Strung with Tungsten Stars

November 8-11, 2007
A Diwali weekend

Diwali was tooth-achingly sweet, eardrum shatteringly load, eye blindingly bright. It was deliciously too much, so that every crevice of my innards were filled with rava (wheat) and jaggery (sugar) and ghee (butter) and every fiber of the rest of my mass was brimming with accumulated sensations and sticky thoughts and sky-blue fuchsia feelings.

That afternoon my boss walked through the office with a sparkler and the fire hit the white marble floors and disappeared. It avoided the computers, but lit up the balcony. The children in the street below had been setting off sounds all day, and when it was our turn the roof looked like a small battle zone. As the sun went down, the city lit up and the constant noise pushed palpably against my skin as I rumbled home in an open-air auto.

The cab pulled up outside our flat, my roommates pulled each other downstairs to meet me, and I pulled a bright scarf around my neck. The festivities were beginning. When I was first draped in another woman’s gray pinstripe business sari, I stood up straight and they ood and awed at my height, but soon there was dancing, breathless waltzing carrying a six-year-old while singing ‘I could have danced all night’ and spinning in circles. There were super sweet Indian delicacies, and piles of biryani (the essential Hyderabadi dish – basmati rice cooked with spices and meat or veggies) to be carefully placed in the mouth (the trick is to pinch the rice, then push it off your fingers using the back of your thumb). Soon, I was sitting on the marble floor and playing hand-clapping games, so the perfectly ironed pleats of my dress would just have to accommodate themselves.

We slept. We woke to the high-pitched joyful screams of our young neighbors (three girls, aged 2, 5, and 6, one behind each of the three doors on our landing), and scuttled in circles, giving sweets, taking sweets, shaking hands and admiring new dresses. We were given chapatti stuffed with sweet batter, fried coconut patties, and balls of cinnamon flavored sugar. Then we left for breakfast. Breakfast brought famous dosas and stories about New York Jews and since we couldn’t believe we were still eating the afternoon went by in a sort of a blur. There was lunch (lunch?!) cooked by our new friend’s chef, and television-food comas and lazy discussions of ceremonies.

Then two of us went out in a cab and came back to a neighborhood that we’d never seen somewhere in the city we supposedly know. We were invited in to the living room where we admired the piles of flowers and incense and little oil lamps arranged around the goddesses, and looked apprehensively at the piles of food waiting in the kitchen. When the ceremony started, some time passed before I realized that the daughter-in-law was calling out each name of the goddess Laksmi, and I wondered as we passed number 137 if she would read out the whole booklet, but by the time she got to the last, the 1008^th name, I was entranced. Fruits were broken, lotus flowers folded, knees bent, foreheads marked. Each of the little oil lamps was lit, and afterwards, they were placed along the front wall of the house, continuing the fences of fire trailing down every ally.

We were given explosives. Fountains of sparks were set off from the middle of white designs painted on the threshold of every doorway. The ground was littered, but more like carpeted, with wrappers and burned fuses. The air shook and the eyes of the children glowed. We ate, inexplicably, and practiced short Telugu phrases to say that we liked the food and didn’t mind the ironic darkness of a mid-meal power cut when it was nearly daylight outside the house. The ride back, out of Secunderabad and to our young friend’s flat in the Western part of town, was chilly when we passed through the military and Muslim neighborhoods, but something more akin to an amusement park extravaganza as we dodged mid-road blasts in the Hindu areas.

When we walked in to our friend’s home, a second shrine was waiting and so more prayers were said, but these were mostly silent prayers, and requests and thanks to ideas more than to idols. We used the oil lamps sitting by Laksmi and Ganesha’s feet as Shabbat candles, and blessed the fact that we had found white wine while we blessed the wine itself. There was a lot of singing and quiet thoughts, and very little eating of that thing called dinner. Soon it was time to take our own magic box up to the roof and add a few more stars to the planetarium of fireworks. Imagine the Fourth of July, or any normal fireworks show, but 360 degrees, the biggest star bursts lighting the sky over the wealthiest neighborhoods. Smoke blocked most of the natural dome, but eventually more permanent stars peeked around the clouds, and by two in the morning there were conversations between moving lips under the evenly spaced stars of Orion’s belt. And even then, another bouquet of fire hit the ceiling and splashed across our easily blinded eyes. Time slowed down and sped up and ran around the block while we tried to leash it and then gave up and let it go.

In the morning, we ate famous food (but don’t worry, it was late in the morning, and light fare for famous food). We browsed books and talked about titles and Salman Rushdie’s obsessive depictions of strange Bombay childhoods. At dusk, labyrinthine sparkling rocks and strange Jabberwoky cousins slouched or slithered and dematerialized behind the softly bent trees of KBR national park. ‘When you admire nature,’ the signs reprimanded gently, ‘you pray to its creator.’ Peacocks, their hundred Argus eyes closed, stalked haughtily by.

We spent the day digesting the sweets and the lights and the noises and the conversations, and sat bundled on flowered velveteen couches. But when we went out, out to the top, where the dresses are shorter than the ones I’d wear at home, and the table-side fountains are filled with rose petals and floating candles and the dark smooth wood is draped with cloth to evoke the desert oasis of an imagined India, we buzzed with energy. The music danced me. I thought of contra lines and tea totaling jazz ensembles and body isolations and learning to stop pointing my toes and steaming up the windows of the Space Needle with high school hip-hop. To cool off, we returned to the roof, and sat again with the stars and watched the extra fireworks being detonated around the city.

The morning was late as mornings after so many days of excesses should be. In the afternoon we walked by the water (which makes everything better) and went out to visit the new (1992) statue of the ancient (3^rd century BC) time when this place was a major center of Buddhist thought. And I stood under the Buddha with a maybe and watched the water stretch and breathe and felt like the city had embraced me. I gave it an A-frame hug back.

(For an alternative telling of the same weekend, with perhaps more straightforward detail and explanatory photos, take a gander at Planet Bollywood, my flat-mate Myla’s blog… the photos that accompany this tale can also be found in my picture albums)