Diwali

The Hindu festival season has finally come to a close, and Christmas has begun, which is significantly less impressive. So instead of telling you about Christmas in South Asia, I will backtrack to Diwali. Confession: it was about a month ago, so I am writing this off of memory alone.

Diwali is technically a festival of lights, which also happens to fall on Kali Puja (Kali is another version of Durga, (the Goddess I talked about earlier). But like everything in my city, things are taken to the next level. A festival of lights turns into a festival of sound, which turns into a war zone.

For a week we walked the streets, always one step away from being blown up by fireworks or being burnt by flame torches. It was what I imagine Berlin to have sounded like in the 1940s.

You know the illegal firework stands on the streets of LA? Well imagine if each person in the city bought out his or her own stand … every night.  Imagine the chaos, the danger, and the insane tension of such a situation.

That's how I felt. 

Still there was one night that topped them all. A couple of the interns and myself went to a local aftercare home to celebrate with our girls. We entered the house, climbed the stairs, and walked onto the roof. They of course, had their own mini firework stand as well. Hundreds of fireworks were stuffed into a corner. The girls were running to the pile, grabbing fireworks as fast as they could, and lighting them from the candles lining the wall.

That’s when things started exploding. Sparklers, poppers, flame torches, and spinning firebombs, all going off to the haphazard sound of screaming teenage girls. One would light her flame torch thingy, realize soon after that she had just lit an uncontrollable fire, squeal and subsequently fling the flaming stick into the air, always just missing another girl’s head. Another would light, what I like to call, a spinning flame of death, and girls would run up to see who could step on the flames without dying.

At one point I just stood back to take it all in. I couldn’t help but laugh. My mother would have had a heart attack. It wasn’t just mad chaos; it was mad chaos with fire. 

And this was happening on every roof. It was in the middle of the night, but the sky lit up like it was day. A layer of smoke had settled in the air as well as in my lungs.  And, of course, people everywhere gathered to dance, sing, randomly bang instruments together, and eat.

So as we danced, screamed, and joined in on the near death experience of lighting hazardous dynamite sticks; I realized something truly profound. You don’t need words to speak a teenage girl’s language. You just need to hold her hand and laugh together. A night of genuine and pure laughter does more for friendship than any amount of language training.

It was definitely a night I will never forget.

That may also be because of the ringing forever in my ears from the constant bombs exploding into the night sky.

Nevertheless, I have also concluded that Diwali is way cooler than The Office makes it out to be.