Deepawali Lights

This Saturday was Deepawali, the festival for Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. Because of the holiday, I gave my students the day off and joined the celebrations myself. Deepawali is, above all, a beautiful holiday. Someone first explained it to me as the “Indian Christmas.”

The religious aspect of it is to welcome Lakshmi into your house. To do this, people light candles and little oil lamps and set them up all around their house. They drape garlands of marigolds over doors and windows and colorful Christmas lights wherever they can. In front of their doors, they draw or paint intricate designs to give a path for Lakshmi to the door, lining it with more candles.

For the more secular part, people blow off fire crackers, give gifts, and celebrate in all sorts of other ways.

As for me, I went with my friends to Sonia and Bryan's house where they were throwing a big party. After being introduced to the other guests, Sonia performed her puja (worship) for Lakshmi, which several of the guests took part in as well. After that was over, we were each handed a box of candles to decorate their patio and yard with. When all of the candles were lit—there must have been close to a hundred of them—it looked almost magical. Once that was done Bryan and Sonia brought out their fireworks. Unlike most locals who prefer firecrackers that mostly just make an earsplitting bang, Sonia had brought back real fireworks and fountains from the Punjab where she is from. It was pretty exciting and colorful, but one of the guest's three-year-old daughter was having some trouble coping with all the noise. Both she and Bryan and Sonia's equally harried dog took shelter inside on the sofa.

After most of the fireworks were done, we all migrated inside for a huge Punjabi dinner. The food was all fantastic and more than we all could eat. When dinner was wrapping up, I was asked to sing once again. This time, I suspected something like that would happen, so I came prepared with “Sure on this Shining Night.” It seemed appropriate. While it is still a little unnerving to be asked to sing on the spot, I'm gaining confidence with it, and even enjoying it. I will take my options to sing when I can. It's one thing to be 'that college student who can sing pretty well' hanging out around the Oberlin Conservatory, and entirely another to be 'the only girl in the village who can sing Western classical music.' It's somewhat liberating. I have a lot more fun singing when I don't have to worry about the critical ears of my listeners.

Unrelated but almost as exciting, I think I saw the Dali Lama by being in the right place at the right time this last Tuesday. I was on a bus coming back from Dharmsala when we encountered a huge traffic jam at the fork in the road where one leads back to Sidhbari and the other to Gagal. There were police officers everywhere, directing traffic off of the Gagal fork. Traffic was packed so tightly on the Sidhbari fork that it had completely come to a stop. My bus was more or less caught in the middle of the intersection, so I could see everything that went by.

Suddenly, one police car came up the Gagal fork by with sirens blaring, followed by a second. Behind them was a black jeep with a man in the front who was waving. My bus erupted into murmurs that made me wonder who it was I had just seen. Following the black car were two vans and a whole bush load of military police. After they passed, traffic slowly returned to normal and I eventually got home.

It wasn't until several days later when I related this incident to Anya and I found out who it was. Evidently, many people had gone to Dharmsala and waited on the road side just to catch a glimpse of him on his way up to McLeod Ganj. Here I just got lucky on my way back from a shopping trip. I'm hoping that sometime before I leave I will be able to hear him speak, rather than just a glimpse of him waving from a car.