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Reminiscing Diwali: A season of longing and hope

After running through rebellion and nostalgia, Abhishek Mande brings the festivities home this year

Around this time each year I watch, with a certain longing, my colleagues lug their bags across the office floor rushing to catch the last flight of the day to their hometowns.
 
To many of us the festive season invariably means heading home – that place from where it all started and in whose familiar surroundings we find a solace that no hotel room or rented apartment can ever offer.

For some of us, this solace is but just a flight, a bus or a train journey away. Others less fortunate must look for it elsewhere.

Diwali was never a festival I've looked forward to – I even stopped celebrating it a few years ago after I moved out of my parents' home.

And yet, every year around this time I find that familiar feeling creep back into my heart.

The festive spirit at my parents' home would begin at least a few months before Diwali – to be specific around the time of Ganesh Chaturthi when father would walk to a particular store that stocked clay Ganeshas brought from a village called Pen and pick up a particular idol that my grandfather would have booked weeks in advance.

And that was how our celebrations began.

The ten days that followed would see a steady stream of friends and cousins and aunts and uncles. And as far as I remember the stream never really died out till almost the beginning of the following year.

After the Ganesh festival was over, Navratri would begin, then Dussehra followed by Diwali and then would come Christmas and New Year's Eve – the two festivals that were added to my family's calendar thanks to my sister's and my Catholic friends.

The 'Diwali' Diwali would probably begin around the time when my grandmother, unable of standing by the gas stove for long, would pull out a kerosene stove, pour out sinful amounts of oil in a kadai to make snacks that I hated then.

It was also perhaps the only time of the year when my grandmother and mother would share the kitchen and not be at each other's throats.

Rangoli would usually be my mother's department, as she'd try to negotiate for space in the narrow balcony of our three-room house.

Often, she would wistfully talk about the rangolis they would make in their village home – a sprawling bungalow where they lived as tenants for all their growing up years before they moved into a tiny apartment in a Mumbai suburb.

In all these years, I never once asked her about her childhood home that she so often spoke about or the Diwalis she celebrated there.

This year I did.

Since the time I moved out, I've rarely visited my parents on Diwali, choosing rather to be at loud parties with strangers, dousing copious amounts of alcohol and nursing a hangover in the hope of getting rid of that damned niggling longing.

Then one Diwali I decided to do what my colleagues do each year: I went home.

And it was probably then that I realised it wasn't the home I'd left behind. Nothing was the same. The familiarity I had hoped to return to was nowhere to be found.

It has been years since my grandparents passed away. My uncle who stayed with us has moved on and has started a family of his own; my sister, travelling off and on for work, sometimes finds herself in an alien city celebrating Diwali with people she's just met.

When I went there I realised that the apartment block bore an uneasy silence – none of the friends I had grown up with lived there any more – and the house that always seemed too crowded and too small for my liking suddenly seemed so empty.

My parents welcomed me, of course, and we must've spoken about something completely inconsequential because the only memory I have of that visit is of returning to a colony and a house that I was almost sure I never lived in.

This year, mum told me about the village house she grew up in and the Diwalis she celebrated there with her three siblings.

She told me of the diyas they made at home, the lanterns they stuck with aata because there was no glue available at the time, the maternal uncle who always, always travelled from Bombay to meet their mother on Bhaiduj and the occasional firecrackers they could afford. There was never enough money in the house but no one seemed to notice it in all the fun they had.

The house, as I was surprised to find out, belonged to Sir CD Deshmukh, the first Indian Governor of the Reserve Bank of India to be appointed by the British in '43 and the third finance minister of independent India.

They weren't any extraordinary stories that came out of that conversation but I realise that they were stories that she cherished and ones that she held on to for the longest time as she moved away from the idyllic surroundings of the place she was born and grew up in, to a strange city and a new life that her husband chose for her.

"Didn't you ever want to go back?" I asked her, "That was your home!"

"I did go back," she told me, "A few years ago."

And then mum said something that was probably cliched but truthful nonetheless: "The house your father brought me to became my home."

During the trip she took, mum realised that the village house was no longer her home. And it wasn't because everything there had changed but rather because she had changed.

Sometime in-between playing wife, daughter-in-law and a mother, she realised that the tiny apartment in the heartless city was the haven she would want to return to each night after a long day at work.

And even after all of us had moved on, the Diwalis she spent with just my dad for company and occasionally my sister were not spent longing for a home that she'd left behind but rather cherishing the moments she had with the people around her.

Later that night, when I went back home I reached out to an essay that almost often and for some inexplicable reason offers a strange sense of solace for the wandering soul.

'Out of Kansas' by Salman Rushdie talks about, among other things, The Wizard of Oz – the movie not the book – Drothy's struggles to get back home and the magical ruby slippers that would help her do just that.

And even as Dorothy goes back to her rather uneventful farm in Kansas, Rushdie, the nomad, argues:

The real secret of the ruby slippers is not that 'there's no place like home', but rather that there is no longer any such place as home: except, of course for the homes we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz, which is anywhere and everywhere, except the place from which we began.

So this year I suspect there may not be any loud parties or that feeling of longing. And just perhaps there might be an earthen lamp outside the door of a place that is my home.

 

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh