Luminescence and the marking of time

Reflections on Diwali

Dadi (Narinder Sharma) with her brother Bawa

Luminescent colour – raṅg – light the melancholy. Diwali creeps up again. Raam bringing with him the usual gifts: existential ponderances, cultural fixes and perhaps, if we are fortunate enough, traces of universal being. 

My dadi died eleven years ago. She was taken to hospital from her care-home in West London to hospital overnight after our Diwali dinner. We had eaten spicy Indo-chinese food–replete with delectable red chillies–at a restaurant called Bombay China that no longer stands. My dad says the food killed her. After a couple nights in hospital, she passed in the small hours of November 6th to the last smatterings of fireworks that continued to cast Bonfire Night; bursts of colour auspiciously radiating over the black firmament (Raam returning to celebrate the end of the sinister popery of the Catholics; perhaps one of the many Ramayanas that field this world). 

This was a crucial life event. And each time Diwali comes round, a familiar sense of melancholy and unease sets in. But often a clarifying meaningfulness is reached. A head-on collision with identity and form, with emotion and purpose. The event of that death set me on a course that I still follow; without a map. 

The air is fresh and crisp marking the beginning of the period of darkness–often coupled with the clocks going back–; ushering in the long cold stretch. It is also the beginning of the cosy depressed season, as well as the full-on demands of the academic year which continue to bear marks through my post-academic life. A series of circumstances left me flying solo this year for the festival and the feeling was no different. We even got the day wrong as a family, so the feeling of being crept upon was that much more potent. 

Under the apricious rays of Tbilisi’s sun, feeling off-key, I ruminated over a pork shawarma, caramelised with garlic-less mayo and pickled chillies. What do we do? Who are we? Should I do anything? I walked over to Singh Supermarket and bought some gujiya and kaju katli; the guy in front of me made off with the last fresh gulab jamun much to my chagrin. Sweets. I know where I am with sweets. I had made gajar ka halwa a couple days previous. A newly instituted tradition I had been upkeeping for the last few years. The veg lady was very interested in what I was going to do with the raw village milk. I spread the gospel of the gloriously saccharine and rich, tempered by spice; a taste I was ambivalent to as a child but have grown to acquire. Maturity is widening your sweet palate too, so I might suggest. 

It was organically decided upon to have a small dinner with a couple friends to mark the occasion. I was going to cook anyway and all the better to share. The afternoon was taken off and a somewhat random assorted meal was constructed of club classics. Daal, rajma, onion pakoda and a huge pot of haldi-rich rice. I say random because we always seemed to make things up as a family, or remix old customs; this is living tradition, one might say, and I was upholding the arbitrariness faithfully in all its precarious glory–the traces of a pre-history.  

We wined on saperavi and I wondered if the Mughals had ever imported these rich Caucasian reds…. A delightful thought as agarbatti swathed the air to the tune of my slap-dash playlist of music. The involute weave of Kadri Golpanath’s raga–mediated via the technology of Mr Sax–gave a colour to our breath, while the 70s brilliance of Kalyanji-Anandji sparred with Nusrat’s invocations and the impure strains of Panjabi MC. Meaning was being made, circumlocuted and folded, encircling self and identity and the absolute impermanence of it all, intransigently passed down through a chain of obligation, utterance and gesture.  

And so the colour of breath lingered on through the wistful nights and down out from sweetened bellies and anxious gaiety was not sundered from its misgiving hosts, but nonetheless the strains of light that vision one’s path continued to beam effulgently for the radiant becoming that constitute the meaning of being; in place, at a glance, full hold and reanimated vitality written along the notches of temporal flight and modalities of abstract chromaticity.