Halloween Diwali Eid

We had a halloween party that lasted till 2:30 am where, amazingly, people came in costume, actually a lot of alcohol was consumed, and we danced. Considering we know 3 people outside of the institute network, and one of them has a 7pm curfew, and 3 people in our 5 person house don’t drink, it was amazing.

The group of friends that we tapped into remind me of Deep Springers, but they’ve known each other longer, and there are more non-girlfriend girls. They know each other from La Martiniere (“La Marts”), which is the k-12 school designed by a crazy Frenchmen with a large budget and good aesthetic sense. So we had a skeleton (Anshul), a couple vampires (Siddartha), a bunch of Sinisters (Saim et al), a Gandhi/ghost (Brian), a gypsy princess (Sadaf) and a train porter (me). It was all of our guests' first Halloween party, but at midnight everyone went around wishing each other happy Diwali. So it was a Diwali party too.

Diwali and Eid fell in the same week this year. They both last several days and involve staying up late, visiting lots of people and eating tons of food. I had 17 servings of seveya on Eid, a milky pasta sweet thing. It's been such an intense week of celebrating that now I'm sick in bed. I even ate a sheher tukra, ‘double roti ka mita,’ which is a slice of bread fried in ghi, twice, and then soaked in thick sugar syrup. It has a bright orange color and looks like it appeals to the basest hunger instincts, which it does, because people eat it to break their fasts.

Wearing a helmet to protect myself from the Diwali fireworks. Safety first.

In Lucknow it seems to me that fasting for God is optional but eating for God isn’t. Every Muslim sits down for Iftar, the first evening food, whether or not they spent the day hungry. The day my camera got stolen I was in Aminabad, a Muslim neighborhood, and it was getting towards sunset. The streets were packed and blaring traffic was moving the speed of a slow walk. Snack vendors had expanded their area and were frantically seating people and serving little plates of fried snacks and fruit. No one was eating; the people sitting with food in their laps were quietly, blankly, waiting. The snack walla’s urgency extended to everyone who might conceivably be Muslim, and as I tried to wend my way through to the sidewalk to get my locked bike, he motioned to sit down and thrust a plate of food in my hands. I refused and kept going, pointing towards my bike. I got to it, unlocked it, and started untangling the other bikes and motorcycles and cycle rickshaws, when the Namaz sounded. The people seated started eating. For those several seconds while the sound of the Namaz thanking god floated over the intersection, the traffic stopped: no pushing, no horns, no cutting, no crossing. I stood and looked back at the people eating. I wanted to stare until I could figure out what was so arresting, for me and all the Hindus in the streets, about breaking the roza fast. It was like being in church, or at a wedding, or once when I went to a native american powow.

My new Eid dress, bought in Aminabad on chand raat, having survived two gropings in the crowd and a bull plowing through. I'm sitting with Sadaf's friend Varda, which means rose in Arabic, at our 11th dinner.