diwali

So this is what the first major festival without looks like.

No waking up at the crack of dawn, none of the usual frenzy before sunrise, no somnolent mid-mornings, no phone calls, no home-made sweets.

It should be - in an appalling way, it is - a relief. We have a ready-made excuse to not celebrate a very exhausting festival.

It is also useless to ask why it makes me feel so terrible when the day has gone exactly like I've wished a thousand times it would be. As if I didn't know why. Instead, I think of how my mother, every year, warned my father a month in advance that she would not be making stuff at home; how, two weeks before he would persuade her to at least make a payasam or therati paal ('for the kid. Paavam, he likes therati paal'). How it would start with that one concession and end with two namkeens, three sweets and a jar of leghiyam that would last a whole year.

It's not that we aren't celebrating stuff because we're not supposed to. We just don't want to. I can see this lack of enthusiasm extending well into the future - I've personally never been a big one for festivals. But my parents had always wanted to do things so that my son at least knew what it was all about. I used to think it was for him; that it would be my son's absence that would take away the enthusiasm. Now I'm wondering if it wasn't my father's craving for the festival specials that made my mother do everything with such dedication year after year; whether, with him gone, she could ever find it in her again to celebrate something like that.