Paroikos

Diwali is the single biggest Hindu festival. It is the festival of lights. And of course comes with its own ancient Hindu myth about you guessed it an evil king, a brave warrior, and a god. The hero triumphs darkness is dispelled and light comes for the first time to the world, or at least the Indian subcontinent. I never did ask how food was grown prior to this point. The festival is naturally accompanied by a great amount of fireworks.

I have known for a while that Diwali was this Monday what I didn’t realize is just how massive of a celebration it really is. And I probably never would have found out except for the failure of modern magic. At about 9:30 pm today the lights and all other electron eating machines went out, ironically leaving me in utter darkness on the eve of the festival of lights.

I admit that I was a little annoyed because I had literally just finished watching a TV show and was about to sit at my desk chair to get back to work, when everything quit and my plans were forced to change. Unable to read, study or even clean (the three things I had planned for the evening) and figuring the power would be back in an hour like normal. I amused myself on the computer until the battery ran out and I was truly left in the dark. By this time however it was well past the normal hour and the power was still not back. I was therefore left with two choices – <l> Go to bed and try to sleep until awakened by the sudden brilliance of the revival of modern convinces in my flat or <2> find something to do outside where there was at least some starlight. I opted naturally for the latter since I had just spent a rather long night sitting around with nothing to do and it would have been easier for me to build my own generator from scratch than to fall asleep at that point.

Up to the roof I went to sit and gaze over the city and in fact it turned into a pretty good idea. Diwali doesn’t start till tomorrow but the celebrations began earlier this last week and firewors have been glittering the night sky for the last few days. My neighbor from downstairs was already on the roof. We start talking when I got up there. Or rather he started talking and I stood there listening and offer an occasional grunt until his wife called him back to his home.

According to him Diwali has greatly declined in the past years. He says when he was a boy they would buy truckfulls of fireworks and the classic mentality was whoever has the most is the winner. The festivities would begin a full ten days before and the skies of Chennai would be full of fireworks in every direction, instead of just the one or two every few minutes that we were observing that evening. He attributed the current lack of enthusiasm both to the escalating price of fireworks and the current modern love affair with the television. He went off on Television for awhile. I asked him if he owned a television, and he said “of course who doesn’t.” He also mentioned that the state government of Tamil Nadu has spent some 20 crore of Rupees ¹ on buying Televisions and giving them away in the hopes that people will elect the current political party and vote for them again. Nothing like good old fashioned political bribery.

At some point in the conversation we got to talking about the current strike by the electron labor union in our house. He pointed out that since our house was the only one on the block with a power problem it probably was a failure in the electrical wiring here and not a shortage of power at the local plant. A hypothesis I had already began to suspect. To make matters worse since it was both Sunday and the eve of Diwali, and the next day was Diwali , it would probably be a few days before an electrician made it to our house to fix the problem. Contemplating two days of lightless nights I decided that I was going to give in and buy either some candelas or an “electric torch” as the English would say. I was leaning more towards the candles. If you try to do anything by flashlight you are reduced to doing it with a single hand since one is required to hold and direct the light which I find immensely annoying when reading and especially when writing.

Now after 10:00pm on a Sunday night you wouldn’t expect much to be open in the way of shopping. And generally you would be right. I figured however that if I left immediately I would be able to squeeze into the City Centre (the local Mall) just before they closed their doors. What I found when I got there however was not a tired almost empty mall on the verge of closing shop but something more akin to a scene out of Dr. Seuss, albeit the animation in this case was far more realistic. Every shop was open, every inch was decorated, every thing was on sale, and every counter had a thirty minute wait behind it. I even heard one store announce while I was there that it would remain open till mid-night so as to accommodate “all your last minute Diwali needs”. And even though my total purchase reached the equivalent of only $ 9 American dollars, the store kindly gave me a Diwali gift just for shopping there.

Of course all I could find for candles were the type that usually find their way into boxes at office Christmas parties or suddenly appear at the dinner table to the great consternation of the husband who simply wants to be able to see what he is eating. But considering my current predicament back home I had little choice but to find the least expensive and wait in line. After that, having forgotten that I had already eaten supper before the lights went out, I found a little Italian place and enjoyed a bite of pasta covered in four cheese sauce.

And that my friends is how I ended up here sitting here in the dark writing about my harrowing adventures while six small candles blaze with an unfortunate steadiness and attempt to do their best to live up to their promises of distributing the sweet scent of toasted marshmallows.

Now if only I had a Christmas tree to go with these candles.

_Matt

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