Lakshmi Narayan

Hers was a typical upper crust family living in a plush neighbourhood, with typical upper middle-class biases. Because they had been posted abroad a few times, they considered themselves more Angrez than Hindustani. They spoke to each other only in English. Their maids were made to wear stiff nursy uniforms. They ate Continental food, using forks and knives and starched napkins.

They hated everything about their home city — the heat, the dust, the traffic, the pollution, the potholed roads, the surging mass of humanity, spitting and dirty public. The only way to survive in this hellhole was to isolate themselves in a bubble and pretend they were elsewhere. Preferably somewhere abroad, with wide clean green streets and orderly people.

As the girl grew up, her hatred for all things desi multiplied. What set her teeth on edge were the festivals — unending, noisy, unmanageable. “It’s the revenge of the have-nots against the haves,” observed her mother through thin lips, covering her ears at the unceasing din thrumming through the closed double-glazed windows. Her father — an armchair psychologist — likened it to the steam going off a pressure cooker valve. “In a taboo-ridden society like ours, this is a chance to lower their guard and let go for a few hours,” he philosophized.

It started with the spring festival, where kites with glass powder-coated-strings strangled you to death if you were not careful. Then came the festival of colours, when high-on-bhang Romeos molested women on the pretext of daubing colour on them. Followed by one where young men made a human pyramid and climbed atop each other to reach the prize money in a mud pot, demanding chand (voluntary donation, not always voluntary!) from the neighbourhood.

Before you could recover, for nine frenzied nights, folks gyrated to non-stop music blaring from their terraces. The climax being the festival of light. Except that instead of light there was the infernal boom of fireworks in the form of rockets and atom bombs going off every few minutes, enough to give a person several heart attacks.

And smack in the middle came the celebration of the elephant-headed god. During ten days of chaos, huge statues of Lord Ganesh were venerated, with processions and honking vehicles choking the roads, before reaching the water where the images were dunked. Huh! She couldn’t wait to win that scholarship and get out of the city fast enough.

It was the last day of the festival. The drums had started banging their repetitious tattoo. Ear-splitting fireworks heralded the announcement of the truck crawling its way forward with the icon. Thumping music blared from the mega speakers. And then the pageant stopped right outside the girl’s house. She couldn’t take it any more. She rushed downstairs to give them an earful for disturbing the peace.

As she approached the open vehicle with the decorated idol on it, something magical happened. She was surrounded by smiling faces who threw a shower of flowers on her. She noticed the drummers were smartly-uniformed girls, twirling their batons and throwing the instruments in the air without missing a beat. Young and old were hugging each other and clicking selfies. Happy kids were distributing laddus and pedas to all the spectators. It sure was clamorous. But no one was misbehaving.

A friendly neighbour pulled her by the hand and urged he to join in the dancing. It was as if she was mesmerized, throwing herself body and soul into the rhythm, swaying to the music in sheer abandonment, matching steps with the others to much cheering, completely submerged in the here and now. Nothing seemed to matter. Except to be one with this maniacal mob of intoxicated supplicants.

When someone shouted, “Hail, the elephant god!” she too chorused back lustily with the others, “Come back soon next year.” It seemed as if she was in a state of ecstasy for hours, when actually it had lasted only a few minutes, before the parade of writhing, shouting, chanting mortals sashayed away. She was never the same again!

There’s nothing more exhilarating than abandoning prejudices and sinking into the experience.

(Excerpted from Fables from Beyond, Authors Upront, 2020)

Journalist, author and animal activist Lakshmi Narayan is a former assistant editor of Femina and former editor of Eve’s Weekly & Flair