On Festival Eve

 

Diwali falls in the first week of November. The government is trying its level best to curb pollution on the occasion of our grand festival. The firecrackers are banned. But a liquor-lover sets up a huge fire of tyres to meet the shortage of firecrackers. The entire village is wrapped in a thick, black shroud of smoke. All this happens during the day. He has set the nighttime tempo for the firecrackers from the black market.

In the town, sweetmeats are more ubiquitous than grocery items on the festive occasion. Even a puncture shop has sweets piled up on a table in front of it. The puncturewala-turned-sweetmaker even said a firm ‘no’ to my request for an air fill in the tyre of my scooty. ‘There is no air in the tank,’ he told me with an injured pride for not taking him as a full mithaiwala.  ‘Take mithai,’ he offers. I have to move on with my half-deflated tyre.

In the town, almost three-fourth of the road’s width is occupied by the sweet vendors displaying their items. Almost every outlet has throngs of shoppers.

The snake charmers are forbidden from keeping snakes in their baskets these days. In order to collect charity money, they are clad like yogis and play their gourd flutes, been, in front of the stacks of sweets as if a snake would surface from the clods of sugary sweetmeats. By the way, presently sugar seems even more dangerous than snakes to the humans. So they have a nice replacement for the snake hoods.

Despite the ban on firecrackers to save Delhi from pollution, there are more crackers available in the black market than the normal one. There is an illicit fun in cracking dummy bombs and firing toy guns. Pungent smoke covers the sky. Eyes burn and you can feel the smoke going straight into your lungs. How wonderful it would be if we celebrated Diwali in its real spirit instead of just letter-driven lip service.

I put an oil lamp under the Parijat tree. It glowed for fifteen hours. In the morning, it seemed as if the tree has paid it a homage with a drizzle of flowers around it. The post-Diwali morning carried a heavy layer of smog. A cold, shivery, metallic blanket holding the fates of our lungs in its tight grip. Imagine, there are still climate change skeptics. Thankfully, a breeze rolled up and dispelled the post-celebration gloom.

The black-market bombs do one nice thing. As they give a blast, the monkeys think that we have started a war against them. Hence, they are on the back-foot for the time being.