Diwali – Childhood Memories
Our group consisting 5 or 6 kids all from the same street, we used to meet in the street corner and sit on a slab put up there. The meeting and discussion will be about the new varieties of crackers launched in the stores. Which are the crackers that produce the biggest sound? Which are the crackers that produce beautiful visual effects? What are their costs? How to lessen the costs and get more crackers? How to astonish the casual passers and 2 wheelers crossing the road by placing bombs and crackers? What are the dresses that others have bought? What about the lip smacking sweets this year? We hated watching television except of course the new songs relayed from movies released on Diwali.
The planning starts at least 2 weeks early. Everyone will provide details about a particular cracker say for example Parachute, rocket etc., there was even a kind of green flower pots, which when lit will start making the entire place look green in color. The parachute will fly to the sky giving different color sparkles and then the parachute returns to the ground. It was a fancy item and caught our fancy. There was the onion cracker (vengaya vedi called locally) which when thrown towards the compound wall will explode. The serpent eggs, sparklers, chakkars and the flower pots were kept for diwali night after all the bombs get emptied. Daily we will go to the nearby cracker shop. Even if it were a small purchase of a single cracker we will go, see all the crackers available there, enquire about any new cracker available etc and then return. Such was our curiosity towards crackers.
Diwali is incomplete without sweets viz badusha, gulab jamun or mundiri kathili. Eating sweets in between bursting crackers is what we did. Every time we burst a cracker we would take a piece of sweet. The first cracker in the diwali day would be an Atom Bomb and that would be early in the morning. The bursting of crackers will continue till the “Oliyum oliyum” kind of program that starts. It would be telecast at around 9 or 10 am. At that time people will be glued to their television sets to watch new songs. Immediately after the finish of the program again bursting of crackers would begin. Some kids would get tired by now that they will continue to watch TV eating the special food prepared on diwali day. We used to burst crackers all day long with no break. There are always bijili crackers to fill the time gap. For a small amount you could get a pack of 100 bijilis. We used to throw it from our hands (not recommended if you are a novice). Rocket Bomb, Lakshmi, Nethaji, Double sound, Indian King are some of the names of the crackers with noisy explosion. We used to wear new dresses on Diwali only after sandalwood paste and kumkumam is applied to them in the corners.
As the sun sets we would take out all those fancy firework items like flower pots, Vishnu chakkars, wire, pencil etc. The entire street would be filled with lights of the fireworks. Rockets will be flying like anything. At about 8 pm most of the crackers would be finished. If something remained it would be burst the next day.
Every year there would be rain during the diwali season. We always loved getting wet in the rains. Even now while I am writing this it’s heavily raining. What more do you need? Rain, sweets, new dresses, crackers, lots of television programs all made our diwali a happy occasion. When Diwali is over we would start dreaming or planning for the next diwali. Such was our enthusiasm towards diwali.
Wishing everyone a Happy Diwali 2006!
Diwali Date: October 21, 2006
January 1st, 2008 at 5:32 am
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