Diwali in India

Dana had served us excellent Margaritas the night before and we supplemented that with a pretty good bottle of Indian Merlot at Little Italy, so Saturday, the biggest day of Diwali, was slow in getting started. Slow for us but not for the truly exuberant Diwali celebrators who had started blasting firecrackers at 5:00 am.

When we finally arrived at somewhat conscious states, we decided to wander down to Destination City to buy some fireworks for ourselves and to have some lunch. We went back to the only real restaurant in the center (there are lots of other eating places, but they are all street food stands or tiny storefronts with 2 or 3 tables each).

The same more or less impeccably dressed little man who had waited on us before greeted us warmly and shook our hands. We then attempted once more to order Tandoori Chicken. This time I had spotted a picture on the menu that looked quite like a roast chicken and because it was in a section of choices that all had Tandoori in their name, I figured one of them must be Tandoori chicken. It turns out they all were, each some variation on the chicken theme. Neither of us was terrifically hungry and we were very mindful of our last experience when we were brought double of everything we ordered, so this time we very carefully and very shrewdly placed our order. No starters, only two pieces of Naan bread and one full order of Tandoori chicken.

The menu listed half order and full order and when I asked our waiter about this he explained that a half order had two pieces and a full order had four pieces. Because we were ordering just one order for the two of us, we decided we should have four pieces rather than two. We supplemented this with one order of Veg Rice and sat back to smugly congratulate ourselves on having not only ordered the right amount of food, but also having done so with such remarkable aplomb.

Imagine our shock when a platter containing eight pieces of chicken arrived shortly at our table (along with a huge bowl of rice). Shaking our head in bemusement over the waiter’s ability to circumvent our specific order, we dug in and found the Tandoori chicken to be excellent. The rice, like most rice dishes we have experienced in India, was very oily, but quite tasty.

When the bill arrived I was shocked once again, because the waiter had only charged us 200 Rs. (a little over $4.00) for one order of Tandoori chicken. I called him over to explain that he had forgotten to charge us for the second order. He looked at me quizzically and assured me we had only gotten one order. Not convinced, I pointed out to him that we had been promised 4 pieces of chicken and had gotten eight. His response (with my assumption of his thoughts) went as follows: “(Are you from Mars?) Sir, there are four pieces in a full order but it’s too hard to eat a large piece of chicken with your fingers unless we cut each piece in half so that is what we do. (Why do they always send us the idiots?)”

We tried to walk off our larger than expected lunch by exploring the outer reaches of Magarpatta. Just as we reached a back gate the droning chants of a Muslim call to prayer could be heard in the distance. There is a fair sized Muslim population here and we knew there were mosques about, but we hadn’t yet heard that hypnotic call to prayer that was so commonplace in Dubai. The chant is comforting and compelling in equal measure and I can understand how it might motivate one to hustle down to the nearest mosque for a few moments of prayer.

As the chanting continued, we heard the unmistakable opening strains of the Eagles’ “Hotel California” coming from a nearby Disco, and the juxtaposition of the two songs was spell-binding. I suggest you try it yourself – crank up some mosque chants on your home stereo and then start playing “Hotel California” from your external iPod speakers and you’ll be blown away by how well they fit and work with each other.

After a long walk we returned to the Destination Center so I could buy some fireworks. All day long we had felt almost like we were in a war zone because the cacophony of exploding fire crackers was incessant and actually got worse as we moved into evening. The attendant at one of the few stores in the Center that sold fireworks must have assumed all foreigners have explosion fetishes because he tried to sell me the equivalent of cherry bombs when I asked for fire crackers. I rummaged through his stash and found a small box of small crackers (each about an inch long and a quarter inch in diameter).

We made our way to one of the plazas in the interior of our apartment complex where we could just squeeze out a space amongst all the kids, teenagers and parents who were blasting off all manner of fireworks at a giddy pace. I placed one layer of crackers on the ground, twisted the fuses together and lit the tip of the fuse with a match. Being old and less fearful of fireworks than I should be, I sauntered back while the little pile went off like a machine gun, adding pleasantly to the sonic mayhem going on all around us.

I repeated this exercise a few times, always grinning wildly when my faint acoustics supplemented the booming of the big crackers going off right and left. Still having plenty of ammo left, I decided to tie two layers together and the increased breadth and depth of racket was quite pleasing. Still, the fascination of sharp noises that hurt my ears wore off fast enough, so I took the final three layers of crackers I had left and tied all their fuses together, placed the wad on the ground, lit the fuse and strolled back a few steps, only to have one of the crackers fly out of the exploding pile, whereupon it hit my leg just as it blew up. I felt a quick sting and looked down to see a flesh wound a good quarter of an inch in size. That may seem small and insignificant, but you can’t imagine the warm feeling it gives you to know you took one for the good of Diwali. I hope Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu have all made note of the incredible sacrifice I made just to honor them on one of the holiest Hindu holidays on the calendar.

On Sunday, along with friend Dana, we had the good fortune and great pleasure to enjoy a Diwali lunch with one of Peggy’s co-workers, Ashwin, and his wife Ritu. We met their two sons, who immediately, and accurately, discerned that we were old and boring and went back to their video games. Ritu had prepared a fairly traditional Indian lunch, trying to hold back on the hottest stuff to spare our delicate western stomachs. The food was all excellent and we were pleased to have gotten a chance to taste some home-cooked indigenous food.

The afternoon was spent in conversations about India and how rapidly it’s changing in many ways while remaining so very traditional in many others. We were apprised of the difference between an arranged marriage and a love marriage and told horror stories of the incredible stress a typical 3-day Indian wedding places on both parties.

Many, probably still most, marriages in India are of the arranged type. The parties to the marriage are paired up by their parents, although there is some give and take in this process that allows each of the youngsters at least some say in who their final partner will be. But this type of relationship is not the kind that we are used to wherein two people fall in love, date for a while then finally decide their relationship was made in heaven and destined to last for eternity so they decide to get married. This latter approach is what the Indians refer to when they talk about a “love marriage”.

Ashwin and Ritu started out as an arranged couple, but fell in love during the process so they consider their marriage a hybrid of the two types. Even so, because the relationship had started on the arranged track, they were obliged to go through with a 3-day wedding, which is designed in part to introduce the two to the notion of intimacy. They both described the utter exhaustion that resulted from this approach and assured us that for days they were both too tired to make use of the (supposedly) new found skills in intimacy.

As part of the decidedly upper, or at least upper middle, class in India, they are very modern in their thinking. They would not presume to arrange a marriage for either of their sons and they expect one or both to leave India for higher education. They also flaunted the whole left-hand-forbidden for eating rule, making us realize that for all the tradition we hear about and seemingly experience, there are some powerful forces for moderation and modernization at work in this vast country.

Back home, while trying to get some work done, I usually try the TV to see if there is anything interesting. For those who think American cable is the vast wasteland, I’m here to tell you that India can give us a run for the money. We get 75 channels and probably 70 of them look exactly the same. On each of these channels there is an Indian person in colorful clothing sitting or standing in front of a very colorful backdrop talking about something that I don’t care about or understand (which pretty much covers all of the world’s topics). This reality pretty much forces me to watch Cricket, which I still don’t get. After paying at least a little attention to one game, I went to a cricket web site later on to see if the story about what happened at the match would help explain this strange sport to me. What a great idea! Here’s one example of how much clearer it is to read about Cricket than it is to watch it:

“Ganga danced down the wicket to launch leg-spinner Max Waller straight down the ground for six, but fell in unfortunate fashion to the final ball of the over when a quicker googly fizzed in down the leg-side came off his inner thigh on the stumps.”

If that doesn’t clarify everything, then let’s face it, you must be from Mars.

Recent photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/26545681@N07/sets/72157622624446906/