Diwali Reminiscences

I close my eyes and I am taken to my non-descript looking home in Ghaziabad.....

The door-bell rings. I run to open the door. There is another guest waiting to wish our family a happy Diwali. He has a big box of sweets. I let him in and get him seated on our worn sofa in the living room. While my mother engages him in conversation (my Dad is at work), I serve the gentleman tea and some snacks.

After taking a few sips of water, he glances at his watch and hurriedly wishes us goodbye and all the usual wishes of the season. I show him out. Just as his car purrs to life, I run back to the living room and get busy opening the box. Burfis are my favourtie....
Me and my Mum sit and make cotton "Diyas". After getting through making some hundred cotton wicks, I get tired. My mother then gives me and my elder brother the princely sum of fifty rupees and tells me to go and buy whatever crackers I want. We spend a blissful evening deciding which ones to buy. Its not easy. The good ones are costly. Quality v/s Quantity.....

Big day!

We all take a bath and get ready for the Puja. I put on my freshly cleaned shirt and trousers. We sit down in the small "Puja Room" while my Mum does the usual things. I wait impatiently for the ceremony to end. At the end of the ceremony, I get a "Pan" leaf, a few "batashas", one "burfi" (as many as I want actually but I have fallen sick after having too many of them already) and five rupees. I go and touch the feet of my Dad and he wishes me happiness in my life. We all sit down to light the "Diyas". My Dad is very punctilious with the wicks and the oil. He takes a lot of time to light them and after lighting them, he gives me very precise instructions on where to place them. I am only twelve. I need clear instructions.
Then me and my brother spend the next one hour burning the crackers. The neighbours come with more sweets and from my house-hold I am inevitably the one who has to go to every household to deliver sweets from our family. I don't mind. The next door neighbours have a beautiful looking daughter.

After finishing off the crackers, I go to the terrace and look at all the rockets lighting up the sky. Someday (I swear) I will grow up and have so much money that I will not run out of crackers to light up on Diwali! After the cracker-fest dies down in my neighbourhood, we have dinner. After that, my Dad sits down with his drink, my Mum sits down with her knitting and I go to buy a pack of Lay's chips with the five rupees Mum gave me during the Puja. (Masala flavour is my favourite).

Today when I open my eyes, I see myself in a room in a non-descript apartment in a foreign land. I want this festive season to be over soon so that I can get on with life. I have grown tired of Lay's chips and besides they are unhealthy. Crackers are banned here, but in either case I have lost the craze I used to have for them. My parents still get a lot of sweets but now the stack of boxes bewilder them. They mostly give the boxes away to the household help unopened. And for the life of me I cannot figure out why I used to count days to Diwali while I was at school....

I wish I could close my eyes and go back to my non-descript home in Ghaziabad again....