Diwali trip 2025

Another trip to India. Seems like this is about the only time I get to pen thoughts on to paper. I don't know if it is because it feels like homecoming because as an immigrant,  I often wonder what home is. Is it the place, is it the self or the place in between or is it the feeling of being slightly misplaced everywhere, so every sojourn, or return, seems like a trip back home. Like the hordes packed to return to their ancestral homes in trains for chhath, perhaps home is defined by the occassion than the place.

 I booked the tickets for this trip on something of a whim, during one of those troughs of spirit when your world seems slightly muffled and you begin to suspect that solitude isn’t the same thing as peace. It was a trip to visit my parents borne out of feeling away from them. My father, in his mid-eighties, remains remarkably well, but you start to notice how even small medical symptoms - his aching knees, the slowness of gait and the surgeon’s suggestion of a replacement - carry an invisible weight. It’s as if the body’s slow weakening has turned into a quiet metronome in the background of every family conversation. When your internal decision tree starts including “age” as a nontrivial variable you find yourself running anxious regressions that no one has explicitly assigned you to calculate. During my last stay in Pune, I remember noticing the quiet physics of aging - the way recovery from everything, even small things, now takes longer, the way homeostenosis becomes not just a medical term but a witnessed metaphor for daily events . I promised myself I’d visit every year, pretending as if annual pilgrimages could outpace entropy. Some sort of prophylaxis against regret. I’ve since realized these trips might need to be solo, though I keep imagining bringing Meera along. She’s at that ripe age when the mind is still elastic,  and I want her to see a world that isn’t sterilized by predictability of the western life - the chaos, the un-air-conditioned texture of things, the way India refuses to be curated.

 There’s this odd craving I’ve acquired lately - to revisit a phase of life when I could occupy the simpler role of “child,” rather than the middle-aged adult performing competence for a younger audience, who now look to him for direction as if he knew the map. I want to taste my mother’s cooking again, sodium and tamarind and spice and all, to allow the memories of that taste overwhelm the metabolic arithmetic. I want to listen to my father dispense his confidently non-peer-reviewed wisdom, to indulge the peculiar logic of WhatsApp theology, to care - ingenuinely perhaps - for the ongoing sagas of distant relatives whose names I barely remember over filter coffee which cools too quickly, in the way time itself seems to expand. Like slowing an old VHS tape to 0.5x: the sound warped,  the feeling almost physical. Perhaps it’s selfish, this desire to hold on. Or perhaps it’s the most core thing we do - reaching back toward what built us, before time keeps us from returning. It’s not altruism for my parents who have long passed the empty nesting phase; it’s the selfish desire to preserve a vanishing present. 

What I do see is that as the urban landscape keeps evolving, it seems increasingly built for the young- in urban India, youth is not merely an age statistic, it is in the atmosphere. It is in what is piped into LED screens into houses, sold at street vendors in graphic short shirts and ripped jeans and blasted on speakers for Ganesh chaturthi miravnuks or through smartphone reels. The median age in India is now under thirty, which feels less a statistic and more a design principle. Everything caters to speed, novelty, disposability: is lighter, faster and designed for the transient connoisseur  :use and throw, digitize or disappear, swim or sink. The things my parents still hold on to- bank passbooks, handwritten notes, Rin soap and bucket baths- now feel almost ceremonial, relics of a slower era or grammar. I keep wondering where the floaters go—the ones who can neither sprint nor surrender. They try to keep up, but the distance- between their era built in memory and the modern—widens quietly each year. 

They try to assimilate- to belong- just as they did when they moved to the western India, just as we later would in another country. This was often imperfect and with an accent that betrayed their origin. Their Tamil inflected Marathi became both a bridge and a border. “Madarasi,” the locals called them, sometimes in jest, sometimes not. They often carved out their own tiny enclaves of safety and community. This became Rasta Peth or Matunga or Jackson Heights, NY or Edison, NJ. They invented affectionate monikers- Appabaloonchoke for Appa Balwant Chowk, Grakipet for Grahak Peth- as if renaming the city could claim a small corner of it. In time they called themselves Punekars, though no one quite accepted them as such. Like one always gets the question despite spending >2 decades in the US- " so where are you really from?". To live where the majority doesn’t speak your mother tongue is to exist in a constant audition. You’re always proving, always translating, supressing a thought, never entirely at rest. There’s a kind of low-grade anxiety that is a resulting adjustment output: the fear that what’s visible isn’t quite real, that belonging is conditional. To be an immigrant—or a Bihari, or a Madrasi, or simply an Indian out of place- is to live, as Jhumpa Lahiri says, in a state of perpetual pregnancy: always expecting, never quite delivered. 

If belonging feels elusive, so too does clarity itself. On my last visit, I had written about dust- its quiet omnipresence, its way of lingering and being part of you, being you. This time, it was the light that felt otherly to the US returning me. Perhaps it was Diwali, perhaps the winter smog, but as we descended into Mumbai, the city lay hidden beneath a haze so dense that the ground appeared only seconds before we landed. The sun, still high, looked like a dimmed and distorted golden orb- eclipsed by something unseen as though light itself had become particulate and perhaps weary. I looked up articles on AQI, but wondered, why has it become so bad so fast. Or was it like this and I just notice this because I come from another ambient air setting. My search led me to a study which showed that over the past three decades, sunshine hours across India have steadily declined. Data from twenty weather stations between 1988 and 2018 shows a quiet, almost invisible dimming—a slow loss of direct light, veiled by aerosols, monsoon clouds, and the detritus of human ambition.The study reads like a soothsayer's prophecy/elegy. Losing light, losing daytime while the engine of progress churns on. It reminded me of the wildfire season in Medford, Oregon, when the skies turned cinematic- almost apocalyptic, in a way that made you uneasy and claustrophobic. The air had a weird taste and the horizon had a blur. You could still see, but not clearly, like a cataract clouded our vision. What shields you from the brightness, I thought then, also steals the distance. 

Then, on Diwali day, the rains came. With the wind, the haze lifted- just slightly, like someone had finally wiped your glasses clean after weeks of squinting through grime. Faces on the street regained definition; edges stopped dissolving into air. For a moment, it all felt lucid again. Maybe that’s why phone cameras in India always seem to have those strange halo effects around people’s faces- some collective conspiracy between air quality and megapixels. (No, I’m kidding. Mostly at least) But clarity,  came with its own price. The rains left behind their usual inheritance: puddles, potholes, damp stairwells, and the high-pitched whine of mosquitoes. Trash lay half-submerged along the curb because the safai karmacharis took time off; the chikhhal clung to your shoes if you managed to evade the puddle with your hop, and jump . The buzzing sound near your ears reminded you of the tiny persistence of life you couldn't see or didn’t want near you, the itch at your ankles announcing the enemy’s victory morsel. When the rains cleared, the air seemed rinsed of its heaviness—but clarity, can be an illusion. Inside something felt smudged, as if the light had turned inward and found anthracite dust it could not wash away.

 

By Mali

Diwali day, this year, was a blur. It came and went like it another box checked on the calendar. It used to be ceremonial and incandescent ( without the smoke)  . This time the only person who wore new clothes was Appa. He put on a T-shirt I’d brought him, and that, somehow, was the gesture that was faithful to the tradition I had known Diwali to be. There was a time when the morning began with Ganga snanam and a spoonful of Diwali marundu- bitter, medicinal, but oddly satisfying. Pati would warm sesame oil with its seeds still floating, then smear it on our heads, and if you were endowed with a small enough body surface area and immodesty of preteen years, on your body. Then there was the brown gritty sludge of shikakai paste—you rubbed it in until your hair felt like Maggi eaten with hands. A bucket of warm water followed, never quite washing away the oil but leaving a thin, stubborn sheen that no amount of soap could defeat. Then came the new clothes, the bakshanam, the firecrackers- saap goli, busvaanam, lakshmi vedi, the sharp scent of sulfur, the heat and dangerously close sparks. With age this became matappu only and then all this became too blase. This year, it was a perfunctory dab of oil on the scalp, a modern shikakai shampoo from a plastic bottle, store-bought murukku and home made rava laddoo. No lamps- because the kids upstairs had once spilled oil all over the balcony. No kolam- I’m not sure why. No akash kandil-we forgot to buy one. And no killa, because where would it even go in this apartment life? Still, mama and mami dropped by; we exchanged sweets and said “Happy Diwali,” and that was it. You realize these are events because they occur with family where there are kids, laughter, shared anticipation. And when they become adults with killjoy work schedules, the ceremonial fun is viewed with a sceptical why. Childhood, it seems, is the only true festival. I guess my parents indulged us as kids because they vicariously lived our childhood. 

Later that afternoon, I met a few friends from BJMC. The conversation, predictably, was adult- billing codes, patient complaints, malpractice insurance. It felt like the perfect postscript to the day: the slow, polite erosion of magic under fluorescent light. 

I didn’t have a vehicle for transportation, so my movement around the city was mostly on foot or by metro. The Pune Metro is, to its credit, clean, punctual, and almost unnervingly efficient—an artery of modernity coursing through the city’s older, slower pulse. From its elevated tracks you get an  panoramic, uncomfortable view of what the maps still label as the Mutha River. What actually glides beneath is an open vein of sludge, a slow-moving serpent of black water (Nagzari V2) sheened with oil and plastic. Trash lines the banks in polychrome decay- plastic, styrofoam, half-eaten food, nirmalya from last week’s rituals. Carbon in all its incarnations: polymerized, oxidized, fluroinated, hybridized. Carbons flirting with negative non-stray anions, looping together into amorous rings and chains, weaving a synthetic epidermis over the earth, inseparable now from the soil where it exists in the simplest form. Bound by my recently US acquired (and somewhat performative) sense of civic hygiene, I found myself one morning wandering with an empty coffee cup, scanning for a public trash can. There are none. Just tiny Adar Poonawalla clean cities bins that seem more cosmetic than utilitarian. The city seems to operate on a shared understanding that the world itself is the trash can. Discarded things simply rejoin the landscape-an act of absorption. According to the Environmental Status Report, Pune now produces roughly 0.4 to 0.5 kilograms of waste per person per day—around two thousand tons in all. Scale alone becomes abstract. In the rains, the trash ferments; the air thickens with the anaerobic musk of rot, a smell that is everywhere and therefore nowhere. You expect the sweetness of petrichor,  but instead the stench hangs low and heavy, the way smog does. 

It struck me then that smell and haze isn’t only in the air; it settles in the mind too. You stop noticing what once appalled you. The smell dulls, the eyes adjust, and the city- its grime, its quiet moral entropy-reconfigures itself into a new norm. This is how the light dims or the day shortens, not suddenly but by degrees, and the sense of fatigue and indifference that does not mind the slow accumulation of the unberable seems to be the real pollution, the soot that colors us. 

There was always a faint smell in the mornings, thought to be the time to smell the clean crisp air over tea, — drifting through the window like a city's exhalation. I tried to understand what is beyond the sphere of my existence, my own Truman show, by buying the newspapers to read on most mornings. I grew up reading the newspaper. Not doomscrolling, reading. The Times of India was, back then, more a newspaper , more substance than cellulose. You could smell the ink and feel slightly better about the state of things before breakfast. I loved going to the center page to savor Jug Suraiya’s dry wit, Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar’s tidy arithmetic of policy, Bachi Karkaria dissecting urban absurdities, Coomi Kapoor's takes on Lutyens' Delhi. Sunday was ritual. The Sunday Times, I’d stretch across the floor along with a steel plate with roti, water masala like a feast with accompaniments. The arrival of both TOI and Indian Express on the same morning was its own small high—a dopamine surge wrapped in newsprint. A sense that the world, even in its chaos, came in folded, knowable sections. Then, somewhere in the early 1990s Malavika Sanghvi's populist cravings and Bennett & Coleman’s quarterly targets devolved the paper into the toilet paper it lives on as now. They began to chase the eyeballs and amygdala instead of the prefrontal cortex. Headlines stopped informing and started performing. The front page, is now a full page ad or a trailer reel: fifteen headlines, zero closure- a lure to open the paper to the pages where the story continues. “Tailor to pay ₹7K for blouse delay,” one headline screams.

 Buried in the middle somewhere is the headline to a 2 paragraph piece “37 die in Chhath mishaps in Bihar, Jharkhand.” Two paragraphs. Thirty-seven people. The tone is perhaps unintentionally flat, the placement also accidental. The tragedy seems anesthetized by adjacency to gossip and corporate litigation- Tata vs Mistry, dunki ordeals and Trump's dance in Malaysia. You pause, maybe, out of guilt. You imagine dirty water, a crowd, the heat. But the next headline has already ambushed you and you move on. 

This, I think, is the hidden arithmetic of a populous nation: it is almost as if living in a populated nation carries an inherent mortality risk. When the denominator is 1.3 billion, the numerator—thirty-seven—barely registers. It’s not cruelty, exactly. It’s scale. The paper has 24 pages. The day has 30 minutes of attention. The brain has limited RAM space. So you read, wince, turn the page, and move on, which is to say, you forget. 

Pause...

In a country where numbers blur into anonymity, recognition is sought in the divine. A place where the one is seen, counted, remembered. Temples were part of my life as far back as I can remember. Perhaps it was my parents’ and grandparents’ faith, or simply geography. There was a temple in every narrow galli, small shrines folded into the map of daily life.

Bhajana Madam

Chinna Hanuman koil

Periya Hanuman koil

 

Our home stood beside a Sivan Koil, which we often treated as an extension of our own yard. We climbed the water tank, edged along the stone wall, and slipped into the temple grounds as if returning home. We played hide and seek in the circumferential corridor, swung from the aerial roots of the banyan tree that grew within, and plucked ber fruit from the branches of the tree that leaned over the back wall. There was also a chinna Hanuman temple under a tree that rose straight from the middle of the road. Or perhaps the road was built around the tree and the temple that followed it. We played cricket on that street, the one that ran from our house to the shrine, and on Saturdays beggars lined up near its entrance, palms open, patient. Farther away stood the South Indian Ganesh temple, the Bhajana Madam, the heart of the small Tamil/Telugu community in Rasta Peth. My mother still visits it every Saturday when she is in Pune, though she no longer lives nearby. In Maargazhi, the cold month of devotion, mornings began before sunrise. I would wake to join the prayer group, play the jalra as they sang hymns and chants, moving from temple to temple—first the Periya Hanuman Koil, then the Ayyappa and Ramar temples—before ending at the Bhajana Madam. As the youngest, I was given the honor of waving the fan before the deity and receiving the first taste of prasadam—ghee-laden ven pongal, fragrant and warm in the palm or a small leaf donnai. Many of these temples still stand. The same bells ring; the same banyan roots breathe. Theism, somehow, survives in India. The Gods persist because people need them to—human, visible, close enough to visit, to bathe in milk, to submerge in water during a visarjan, to speak to as one might to a friend. 

There’s a lot more I could list. A trip along the Mumbai Pune expressway-though the express part of it is a facile title; a day in Mumbai, a city that, despite everything, still feels slightly saner; a trip along Marine Drive in the rain with my friend Dhiraj, wipers keeping time with the sea. The strange, practical mercy of apps—Blinkit, Swiggy—that now serve as prosthetic tools for aging parents, sparing them the small mini-tumults of running errands. And yet, for all this convenience, there’s the unmistakable social isolation of the urban landscape in  a city of 7.5 million people. That’s more than the population of Maryland, though that comparison is, admittedly, useless except to show how absurdly dense our togetherness has become.

 On my last trip I reread Maximum City on the flight home. Mumbai, that supposedly saner city, is still struggling with its own sprawl—the bustle of hyperurbanism, the inherent prejudices and tribalism, the exhaustion of ambition, the relentless restlessness, the absence of thehraav, that stillness of being. Pune, my city, has grown into a rougher, more impatient version of the same—similar temperament, smaller room to breathe. I come seeking the quiet breeze that blows against your face on evening bike rides, for a corner on Z Bridge or Worli Seaface where I can sit and contemplate purpose without someone coming and telling me "sarak ki". Even time has become municipal property now. So I try to hold on to the small things—the pieces of joy that flash and fade but manage, for a second, to lift the fog. You cannot reason your way through the chaos; there is no logic to it. The whys have long since stopped being answerable. You just live, count the moments that glow, and let the rest drift past like traffic.