By Sid Sharma

The Cynical Desi

@SidSharma

I don’t think I ever needed a real excuse to set off firecrackers. All this talk about Diwali and philosophical discussions of good triumphing over evil sounded like a needless waste of time. Lighting a fuse and running away before the big boom is a rare thrill that needed no spiritual justification to a kid.

The only thing that could top that rush of blowing things up was doing it with your friends. Ram Kumar, Bilal and I built up a little money stash over the year for the purposes of procuring some “parentally frowned upon” fireworks. I guess early 90s south India had some pretty unscrupulous shop owners.

Immigration puts an end to all this fun and forces the Sharma clan into survival mode.

1995 ended with a bitter winter. My family and I spent our first Diwali in a rundown Canadian apartment without proper heat and it was just awful. We were low on cash and getting halfway decent rice was a challenge. We did, however, want to celebrate the holiday in some way so my mother got us to clean up the house. She decided to turn on all the lights to try to recapture some of the magic we left behind on the other side of the planet. My father comes home from another day of failed job hunting and realizes that we have to pay for all this electricity.

There was a particularly nasty argument between my parents about money. Doors were slammed and people retreated to their respective corners. I’d seen conflict before in my house but this looked really bad. The stress of being in a new country took us to a breaking point.

For some reason we stuck together through the night. Maybe because we realized that we were all we had. So my parents slowly started talking after a few hours and we tried to celebrate as best as we could.

They say that Diwali has some deep roots in Hindu tradition. The lighting of fireworks and candles supposedly represents the vanquishing of the dark through the fire of knowledge. The truth is that there are so many regional and ethnic variations in India that we really can’t be sure. Wikipedia nicely summarizes it by saying, “The religious significance of [Diwali] varies regionally within India, depending on the school of Hindu philosophy, regional myths, legends, and beliefs.” So does the holiday really mean anything?

Even as a lapsed Hindu I still celebrate Diwali. Not for religious reasons people like to talk about but for very personal ones. Sure, these days it’s nothing more than a “Happy Diwali” text but it represents something very intimate and honest. To me Diwali is a solemn oath our family made to each other that we would not break in this new land.