My DIY Diwali

Diwali is such an easy holiday to celebrate these days. One rangoli (solid cut-out, ready to assemble), a few dozen diyas (store bought), cards (from a store), a stack of gift boxes ordered from confectionery shops, and I’m ready for the festival. Back in the retail-challenged past, Diwali was mostly a do-it-yourself affair that kept us busy for weeks.

Houses got cleaned. Special foods got cooked. Metres of silk had to be shopped and dropped off to be stitched by the tailor, followed by days of begging and threatening so that new outfits could be picked up just before the festival. Platters of goodies draped over with a festive cloth had to be hand-delivered to the homes of friends and neighbors. People dropped by with their platters of goodies and sat and chatted over cups of tea. My sister, brother and I made Diwali cards, laboriously drawing diyas and paisleys and writing a personalized greeting from our family -- none of those e-cards and smses sent off with the click of a digit. We did all this even though we just got one day off from school for Diwali.

The annual cleaning did not just mean uncluttering the house. Cupboards and drawers were turned out and stacked neatly. Cobwebs that had been tolerated with a frown for months were finally demolished. Every corner of the apartment: the walls, the floors, and every door and window, were washed with soapy water and scrubbed.

During this annual ritual, a brown river crowned with suds would trickle down the stairs of our building. That was one of the tests of good neighborliness. Some families had their runaway tributaries mopped up. The bad neighbors just pushed their dirty water out.

At the risk of sounding ancient, I will share that in those days aluminium ladders weren’t available. Paranoid about the makeshift stools most households used, my father had a carpenter build a tall, topple-free four-legged stool with a platform wide enough for a bucket and a pair of legs to stand on. It was a great stool. Neighbors asked to borrow it for their house cleanings, and sent it back with a platter of homemade sweets.

The ultra-clean floor had another use. My siblings and I loved walnuts but the betelnut cracker at home would not open wide enough for a walnut. We designated the corner of our living room door-jamb our nutcracker. We’d wipe out the corner, stick a whole walnut in and close the door till we heard a crunch. We’d take the broken fragments and separate out the kernels.

Once the house was cleaned, the Diwali goodies were prepared. Each day, one or two items would be made. My nose got a smell telegram as soon as I got off the rickshaw with my schoolbag and entered our building. Sev. Murkha. Gaja. Nimki. Fafda. Or if it was that cloying smell of simmering ghee and sugar, I knew it would be Ghughra, Mohanthal, Adadiya. Our little kitchen became a sanctuary for deep-frying as kilos of hydrogenated fat and tins of ghee and oil were emptied.

Sometimes my aunts were all clustered outside the kitchen, sitting under the fan even though it did nothing to prevent the sweat circles around their armpits from getting bigger. They rolled scores of rounds of dough, chatting and moving their elbows in brisk little jerks. We helped a little and tasted a lot. But when sweets were made, a smiling Brahmin cook called Devji Maharaj took over the kitchen for a few afternoons.

Devji Maharaj was brown and round as a gulab jamun. He had large tufts of white ear, thick as a shaving brush, and the hairiest, bulging forearms that would smack, twist and flatten kilos of dough. He brought his own industrial size pots and woks, and utensils with handles as long as fishing rods. He was no wimp who needed to be near a churning fan. He leaned over the kitchen fires, deep-frying and stirring and kneading for hours until the vapors rising from the pots made him look wavy like a genie in a mirage.

The tins of sweets and savories would be depleted over the next week. Most were sent off in platters to the homes of friends and relatives. The snacks we reached for over-eagerly lost their novelty in a few days. We groaned every time mother set them out on a plate or packed them for school snack. The festival started early and lingered in our blood streams. Years later, when I suffered my first hangover, I recognized a hint of that feeling of absolute overload.

My mother's DIY Diwalis have imprinted smells and memories that haven't faded. I won’t be scrubbing any walls, but I have cooked some snacks and sweets whose smells prompt little hands to go on clandestine missions to the kitchen. My family will do our own little Lakshmi puja and hand-deliver chocolate boxes to our friends' homes. We'll arrange diyas on our porch and light our modest stash of fireworks. Then we'll shut all the windows, cuddle up and watch the skies explode with the muffled pop of all the fireworks in our neighborhood.

Of Gods and Parents

Janmashtami is around the corner and the gaudy Ganesh statues arrayed on pavements signal that Ganesh Chaturthi is not far away.

Ganesh is hands down my favorite deity. The elephant-headed god thinks on his feet, loves sweets, has lots of body confidence despite his girth, and merely thinking of him is supposed to be good for procrastinators like me.

He’s cute and chubby and a kid at heart. But when I tell the story of Ganesh to my younger child, her forehead sets in a frown. “I don’t like that,” she declares when I come to the part about Shiva lopping off Ganesh’s head in fury. She’s a funny one. She’ll protest, “Don’t change the channel, I want to SEE that!” when I pound the TV remote as soon as a close-up of a dead body or a gushing wound unexpectedly appears on screen. She stares at the screen with an unblinking interest that disturbs me. But she is troubled by the story of how Ganesh lost his head and ended up with an elephant’s.

I can why this story would be unsettling. What parent – and especially a god, for god’s sake – would do this to a child?

It’s hard enough for a mortal like me to explain this story to my children. However Ganesh’s mother Parvati manage to explain this to him? “Daddy got so angry one day, he cut your head off. But he was very, very sorry and said he would replace it first thing in the morning…. Yes honey, it is an elephant’s head but I want you to know you’re very special, and we love you very, very much.”

I enjoy reading and telling mythological stories to my children. They’re colorful as stories and resonate with layers upon layers of symbolic meaning.

And I find them reassuring and empowering as a parent. I’ve been known to lose my temper and am glad I don’t have a third eye because I would have caused some serious, regrettable damage with it. But compared to Shiva, I’m not doing too badly in the parenting department.

What a wonderful luxury! Our legends provide provide us with the delicious paradox of being able to venerate our gods and goddesses and still being able to notch higher behavior points than some of them. Look at all those gods and goddesses and heroes and the messes they got themselves in and out of. Most of them had such dysfunctional families and complicated lives, yet they all turned out happy and fine and interesting and mostly put together. And people in India have had the scoop on their shenanigans for thousands of years and still worship them.

Look at Krishna. How dissipated and lost he might be in today’s world, although he did just fine in his time. You can imagine a therapist giving him a dressing down: “I know you’re struggling to overcome the trauma of being a foster child. You are addicted to dairy products. Eating so much butter since childhood places you in a high-risk category for heart attacks. You have a history of stalking women. The court order obtained by the gopis states that you must maintain a minimum distance of 50 yards between yourself and them, yet you consistently violate it. And your neighbors complain you play the flute loudly at all odd hours. How can you expect people to continue worshipping you if you exhibit such poor self-control and continue to flout the law?”

A culture that is not afraid to vest its gods with frailties and can see beyond their imperfections and worship them despite their flaws century after century has to be both blind and andar-se strong.

Our gods stuff themselves with laddoos till they burst, chase women, bend rules when they want to. They are extensions of ourselves, but with divine powers. They are our superheroes.

America has Superman and Batman and Captain America and hosts of superheroes dashing about in capes. We have our gods and goddesses. That is why a copycat modern superhero like the flabby Shaktiman in his wrinkled nylon bodysuit is a dud who will never capture our imaginations in the same way.

Our flawed, carbo-loading, multi-armed, third-eye incinerating superheroes rule our imaginations. That is why we haven’t tired of hearing and re-telling their stories for 5,000 years, and my children will pass them on to theirs.