deepavali

deepavali has a routine to it ,not something planned early on at home but a sequence of events which just seem to fall in place during the festival, and at the end of it faintly reminiscent of all the previous ones.
It generally starts with Appa asking us in a mock serious way if we still want crackers , now that we are all grown up, we do not bother replying since we all know that he will be fiercely competing with us for rockets and his eternal favorite the vishnu chakra, all bought by K dodappa in Salem in the true spirit of a station master (oops!)
When we were small A and i would spend long winter afternoons bursting bijli paataki, days before the festival, our nails charred black at the end of it till amma shooed us in.
Every year we would always promise ourselves that we would buy better rockets for next year, not the standard standard ones.
The festival to this date never feels complete without S aunty(a Gujarati family friend, but more kannadiga than any iyengar ajji in malleswaram) bringing the customary jamoons and other khara stuff which i shamelessly devour ,talking to us in herfamiliar sing song kannada, exchanging recipes with amma, telling us that deepavali was the new year for gujju's and all that.

the crazy phone calls, new jeans , little cousins whom you can scare the hell out of, and of course shooting rockets on eleventh cross which is probably a near death hazard.

This year, we had two screaming NRI kids , opposite, who were just learning the ropes of bursting crackers, heavily chaperoned by their mum, and were awed by our bravado. (hahaha)
these hols were probably the happiest the whole of this year, and please don't talk of global warming.Obama ,will figure it out.