On family and festivals

Festivals. We have too many of them. And I don’t care for most. Leaving my atheism aside, most festivals if not about sundry gods, are in honour of brothers and husbands (why never mothers or sisters). If they are about women, they are concerned only with the married woman (husband still living, mind you) or pre-pubescent girls. The only good thing about them is the food! Each festival comes with a detailed menu of goodies which are specific to it, on which it seems to have a virtual monopoly.

Diwali, in particular, has much going against it. It has become an excuse for socially sanctioned bribery and unbridled consumerism. But diwali has a subversive quality to it. ‘Our diwali’ (as I tell all non-south Indians) is the one festival where we go against all rules. We seem to be insulting Narakasura, the evil asura king whom Krishna defeated. But aren’t we honouring him instead? After all didn’t he in his death ask people to celebrate his destruction with lights, new clothes. Or are we affirming the original dravidianism by refusing to follow Aryan ritualism even in the moment of its supposed triumph over the dravidas? Is this the explanation for the thumbs down to rituals, to purity? The only other tamilian festival I value is pongal. There is something endearing about the vision of tamilians, spread over as they are, stubbornly celebrating the onset of harvest in one tiny part of the country and searching for sugarcane, tamarind and such season specific products in parts of the world which follow very different time-tables.

Coming back to diwali, for me diwali has always been with family. And over the years, my extended family has been making less and less sense to me. The feeling I know is mutual. But come diwali, I wander back. To diwali-eve late night card game sessions. To endless retelling of family stories and jokes, of which one will be new and everything else has been repeated a million times. To drop off to sleep exhausted with food and laughter. To be woken up an hour later to have oil applied to our hair. To sit in front of gods defiantly munching on snacks without a mandatory offering to them. And that too without having a bath. To being pushed into taking the bath in the lure of new clothes.

But increasingly diwali is becoming poignant in its nostalgia value. For in the past year and half, three people whom I most associate with diwali and who are (perhaps not coincidentally) the nicest people in the family are no more. Next diwali I know I will trudge back home seeking the familiarity of the festival I like and the family I want (at least during the festival!!!), but wonder if it hasn’t changed forever…