Deepavali

It's Deepavali.

I used to be told that there were two ways of celebrating Deepavali. One was the conventional way, with family and friends, sweets and a feast, new clothes and crackers. This was routine every year, and Amma used to make the most incredibly tasty sweets and pass them around to stuffed mouths and greedy hands. Much before dawn, my sister and I would be wildly shaken awake, dragged to the temple and made to stand in the midst of the lights and chants and dressed-up women. And once that ritual was done, we'd race to join the kids in the neighbourhood, with pencil sparklers and catherine wheels and those pyramid sparkles. I remember our most glorious moments were when the umbrellas (ghostly pink and green and white) came floating down from the rockets we'd painstakingly lit and prodded upwards.

Then the day would pass like any other, though added bonuses of the best sort of food and payasam, and there would be Lakshmi Puja.

I learnt of the other way when I met S-ji. That way was/is intensely personal, and here, the symbolism and the hidden significance take the limelight, and ritual and crackers recede into the dim background. This is that significance that Wiki tries to condense into half a page, and something I have heard almost all my life with a strange and half-undeserving feeling.

Sitting around him on certain earmarked days, we would hear of how Deepavali is one of those days set apart in the Hindu calendar to remind man that material pursuits are shrouded in unreality and ephemerality, and that the Real was right here, way deep inside, and we were all looking in the wrong places. All one needed to do to realise this was rake away all that trash one called thoughts, for they blinded and blocked the truly important. Deepavali, with its Lakshmi Puja (for she is the Goddess of Wealth, and not merely material wealth), was an invocation to that inner light, and a festival to set aside material pursuits and start the spiritual journey.

I'm not sure I understood what he strove to make us understand, but then, perhaps that is secondary for the purposes of this post. All I'm required to know for now is, Deepavali is a festival of lights, and the lights are to be lit within and without.

Happy Deepavali. May you find your light.