandhi. He
and his wife, Vishala Patti, were the first stop, and we always got a banana
each as we left. And then there were visits to various Tamil colleagues of my
father’s, whose sons and daughters were much older, or at any rate, always much
better read than us. Completely intimidated, we would come home with relief to
our Diwali lunch, which was usually pooran
poli and srikhand or masale bhat – the only indication that
we were actually half Marathi.
In the evening, my mother would do a simple
Lakshmi puja and make little feet of rice flour which showed Lakshmi heading
straight into our house. Like most girls of our time we disliked noisy bombs,
held phuljadis with care, and
exclaimed at all the anars and chakras blossoming around us. But most
of all we loved the snakes which coiled out of a little black pill.
As I grew older and was left to my own
devices, pre-dawn awakenings gave way to holiday sleep-ins. With no children to
teach ritual to, I lapsed completely. My mother’s dainty Lakshmi feet have become
in my clumsy hands manifestations of a yeti
yeti arrival. Its been decades since I ignited crackers. But my husband and
I still like lighting our house, and Diwali is still a special day in my
calendar, despite the noise, despite the spiking air pollution – a day of
visiting parents and eating too much.
This year, when I heard of the attack on
Junaid in a suburban train, something broke. Here were young boys, on their way
back from shopping for new clothes for Id. What they were doing was what every
child in this country does, look forward with excitement to an upcoming festival.
How can I be happy at Diwali, when Junaid’s family – and that of many others
who have suffered the corrosive hate of a communal attack – have not been able
to celebrate their Id? When some people take pleasure in the death of a Gauri
Lankesh, how does one have the heart to celebrate anything at all? The small black snakes of my childhood have
become Kaliyas, but there is no
Krishna in sight to subdue them.
I don’t know which prescient educator
prescribed these texts, but the two stories that have stayed with me from
school are Premchand’s Idgah and
Tagore’s Kabuliwalah. For years, I could
not narrate these stories to others without crying. In both, there are
characters whose festivals (Id and a daughter’s wedding) were made happier
through the happiness of others. If our sense of our selves expands when we
share our happiness, it also expands when we share the sadness of others.
For me it is more important to be human
than merely to be Hindu. This year, my
house will be dark on Diwali, but at least my heart will be lighter.
https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-edit-page/why-i-will-not-be-celebrating-diwali-this-year-something-broke-when-i-heard-of-the-attack-on-junaid/
