Light up your life!

With Diwali just getting its nose out the door (ours was yesterday, by the way) and firecrackers sending the air around us dingy with smoke and particles and smell, we start to consider life before. Before crackers, before noise, before smoke, before mounds of litter clogging the streets. That was the time that Diwali, Deepavali or however you choose to spell it was about bringing the light into your home - the light being symbolic of Lakshmi, the Goddess of Prosperity, of the triumph of good over evil, of enlightenment and new beginnings. For some like me, the festival is still more about all that than about showing off with new clothes, lots of money blown up in smoke (literally) and more calories than is good for even the soul. I like the gentle twinkle of tiny flames lit in diyas, of the flicker of an oil lamp set in a window, of the sway and shadow of kandeels, even the disco-style bulbs of string-lights decorating an entire building. There is light and colour and a sense of joy and brightness that makes it work for me.

Long ago, when I was a child, my parents and I would light diyas all over the house. There would be some in every room, from the lobby to the loo, and they would all sparkle and glimmer until I had fallen asleep. There was the ritual of having an early oil bath, wearing new clothes, gathering around to do a small puja and then sitting down to eat a sumptuous meal, after which we lay down and pretended to be anacondas digesting an especially large lunch (which we were doing, of course). Friends would drop by and calls would come in, or else we would go out to visit people we had known for ages, and there would be lots of admiring of clothes, eating of sweets and exchanging of news and views and good old gossip. And once we went home, there were more diyas, rangoli, mithai and then, finally, a glass of lemonade or buttermilk and a long sleep through the night.

Most of all, there were the lights. This year, while the ritual and the eating were pared down even further than is usual for our small family, we did the early oil bath, new clothes and sweets bit without fail. But this year we put out small clay diyas, lit with a wick floating in sweet oil. Two were placed outside the apartment, and one in each room, though not in the bathrooms, and a pretty array of Ikea lights sat on the main windowsill in the living room - no breeze could blow them out and the arrangement was delicate enough to be elegant rather than showy or vulgar. I use these every year and never fail to thank, in my head, the friend who gave them to me. While they cannot take the place of oil lamps or even candles, the fan of soft lights adds a wonderful sense of exuberance to the house and to the occasion.