Diwali: The Festival of Pipe Bombs

---

The day after we went to Ellora, we all piled into a van and a car, luggage and all, to head out to Chahardi. Turns out that Chahardi is a village where some of Purnima’s family (the Patil family) lives and it’s a real village. Dirt roads, animals, farms, no mobile reception and the like. The Patil family owns the 3 largest houses in the village, they are literally room after room, courtyard after courtyard. The original tour I got from Ravi Bhao* was, “it’s like a train, room leads to room leads to room, like the coaches in a train following each other.”
Looking at Purnima’s family and then looking at Eric and saw an Indian version of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”. More and more members of Purnima’s family kept coming up, I couldn’t even begin to remember who was who! There were never fewer than 10-15 people at any meal. On the topic of meals, they consisted mostly of dal, rice and vegetables on a banana leaf, eaten with the hand (right hand only!) while sitting on the floor.
At bedtime we found the first floor (second by American standards) was sort of split in two. One side was the men’s side and the other for the women. Each section had two or three rooms a bath room (not a toilet, just a place to take the ever so exciting bucket bath) and more than enough beds, cots, mattresses and mats for everyone to sleep.
In general we just hung out, eating a lot of food, doing mehndi (Purnima and I tried to learn, it’s rather difficult, actually), reading and talking. Purnima and I (and Daya) also tried our hands at Rangoli (coloured cuolom...see below), which turned out to be much harder than we imagined. Beyond trying to control the powder you're pouring from your fingers, you have to control the design and the size of each segment...we've got a lot of practicing to do.
The evenings held special poojas (ceremonies) each night. The first night we did pooja for Laxmi (or Lakshmi) the goddess of wealth. Before the pooja area (where pictures of the gods are), lamps were set up and cuolum (white powder laid out in designs) put out to look like a necklace. There was a brass plate with kumkum (that red powder people put on their foreheads), turmeric powder, a ring, uncooked rice, and a flame (I’m probably missing somethings here, but that’s the main stuff). One at a time (or by family) people would go up, men would put on a white cap the shape of those paper Krispy Kreme hats (ok, that was a rude reference I think, but it’s the first that came to mind), they’d take up the plate, sprinkle the kumkum on the pooja area, then the turmeric powder. Then they’d throw a bit of rice onto the pooja area and circle the plate three times in front of the pooja area.
The second night was for women to do pooja for their husbands who then should give the wife a gift of something gold. Everyone in the Patil family seemed to take this tradition lightly. Eric gave Purnima his wedding ring, one of the bhaos gave his wife a marigold flower he pulled off the garland that was draped across the pooja area. The third night was for sisters to do pooja for their brothers, after which the brother gave the sister a little monetary gift. In many Indian families, cousins are called cousin-brothers and cousin-sisters, so the cousin-sisters did pooja for their cousin-brothers, making it a long evening, but Jagdesh Bhao adopted me as his sister so I got to do pooja for him!
After poojas, we’d usually go do fireworks, somehow the festival of lights translates to festival of firecrackers here and they go pretty nonstop, even during the day. I’m not talking about the sissy type you can pick up without a permit at Longs Drugstore, either. I’m talking about arial fireworks, loud poppers, rockets, pipe bombs, etc. etc. It was a loud, impressive, slightly frightening (mostly due to the lack of quality control in Indian fireworks) display. In light of the recent bombings in Delhi, Eric and I got into a discussion about how the noisy firecrackers must sound to someone who survived a bombing or was in a war. It must be a traumatizing experience so soon after a bad event…or even years after.
Friday night we left Chahardi to return to Jalgaon and then make our way back to Mumbai. Daya and I shared a top berth and she was a pretty good bunkmate except for a couple of times when she kicked or hogged the berth, but all in all it wasn’t bad. Saturday morning at 4 am we arrived back in Mumbai and I went home to repack for my week in Rajasthan.

*Bhao means older brother. Thei means older sister. Here it’s pretty impolite to call anyone older than you by just their name, so if someone is in your generation, the proper way to refer to them is with bhao or thei after their name.

---