Diwali, or Deepavali, depending on which side of the Vindhyas you learned the word — it is one of the few festivals that the whole country keeps, and keeps differently. The South does it before dawn: the oil, the bath, the lamps already lit while the sky is still dark. The North does it after dusk, when the lamps have a dark sky to shine against. Same festival, opposite ends of the day. I grew up between the two and never quite settled which one was mine, which is probably why I keep both.
But the Diwali I actually remember is neither of those. It is two days before, and it is small.
Two days before the big day, there was a family thing we did — not a ritual with a priest, just something the house did. Someone would light a single diya. And then we would carry it, cupping the flame against the draught, to the darkest part of the house. Not the doorstep, where the neighbours could see it. Not the pooja room, which already had its lamps. The darkest part. In the farmhouse we lived in for a while that meant walking right to the back — the store, the passage behind the kitchen, the corner where nobody went after sunset and where the dark had a smell to it, of grain sacks and damp and old wood. The lamp went there first. It sat there on the floor, a small shaking light in a big black room, and only after that did anyone bother about the rest of the house.
I did not think much about it then. I was a boy, I wanted the sweets and the crackers, and the walk to the back of the house was a chore between me and them. I think about it every year now.
Because everything else I saw growing up was the opposite instinct, and it has only grown louder. People gifting gold. People gifting shiny things — silver coins, steel vessels, a new phone, something that catches the light. And every year a little more marketing around it: Dhanteras, Akshaya Tritiya, one auspicious window after another, buy now or the year will not go well. I do not want to be sour about it. Gold is lovely, a gift is a gift, and there is real joy in a daughter-in-law being handed a bangle that her mother-in-law was handed once. But the glitter was always meant to be a pointer and not the point. All that shine on Dhanteras is a reminder — a slightly expensive reminder — to recognise that which shines: deep within you, around you, within the person across the table, within everyone. And, if you take the farmhouse seriously, to go looking for it in the rooms where it is hardest to see. To acknowledge that the dark side of us can also be lit.
There is a chant I keep coming back to this week. You may know it; it opens the Īśāvāsya Upaniṣad as a śānti pāṭha, the peace verse said before the teaching begins:
ॐ पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदं पूर्णात् पूर्णमुदच्यते ।
पूर्णस्य पूर्णमादाय पूर्णमेवावशिष्यते ॥pūrṇam adaḥ pūrṇam idam · pūrṇāt pūrṇam udacyate ·
pūrṇasya pūrṇam ādāya · pūrṇam evāvaśiṣyateThat is complete. This is complete. From the complete, the complete arises. Take the complete away from the complete — and what remains is still complete.
Say it a few times and then look around. It changes what you see. Anything in front of you — anything at all — is complete. A plant is complete in itself; it is not a failed tree. The sea is complete in itself; it is not waiting for more water. We are complete in ourselves — not will be, once the bonus lands or the gold is bought or the promotion comes, but are, now, with the grey hair and the unpaid bill. Everything is complete in its own way. There is no shortfall of anything in the room.
And then the last line, which is the strangest one and the one I like best. Even if you remove that completeness from a thing — take it away, give it away, lose it — what is left behind is also complete. That is a very odd kind of arithmetic. It means nothing you give away this Diwali leaves you with less. Nothing you are handed makes you more. The lamp does not get dimmer for having lit another lamp; that is just a physical fact about lamps, and the verse says it is a fact about everything.
Which is what the stories are saying too, in their own louder, more colourful way. We tell them as if they happened somewhere else. Narakāsura, the demon king whose end the South remembers on Naraka Chaturdashi — Kṛṣṇa going out at dawn to finish him. Rāvaṇa, whose effigy went up in the maidan a fortnight ago with the crackers packed inside him, Rāma's arrow finding the one place he could be hurt. Good stories. But Naraka was never a king in a faraway kingdom. He is the name we gave to the negative tendencies — the grudge I have been keeping warm, the small cruelty I tell myself was a joke, the heaviness I would rather not look at. And the burning of Rāvaṇa is not about Lanka at all. It is the killing of the ego — the ten-headed thing in me that must be right — so that afterwards I can actually look around, smile around, hug around, and respect the person across from me whose opinion is nothing like mine, whose thoughts come from somewhere I have not been.
So today is that day. The day we are asked to let go of what we hold most dearly — and it is rarely the gold, it is usually the grudge. Lighting the lamp is symbolic of burning those thoughts. The flame at the back of the farmhouse was never for the room. It was for whatever I had carried into that room with me.
People sometimes forget Diwali is not a day. It is five days, and they come in an order, and each one asks something different of you. Here is how I hold them — the way I wish someone had explained it to the boy carrying that diya to the back of the house, instead of just telling him to be careful with the flame:
- 01 Dhanteraslight the dark side The lamp goes to the darkest room first. Wealth, yes — but the first wealth is noticing where in you the light has not reached.
- 02 Naraka Chaturdashiburn what should not stay Narakāsura falls. The evil thoughts, the ones that have overstayed, are shown the door. This is the day of letting go.
- 03 Lakshmi Pujainvite the wise Now that the room is swept and lit, Lakṣmī is invited in — not just prosperity, but the wisdom to hold it lightly.
- 04 Govardhan Pujathank what carries you For the cow who gives milk and ghee, for the vegetation that feeds us, for everything that supports us without asking. A day for the others.
- 05 Bhai Doojremember your people Brotherhood, sisterhood. The festival ends not at the altar but at the table, with the people who will still be there when the lamps are out.
I find the order itself instructive. You cannot invite Lakṣmī into a room you have not lit, and you cannot light a room you have not first admitted is dark. Govardhan comes only after the house is full — the thank-you to the cow and the fields and the people in the kitchen, the ones who did the supporting while we did the celebrating. We do it for the animals and for the vegetation around us, and it is the one day of the five that is not about us at all. And then Bhai Dooj, last, the quietest — a brother visiting a sister, a sister putting a tilak on a brother, no gold needed. What to burn, what to invite, what to acknowledge, whom to hold. Read that way the five days are less a festival calendar and more a small manual for how a life should be led, compressed into one week in autumn so that we do not forget it entirely.
We all celebrate Diwali on different days. The South before dawn, the North after dusk, the panchang arguing with itself every year about which tithi falls on which date, Kerala keeping it small and Gujarat starting a new year on it. It does not matter. Wherever you are in the five, and whichever day your family calls the real one — a happy Dhanteras, a happy Naraka Chaturdashi, a happy Lakshmi Puja, a happy Govardhan Puja, a happy Bhai Dooj. Lots of love, lots of happiness. May you keep shining.
And the question I am carrying into tomorrow's lamps is the one the farmhouse left me with. Which room of mine is the darkest this year — and will I carry the diya there, or only to the window where it can be seen?
दीपावली की हार्दिक शुभकामनाएँ 🪔
Heartfelt wishes for Deepavali — all five days of it.