The Five Days of Dewali: Budhvar and Guruvar

Wednesday, November 7: With no particular Dewali plans, I fall under the sway of an attractive Indian woman with a three-day program. Besides being fetching, she is also infallibly competent (I’ve begun to suspect that I am unconsciously drawn to competent women, perhaps in an attempt to counterbalance my own fecklessness), consummately selfless, a bit overbearing, serious on some subjects almost to the point of humorlessness, and, given the forgoing, likely entirely wrong for me. She is a Seva Mandir employee who spends her free time volunteering at a “Short-Stay Home” for children and women who have been abandoned or battered by their husbands—a government-funded shelter also operated by Seva Mandir. The three-day program is quite simple: Celebrate Dewali with the residents of the shelter. Given such an admirable concept and the prospect of seeing this woman outside of work, how can I say no? And so on Wednesday evening, I pile into a tempo with two other American volunteers, Lindsey and Marissa, and head north of Fatehpura on Bedla Road, to the campus of Vidya Bhawan’s Rural Institute. Seva Mandir’s Badgaon Block Office is located there, and next to the Block Office is the Short-Stay Home.

The shelter is a single story L-shaped structure of perhaps ten large rooms, all opening upon an interior courtyard. We are introduced to the residents, given a quick tour, subjected to an overlong description of the Short-Stay Home concept and its sister government program, the Child Distress Line, and ushered into a common room which will host the night’s puja. Puja is a broad term—literally, respect—that embraces a range of worships activities, almost always including prayer and often a meal as well. At the far end of the common room, a makeshift idol has been erected—it seems a color print-out of a triptych of goddesses has been affixed to a rectangle of white cardboard and draped with a garland of marigolds. A handful of votive candles flicker on a tray before it. This, in my reckoning, is the Dewali equivalent of a stunted, artificial Christmas tree, its branches drooped under a handful of vapid globe ornaments whose synthetic surfaces are unable to reflect even the feeble glow of the tree’s single strand of white lights (and perhaps beneath the tree empty boxes have been wrapped up in tawdry paper and wound with bows).

Slowly and quietly, the shelter’s remaining residents (many of the women have returned with their children to their parents’ or other relatives’ homes for the holiday) file into the common room. One of the Short Stay Home’s residents has attempted suicide that morning, which is proffered as the source of the group’s solemnity—but I wonder if cause and effect haven’t been transposed. The puja begins. The assembled sing and clap half-heartedly while taking turns before the idol in small groups, gently rocking the tray of votives together in a slow, arcing movement. It seems no one knows more than the first verse of the song, and so the singing temporarily sputters out while someone fetches a songbook. The three Americans also get a turn in front of the idol; otherwise, we attempt to keep the beat by clapping—no small feat given the multitude to choose from. “Why do I get the feeling,” I whisper to Marissa, “that in twenty years this scene will be described in some best-selling memoir about growing up poor in India?” We don’t stick around for the meal.

Thursday, November 8: Marissa, Lindsey, and I return to the Short-Stay Home and join a group of about twenty residents, staff, and volunteers who pile into two hired tempos for a ride to a street fair just off of Hospital Road. The fair is a gargantuan neon eyesore and almost exactly what one would expect of a county fair in the U.S., except bigger and without the livestock (the entire country is a county fair in that regard): rides (including a towering Ferris Wheel!), games, assorted gimcracks and gewgaws, and lots of unwholesome food. We spend about ninety minutes milling around the grounds. Balloons are purchased for the smaller children, and everyone has ice cream bars and South Indian food. The kids are permitted but one ride before it's time to head back to the Short Stay Home. I am withdrawn and sullen almost from the time we arrive at the fair, frustrated by the fact that I fail to make even a basic connection with any of the kids; I don’t even try with the women, which, given their circumstances, and given Indian culture too, is probably a wise course of action. Marissa and Lindsey get along much better with everyone. As we prepare to return to the shelter, we're given the option of leaving; the two women have an apartment-warming party in Old City beckoning, and I invite myself. While they say fulsome goodbyes and glad hand the scorned masses through the windows of the hired tempos, I wait impatiently in the auto-rickshaw we have hailed. Along the way, the auto stops at a liquor shop; we purchase cranberry Bacardi Breezers and a couple of 750 ml Kingfishers for me.

Old City is Udaipur’s tourist hub and a warren of claustrophobic streets and alleyways, small crafts shops, cafés, and chalk-white apartment buildings. It is my first time setting foot there, and I am immediately charmed. Along major thoroughfares, as throughout the city, the street is bedecked with a thick, sparkling canopy of tinseled garlands and lights—a canopy so thick, in fact, that several times over the course of the weekend I have the sensation that, rather than being outdoors, I have wandered onto some vast warehouse movie set. The apartment’s entrance is off of an alley, and the fireworks being set off outside reverberate so loudly against the walls of the surrounding buildings that they are bomb-like in their aural ferocity. This feeling, too, will become a leitmotif of the weekend: shutting my eyes and imagining without trouble that I’m in a war zone.

The apartment is on the third floor and has been newly rented by Henrik, a young Swede with short, hipsterish hair and long sideburns. We trade small talk and sip our drinks for a bit with the other guests—a Brit, three Indians, and two other Americans—before adjourning to the roof of the building, which is six stories all told. The view from the roof is generous: Old City seems less a labyrinth than jigsaw puzzle from this height. In the west, looming above everything, is the enormous facade of the City Palace, an imposing structure that attests to the Rajput (or is it simply Indian?) obsession with grandeur. It is strewn with white lights for the holiday. By the time we reach the roof, a fireworks show has already been in progress above the Palace for some time; when we leave a half an hour later, it has only gathered in intensity. At least a half dozen other displays of equal radiance are competing for the city’s attention in the skies above Udaipur, and it is a protracted battle, one that will be waged into the darkest hours of the night.

I cannot fail to appreciate the tableau before me: demigod's eye view of the prostrate city, fireworks above a palace, exotic, picturesque India at hand--and yet I cannot enjoy it. The feeling of undeserved privilege, an admittedly foolish one, rises within me uncontrollably. India cannot join me on the rooftop; if anyone should own this prospect, I think, it is them. It is their holiday, after all. We only gawk at its native voluptuousness for cheap, vicarious thrills, I think, like an old white man leering hungrily at the twirling brown bodies during a classical dance performance. For similarly foolish, although perhaps more complicated reasons, I am uncomfortable among the expatriate crowd, which I somehow convince myself is a decadent bunch of ne'er-do-wells, rather than a group of young people trying very simply to enjoy a world and a life far from any they have known in the past. As everyone heads off to dinner, I part company, and given the pleasant air, effulgent sky, and nearly full bottle of Kingfisher in my hand, decide it will be best to walk. Tomorrow is Dewali Day, and the long weekend awaits.