Diwali is a celebration of light and beauty. You look around the house and realise dismally that it is in desperate need of both.
Start by decluttering. Open the cupboard. Saris from the stuffed top shelf rain down on you. Spend half an hour re-folding them. Hold the green and red silk against yourself. Stare soulfully into the mirror. Remember wearing it as a young bride and being told you looked like Goddess Lakshmi herself. Except by an aunt-in-law who said green was not your colour, to try brown. Remember shimmering through the evening. Remember stepping on the pleats and stuffing them back to sport a huge paunch through the evening. Oh, that could also be the three servings of mithai. Remember, you have to start on the mithai-making, too.
Go to the kitchen to check on the ingredients. The teen is making decaf organic green tea. Now where has the ghee for the mithai disappeared? She has kept it for the diyas, she says. Ghee is bad for the waist, she says, glaring pointedly at your wobbly middle. The mithai without ghee will taste like cardboard, you fume. She will not budge. Ghee diyas are purer, she insists. She is on a binge of revitalising past traditions. She wears bindis and nose-rings. You glare pointedly at her micro shorts.
Back to decluttering! Discover a pile of jeans you promised you’d fit into again. Prep yourself to part with them. Find old books. Spend ages reading pages at random. One quote calls out: Losing Hope is Losing Life. Corny! But true. You will not give up on your old jeans or promises. Push the lot back in. Spend even longer trying to stuff yourself into old dresses. The teen sashays in to say she can hear your huffing and puffing from the kitchen.
Decluttering means cutting ties with sentimentality, she lectures. It’s about detachment. You pull out her baby booties and burst into tears. She rolls her eyes and stomps off. Spend the next hour sniffling over her first bib and the spot on the baby dress where she dropped her first spoonful of porridge. Lovingly pull out the chewed-up first spoon. Shake her rattle. Smile through the tears. Re-roll all the ribbons you tied in her baby-soft hair. Spend another hour poring over her baby albums. Your eyes are streaming and nose is stuffed. She hands you a mug. ‘Be kind.’ The mug says. ‘Especially to yourself,’ the teen says.
You both sit on the bed sipping her awful green tea, surrounded by things you couldn’t discard. But you’ve let go of the guilt, the negativity, the loneliness. You talk about her being a baby yesterday and about to leave for college now. She lets you cry. She dabs at your cheeks with her first bib.
Diwali is also about celebrating a great, great love.
Where Jane De Suza, the author of Happily Never After, talks about the week’s quirks, quacks and hacks
