Sublimity…

Literally! I came back from Dehradun yesterday evening, and was just starting to settle in after supper when the whole house shook with a huge “Boom”, like a gunshot – but louder. “Humm”, I thought to myself, “must be the neighbours setting off fireworks”, and calmly went back to unpacking. While India is crazy and anything can happen at any time (and thus I wouldn’t be too surprised to hear fireworks randomly), the Divali festival is on Tuesday, and the country is “warming up” for it.

Divali is the “Festival of Lights”, in two senses. Firstly (and more traditionally), is it so named because on the night of Divali, every house is lit up from the glow of one to hundreds (depending on the wealth of the owner) of little clay dish-lamps. The story goes that Parvati (the goddess of wealth) goes around on Divali and bestows good fortune on houses she visits that night, and she chooses which houses to visit based on how brightly light up they are (also how clean/nice they look, meaning Divali season is not only the festival of light, but of painting as well – everyone has been out painting their house this past week!).

The other aspect of the name is the fact that everyone goes out and buys fireworks and sets them off on Divali (making big huge colourful displays of light all throughout the night which goes well with the traditional theme). However, unlike the west where it’s hard to get fireworks, here in India (at Divali time), the bazaars are chock-full of stalls and carts covered in fireworks of all types and sizes, and all for cheap! Furthermore, there aren’t any rules about what kinds/sizes of fireworks you can sell here (or at least no rules that people obey) so you can buy everything from the little fountains found in the west to huge rockets that I’ve only seen in big professional shows (like Canada Day in Ottawa). The neighbours’ fireworks last night were of the larger sort, after hearing about the 10th one shake my room, I decided that I should go out and see what they were like as they sounded big and impressive – and they were. They were launching the rockets out over the valley, zooming skyward with a bright fiery trail before exploding into huge multi-coloured spheres with a tremendous bang that reverberated through the hills and valleys of Mussoorie – and seemed like it would have been heard all the way down in Dehradun! They were just doing them for fun, one at a time with a significant interval between them, but I saw them shoot off about 15 in the 10 minutes I was out there, so it was a pretty impressive spectacle, and it isn’t even Divali yet!

Needless to say, it looked like fun, so I’m off to the market now to go get some of my own. Also, I’m going to have to get some extra sleep tonight as I certainly won’t be able to sleep Tuesday night with one billion people setting off fireworks all night long! It was bad (loud) enough in Dehradun last time that I couldn’t sleep at all, and up here in Landour with the echoes, it seems like it’s going to be even louder. At least I’ll have an awesome view of the festivities; I can clearly see both Mussoorie and Dehradun from my front yard, and so I think I’ll get quite a show on Tuesday that may well be worth staying up the whole night for…

Happy Divali!

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 30th, 2005 at 11:47 am and is filed under India. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.