The Five Days of Dewali: Shukravar, Shanivar, and Ravivar

Friday, November 9: Friday dawns like any other in Udaipur, except that on this day I’ve been mercifully absolved of the need to trudge to Seva Mandir in order to occupy myself with work for seven hours. And oh yes, it’s all because today is the holiest and therefore most raucous day of the Hindu calendar—Dewali Day—I mustn’t forget that. Most Seva Mandir staff members have taken leave on Thursday or even earlier in the week, and many hailing from other parts of India have returned home to spend the holiday with family. Arun, however, has not returned to Karnataka, and so we meet in the Guest House in the late afternoon, both dressed to go out. “Where are you going?” he asks. I tell him that I’m headed to the internet café for a bit, and after that I’m not sure.

“Where are you going?” I ask.

“I am also going out, I don’t know where,” he tells me with a rueful quarter-laugh. Having already dismissed the idea of returning to the Short-Stay Home, I think that if we’re both to do nothing for the holiday, we might do it together, but don’t venture the thought aloud. We part ways; I won’t see him again until Saturday morning. Though sunset is slightly more than an hour off, they pyrotechnics have already begun; in fact, their cracks and pops have been audible since morning.

On the way home from the internet café, I stop at a corner shop and purchase a half-kilo of sweets, which have been marked up 40% for the holiday. As with all important occasions, Dewali is observed by mass ingestion of the sort of food that induces premature death, and sweet shops throughout the city have increased production, augmented staff, and expanded their boundaries to cram the esurient maw of the people with the confections it so vociferously clamors for. Makeshift shops, often no more than a single table beneath a cloth canopy, have appeared along roadsides throughout the city like creepers crowding a tree trunk, choking egress; in addition to sweets, many sell fireworks or trinkets and other small gifts. I take the box of sweets back to my room and devour half, thinking that if I honor no other Dewali rite today, it will be this one. Though the holiday is not part of my cultural tradition, I am depressed that I have no one to celebrate with; I am also deflated by the realization that no one among the initiated will introduce me to this essential expression of Indian existence (and remember bitterly how Arun has implicitly refused that very opportunity).

I won’t allow myself to simply pass the night in my room and so venture forth into my neighborhood, hoping to steal a frisson of joy from the celebration of others. At this juncture in the night, the sound of exploding fireworks has become a near constant, like the persistent volley of a firefight. I turn down a canopied side street and enter a different world, one where the sacred and profane coalesce in a perfect, swirling maelstrom and become indistinguishable.

Beneath the street’s garish canopy, the doorsteps of every shop and home are decorated with elegant and hallowing white and umber rangolis. Tiny candles form small, glittering constellations around the chalk designs and on most other flat surfaces—along the tops of walls and on window sills and ledges. Fireworks thunder in all directions, and their furious light eclipses that of the candles; one burst has scarcely failed before another rises through the shower of its predecessor’s dying embers. I watch a family of three perform puja in a tiny shop before an idol of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, to whom the day is devoted. In the street, a group of small children form a semi-circle around a cone-shaped device, and they burst into ecstatic leaps and cheers as it throws up a slender, listing wall of brilliant greenish light. Along the roadside cows chew their cud quiescently while the deafening din of explosion rends the night all about them. Everywhere the appointed scramble with their matches or lighters, seeking cover from the sound and fury they have unleashed. All is furious—furious light, furious noise, furious joy. It is a fantastic world I have entered, and though I am in it, I am not part of it. After thirty minutes of wandering, I set off for the near shore of Fateh Sagar.

On a bench at the lake, I have an uninterrupted view of the fireworks above Old City. I am also able to watch displays near and far explode above the trees lining the road that runs along the lake’s eastern shore—I attempt to gauge their relative size and distance according to the lag between sight and sound. I am mostly alone, although two teenagers on a scooter stop to talk for a bit, and another young man laughingly shouts “Go back to your country,” as he passes on the back of a friend’s motorbike. After another thirty minutes of watching, I walk home. When I climb into bed at 1:30, the thunderous fusillade outside my window has scarcely abated.

Saturday, November 10: At 8:30 I wake and trudge to the bathroom to the familiar accompaniment of low grade explosion. Has Udaipur known any respite from the onslaught during the night? I wonder at the motivation for setting off fireworks at such an hour: is it an excess of fervor, an excess of fireworks, or both? Or is it simply delight in noisemaking? Arun has spent the night at a coworker’s flat, and returns to the Guest House around 9:30. He soon invites me to join him for an afternoon showing of the new Shah Rukh Khan blockbuster, Om Shanti Om; as I have yet to go to the movies in India, this would seem a perfect initiation into the Bollywood universe. I instantly feel better about the previous day’s snubbing.

I know of no American analogue to Shah Rukh Khan. He is Bollywood’s biggest star and in this country entirely inescapable: he is on television commercials, at cricket matches, voicing radio promos, and splashed across the gossip page of every newspaper. Shah Rukh is India big, which means the adoration of more than a billion people. This is his world, heart and soul; Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and Johnny Depp are superfluous. Om Shanti Om is a Shah Rukh vehicle, and it has a Dewali release; the combination has seismic potential.

Arun and I arrive at the cinema in Chetak Circle ten minutes before the 3:30 show and find its grounds overrun with a restive mass of prospective moviegoers. The theater’s woefully inadequate parking lot and perimeter overflow with motorbikes and scooters, and thick, misshapen lines have formed in front of both box office windows. In true Indian fashion, Arun and I shoulder our way to one side of a queue, and then attempt to merge with it as close to the box office as the welter of bodies will permit (I only bemoan Indians’ flagrant disdain for the queue when I myself an not benefiting by it; that is, any time I’m not accompanied by an Indian). At the front of the line, a scrum of patrons struggles violently, each attempting to hold his ground (and they are all young men) against the mass imperative of the crowd, which seeks any vantage closer to the ticket window. The foremost are sweating profusely with the effort of restraint, despite the relative mildness of the day. Arun and I hover just outside this seething mass and wait perhaps fifteen minutes before a shouting man dissolves the queue: as I have suspected all along, the 3:30 show has long been sold out; the line we have joined has been waiting to purchase tickets for the 6:30 show, and the box office won’t open again until 6. The man tells everyone to beat it.

We laugh wistfully both at the zeal of the masses and our naïveté and rather than sticking around as many do, we instead take an auto-rickshaw to some large public gardens just east of the Old City. Udaipur’s tiny zoo is located on the grounds (Admission: Indians—Rs 7, Foreign Tourists—Rs 50), and we spend some time snarling at the leopards and searching in vain for the Asiatic lion that a sign tells us the zoo houses. Afterward Arun makes some purchases in the market (undershirts, shorts), and darkness creeps over the city. “Do you still want to see a movie?” he asks as we make our way toward Delhi Gate. I think him delusional to imagine that we might still get tickets to the late show of Om Shanti Om, but I say yes anyway.

Rather than heading toward Chetak, we take an auto to Hathipole, where, unbeknownst to me, another theater lies hidden from the road, obscured by a high wall, perfectly invisible to the ignorant; it is an older, smaller structure that features second-run movies. We purchase balcony seats for a film called Bhool Bulaiyaa, which Arun translates as Forget the Ghost—I learn later that a more accurate translation is The Maze or The Labyrinth or, more literally, The Place Where One Gets Lost. Yet Arun’s interpretation is the truer, as the movie is, at least on the surface, a ghost story. And he should know: the Bollywood version of the film is the fourth he’s seen. He’s already watched it in its Kannada (his native language), Tamil, and Malayalam incarnations (naturally he claims the Kannada version is best)—it seems Bollywood is as hard up for ideas as Hollywood.

The theater is enormous, and though our seats seem miles from its fore, I needn’t strain to make out detail—the screen is in keeping with the scale of the place. I am immediately glad that the movie’s Hindi dialogue is incomprehensible; theater etiquette in India, if it exists, is akin to barroom etiquette in the States—within legal and reasonable bounds, one may behave however one wishes. Spectators hold conversations, answer phone calls (no Indian will ever turn off a phone for any reason—I recently attended a wedding in which the priest answered his mobile in the middle of the ceremony), smoke bidis, shout at the screen, whistle, and catcall. Perhaps some of this insolence is due to familiarity; I get the idea that many among the crowd have seen the movie before.

Afterwards, Arun and I discuss the movie over masala dosas and fruit shakes with ice cream in a grimy little hotel on the Circle. Arun declares the Bollywood version the worst of the Bhool Bulaiyaa lot, and though I haven’t seen the other three, I believe him. The film, in my estimation, is a deplorable convolution of genres—comedy, suspense, romance, action, drama, and, this being Bollywood, musical—and had I been able to understand the dialogue, I would likely deplore that as well. One might justifiably wonder how I can judge with confidence the quality of a film without this essential interpretive tool. To this I reply, did one have to hear Leo DiCaprio cry “I’m the king of the world!” to know that Titanic sucked? Mediocrity is a universal language.

Prima facie evidence: Bhool Bulaiyaa’s main character, played by big star Akshay Kumar, is introduced around the movie’s halfway point by means of a music video that arrives and departs without warning or connection, whether visual or thematic, to the film—that is, other than the shared presence of Akshay Kumar (and this isn’t some intermission diversion—that will come later). Kumar’s character is both irreverent jokester and principled man of action, and in a late, improbable twist, he is also revealed to be a brilliant student of psychology. The movie reaches a climax of absurdity when, at a critical juncture, Kumar exclaims in a stream of English as unprecedented as that psychological acuity, “I must go beyond the conventional practices of psychotherapy!” Also, has a creditable work of art or entertainment yet been created whose conflict centers on a character suffering from multiple personality disorder? I don’t think so.

After dinner, Arun and I walk home. Fireworks light the way, naturally.

Sunday, November 11: Normalcy slowly finds its way back into the world.