JUDY RAYMOND
There were leaning stacks of big, deep, aluminium pots for corn soup, piles of flat round tawas for making roti. But the store was also packed with plastic buckets, flowered bedsheets, brooms, electric fans, irons, kitchen towels, gingham covers for washing machines, checkered plastic tablecloths. A Hindu friend had suggested she try this store for deyas, but she should have guessed she could find them here: it might look like a variety store to be found in almost any country, but it was in St James, where most of the streets had Indian names and where many former labourers had settled after their indentureship had ended, a century ago and more. Of course, it would stock deyas and tawas and bilnas, among other utensils whose names she was slightly embarrassed she did not know.
Rather than searching for anything, it was easier to edge between the shaky pillars of plastic bowls, sidestep the string-headed mops, clattering the concertina-ed ironing boards against each other, and then speak to the affable man at the counter.
“Ravi!” he shouted, apparently at no one in particular. A skinny teenage assistant appeared from among the packed shelves.
“You want the wax ones, or the plain deyas?” Ravi asked in response to her request, then vanished again and returned cradling short, crooked stacks of the little clay bowls. In this store crammed with shiny metal and plastic, they looked as though they had been brought out not from a storeroom, but out of history. Ravi counted them into a black plastic bag. She could have chosen the modern ones like candles, ready-filled with wax, rather than the smaller old-time ones, empty and with an indentation in one side where the wick would rest.
For these you could ask for the wicks, bundles of soft loosely-twisted string to be cut to the right length, then arranged in the deyas before you poured in the oil. Ghee was said to be best, but she used coconut oil. Nowadays it was fashionable overseas and was reimported to the island, as gentrified as olive oil, cold-pressed, extra virgin, extra expensive. But here you could also still get the kind people had used here for cooking since the first Indians were brought to work in the cane fields, after the emancipated Africans abandoned their previous drudgery. On the shelves of airconditioned supermarkets, the opaque white oil was lined up in its bottles, solid like candlewax or bacon fat; but by the time it reached home in its plastic bag in the trunk of your car, the heat would have morphed it into a miniature iceberg sliding through a greasy yellow sea.
Some people didn’t even use deyas any more, but put up Christmas lights from now, and left them up till the end of the year. There were whole streets in certain areas that were famous for their displays, each house owner trying to outshine the next; police had to be called in to deal with the traffic when outsiders came every evening to drive slowly past, comparing the numbers and fanciful arrangements of lights. But Clair had always found the little oil lamps with their cats’ tongues of golden flames so much prettier, and the careful ritual of lighting each lamp more moving than flicking a switch.
She imagined the countless deyas conjuring others into life around the planet as it spun into darkness, wrapped in coils of these little beads of light. She thought of the first Indians brought here almost two hundred years ago, lighting their deyas — in those days not so different from the lamps their colonial masters used — under strange skies. Perhaps it felt as if they were sending a message back to the home they might never see again. There would be no visible response to these tiny signals. But did it comfort them to know that their compatriots were doing the same, beyond the kala pani, the dark water they had crossed? Did they feel their gods were smiling down on them from the same heavens? Or did it underline the newness of this place: stars in corners of the heavens where there should be none, the croaking and whirring of night creatures they could not yet name, the lack of the ingredients to make the foods that should make up the feast?
***
Clair had bought twelve deyas, the smallest number you could buy, and as she left the store, the shopkeeper wished her “Shubh Divali,” a greeting she returned with pleasure — perhaps a little too eagerly? She wondered whether he was a Hindu himself, or a Muslim. Or a Christian. It was hard nowadays not to despair of this country, but in this one short season of the year it still felt like a few decades ago, in the days when some aspiring political party, probably now defunct, had had the slogan, “All ah we is one.” For many years now, people of other faiths had joined in this festival. That gave it one of the meanings it held for her: that there was still hope for this place. Though much had been lost and many had fled, or withdrawn behind high walls and security barriers, people joined together as these lights were lit on this tiny island, from a spark that was kept alive through the lamps and the fuel that some of their ancestors had used for centuries. It had become everyone’s festival, if they chose. The survival of this custom said that some of the old ways were indeed the best ways, that human nature didn’t change, and despite its flaws, there was good in people still.
***
She sidled out between the piled-up goods into a sunset that gilded the long straight road of rumshops, Chinese groceries, old-time steam laundries, more variety stores, trucks from whose trays men sold fruit and vegetables from the countryside. When it got dark, women would come out to sell roti on the pavement to the men drinking beer in the roadside rumshops, and would cook on the spot while their customers waited. Every night the women unpacked their covered pots of pumpkin and baigan, curry goat and chicken, the styrotex coolers full of balls of dough, the little tanks of gas for cooking the roti over an open flame, the folding tables decked with an oilcloth. They’d light up the single gas ring, flatten the roti between their hands and spread it on the tawa, brush it with ghee, flip it until it was flecked with crisp spots of brown and ready to be packed with pot-spoonfuls of the chosen fillings, rolled and twisted into greaseproof paper, slid into a brown paper bag.
***
She had time to reach home before dusk fell, to look for a few deyas her children had decorated at school — decades ago now — with wandering red or purple borders and glued-on sequins. The paint was mostly worn away, the sequins fallen off, but these deyas remained the most precious. She didn’t put oil in them but lined them up on display.
Some years she and her husband had driven the children around before the day itself, to see spectacular public displays in villages and parks, thousands of the little lamps balanced on the joints of lengths of split bamboo that had been arched and joined into flower shapes, simple or surreal; elephants; om symbols; lotuses; cobras; archways tall enough to walk through. She’d taken the children to Divali lighting-up events at their schools, too.
She didn’t know much about the rituals that preceded the festival for Hindus, except that they involved cleaning, cooking, painting, washing, as Christmas did for their Christian neighbours; in fact she wondered if the latter’s similar, obsessive preparations for Christmas — new curtains, “putting away the house,” new furniture — were actually influenced by the Divali customs.
Photo credit: Nilanjana Roy, Delhi, who noted that the photos were both “courtesy our local potter’s colony, where they make diyas every year, paint them right before Diwali and fill the candle wax/ wicks the old-school way.”
For the believers this festival had deeper meanings: it was a time for charity, for welcoming the lost and friendless, mending rifts, closing the distances between people. It still brought her comfort these days, though almost overshadowed by a melancholy nostalgia. But who could object to a night that celebrated the triumph of good over evil, light over darkness? Especially those in need of light in their lives. And in these times. The deyas were tiny beacons, given power by their vast numbers, beacons sending not a warning, but good news. The festival was pure, simple, without the frantic excesses and expense of Christmas. Her little family wasn’t religious, but this was one of the few rituals they observed — even if, at least in the early days, the reason the children loved it was because it was the one time of the year they were allowed to play with fire. There had been years, though, when the evening was marred by the tears of those same children, or, more recently, grandchildren, because they could only watch the lighting-up and weren’t allowed to touch flame to wick themselves; or, when the great day came, they’d been burnt by a drop of hot oil, or a match they’d tried to use to light too many deyas.
***
This time, when dusk fell, she added an old deya to those she’d bought, and arranged them all on her porch — she had downsized from the family house and lived in an apartment, with no yard space of her own. But the evening was too damp for deyas out on the grass anyway. Clair nudged them into a circle and lit one each for her children, their partners and their children. One for an old friend who had died recently, one of the first and certainly the closest to go; one for her ex-husband, even, as he was being friendly these days; another longtime friend who’d grown distant; one who was celebrating elsewhere with her big Hindu family . . . She added enough to make up thirteen, which she’d been told was an auspicious number in Hinduism.
She watched the flames for a while, not knowing what to do next. In the past, Divali wouldn’t simply have been the lights: her colleagues would bring sweets for her — gulab jamoon, barfi, doughy prasad, and her favourite, crisp ginger-infused kurma; she’d bring some home for the children and the rest would be shared round the office. But those were people — friends — she didn’t work with any longer, and they’d mostly lost touch, despite the promises.
This year she’d met an acquaintance in the mall who had asked what she was doing for Divali.
“Oh, I haven’t really thought about it,” she’d said. “You know, all my children live away now, so the grandchildren aren’t here . . .”
“You must come by us,” Reshmi had said. “We all still go by my parents, in Kelly Village. Just family, but that is plenty people now, with all my brothers and sisters and the grands. Come, nah, so you wouldn’t be by yourself. We all cook and take something.”
“Well, the children might call, and I wouldn’t want to come and then have to spend the evening on the phone . . .”
It was the best excuse she could come up with on the spot. She wasn’t quite up to being with people but didn’t want to unload her troubles. She had promised to let Reshmi know but hadn’t called: she would have felt out of place among the celebrations of a big family she’d never met, and been made even more deeply aware of her own children’s and grandchildren’s absence, thousands of miles away. She was hesitant, too, about driving to Central and back alone at night. Not nowadays.
As for the children calling, well, there was no reason they should call especially for Divali, and sometimes the calls didn’t go the way she hoped.
“Hi, darling, how are you? How are my grands? How was Dylan’s school concert?”
“Hi, Mum, can I call you back? We’re now about to drop Jada to soccer practice. ’Kay, thanks, love you, ’bye. Talk soon.”
Still, she was — usually — glad for them that they were away. So many people had left now. She couldn’t see much of a future for this place, either, only sinking back into the obscurity and the struggles it had known in colonial days. Except it was now proudly independent. And what did that mean? Too small to be a useful pawn in global chess games; too small to defend its own position in those games. So she had once thought her children would be not only more comfortable but safer in the north. Now she read about cyberattacks, waves of climate refugees, coming water wars. She had marvelled at their smart houses, where everything was controlled by an app on a phone — lights, heating, window blinds, oven. What happened if a smart house was blown offline by a smart bomb a thousand miles away? And in one of the unusually hard winters that were becoming usual? Still, those places had the resources to recover, rebuild, adapt, not like these forgotten islands.
For now, too, her children had opportunities they could never have had here. She tried not to think further ahead than that. She should be — she was — glad they were all well and happy. And busy. That they didn’t worry about her. And she should be comforted by knowing they had been parented well enough to be able to spread their wings and fly away, to where there were more opportunities, less crime. She wouldn’t want her grandchildren to be brought up here, the way things were, with no end in sight. Her own children had run up the road to play with the other boys, ridden their bikes around the neighbourhood. You couldn’t let them do that now, here, unless they lived in what was called a “gated community,” but was only a gated and guarded group of neighbours who were strangers to each other.
Still, the mass exodus, she supposed, was a sign of the success of the people whose ancestors had come here against their will or by chance, or in desperation, in search of new beginnings: they had grounded themselves in this alien soil so well that when the time came to move on again, they could uproot themselves once more, venture to the metropolis itself, and not just fend for themselves, but flourish there.
***
She took photos of her deyas to send, hoping they would bring back pleasant memories from decades before, even though there were just a few lamps, no children gathered around, soft faces gilded by the light. She had no wishes she dared ask to be fulfilled, no gods to pray to; just memories to hold against her heart like lost, familiar guests, friends, her own children. Her eyes were fixed, unfocused, on the deyas, lost in the ancient human fascination with fire that predated any faith. The little yellow fires added a deeper warmth to the red clay of the lamps, and the oil reflected the dancing flames so that there seemed to be dozens of them.
She steupsed at her earlier mood. “Look at you, getting on like a poor-me-one.” She was glad she had taken the trouble to drive to buy the deyas and wicks. This ritual, the festival, were hers too, and soothed her. At least she had had a choice — she could have joined Reshmi’s family; and tomorrow one of the children might indeed call, or she could call one of them: it had been a few days, so she wouldn’t seem too needy. In fact she wasn’t; she’d been doing all right recently.
***
She didn’t wait up until the end. She knew how it would look — like the aftermath of one of the children’s long-ago birthdays: the clustered lamps the size and shape of half-eaten cupcakes, but with scorch marks on their rims, small gleaming puddles inside. There would be more shining liquid, as though from spilt drinks, on the tiles, where a sooty wick or two had dribbled out the last of the oil it had sucked up from the deya. But the cleaning-up could wait until the morning, like cleaning up after one of those parties.
She checked before going to bed that it was safe to leave the deyas that were still alight. She didn’t want to wait until the twelfth one sputtered out and left one lone flame, trembling in a breath of breeze, then straightening itself and standing up a little longer, holding off the enormous dark for now.
