Diyas, crackers and friendships

The title does not have tuning bulbs. But let me start with them. When I was a child, there was mostly one kind of tuning bulb. Little bulbs enclosed in a case. A lot of those cases connected through a wire. One had to stand on a stool or a chair and put them on the balcony through the nails and the railings. And then wait for the magic to happen. If you stood in your own balcony, you couldn’t see the whole design. So you had to run down the building and take two turns to come face to face with your balcony and those dazzling bulbs. It would be a moment of pride for the little you.

Now I can see all kinds of designs for lighting the balcony. We were happy and innovated with what we had.

The magic of Diwali started in the evening, when the sun set. In the small town of Bokaro, issues like noise and air pollution are not discussed, at least I didn’t hear anyone complaining about them. It’s a free ride for crackers. You coerce your parents to buy as much as possible, with all kinds of varieties. There were the milder ones like the Aloo bomb and then there were the strong ones like the bullet bomb. Added to these would be the ones which did not make any noise like the Anar. And once you chose amongst them, you had to decide how many rockets to buy.

Some of us were afraid of burning the crackers. So we searched for a stick with a hole at the tip. The bomb would go in the hole and then from a safe distance, one could light it. Others were fearless. They could keep the bomb on the road and then light it peacefully and had time to run away as well. There were sounds all around. One always had to be careful lest someone threw a cracker at you or if someone was lighting at cracker just at your back.

Before we got down with the cracker business, it was the diya business that had to be concluded. Parents would buy a bunch of diyas, ghee, and small cotton strips. Each diya had to be carefully filled with some ghee and then a cotton strip placed on it carefully and then lighted. These diyas were placed on the empty spaces in the balcony, on the windows and the roof. We were not allowed to leave before the tradition of lighting and placing diyas was complete.

Friendship was at a crude display during these times. Friends would burst crackers together, sometimes scare each other by bursting them close to each other. They would count and ration the crackers so as to be in the game for long. Then as the night wore along, we would visit the houses for food. We would go to each and every family in the colony and relish the food served to us by the aunties. Some of them would be magnanimous with us and even had non veg dishes, which we children liked a lot. At every home, we would be asked things, mostly about school especially if you were a good student. And sometimes we would come out of a home and make fun of the owners. We would compare the dishes, all kinds of things would be there in our conversations.

Late night would be the time for the big chatai bomb, the one which bursts for five minutes. We would all watch with bated breath as the whole bomb would be laid on the road. And then the bhaiya who had bought it would light it up. The whole sector would hear it as it made its noises.

   Ah, those times!  They will never come back for us.