Diwali

This Friday was Diwali, the happiest day of the year across India and the world, really. Actually, it might have been all of last week, I’m not entirely sure; the point is, Diwali is a festival of lights celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains alike, which translates into neighborhood kids throwing firecrackers at my window until three in the morning. It probably has greater meaning to most people (especially hindijainsikhs), but as far as I am concerned, it is a miserable holiday and should be burned to the ground. Please, let me explain my bitterness:
Monday night, I was innocently walking to my house with a fellow student （同学） of mine, Sam. Sam and I were contently digesting some ten rupee Samosas purchased from our favorite dhaba on Bhagsu road. Samosas are the most wonderful creations in existence here; for ten rupees (15 if you go to that jerk on temple road) you get a beautifully flaky and crusty samosa filled with the most mind-blowingly delicious potatoes n’ things I don’t want to identify, all covered in three different sauces. A couple of these or the Veg Plate will generally make an extremely satisfying lunch for about 80 cents. The dhaba itself is essentially a kitchen open to the street with a bench lining the back wall for the guests to sit on, and I might take a picture some time if I can manage to gain the cooks trust long enough to steal his food-smithing secrets. Anyway, we were walking down market road towards my house at around 4 in the afternoon or so. Just as we passed Man-In-the-Box, we were stopped by a loud explosion coming from only ten or fifteen feet in front of us. Alas, I’m getting ahead of myself; its about time I explained Man-in-the-Box (MITB). MITB has been an integral part of the McLeod community for several decades, I believe. He sits in his box all day and mutters things, maybe in a language but I’m not entirely sure, getting out only to vomit or defecate on the street in front of his box. The people of McLeod feed him and generally clean up after him, and he has become something of a landmark in the town. Just as we approached MITB, and as we were entirely distracted by his good natured mutterings, the shock of the explosion left us entirely dumbfounded for several long moments, even as the locals kept walking as if nothing had happened. We assumed terrorists or aliens, yet this was nothing more than a cruel awakening to the horror that is Diwali in McLeod. Happily, that was all that happened that day and we went on our way dismissing the event as inexplicable India. Sadly, that was just the beginning: over the next week the blasts became more and more frequent, and by Wednesday it was impossible to walk home from class without avoiding death by mere inches at least three or four times. By that night, we thought we had become numb to the constant blasts, even as firecrackers were thrown into the café we were eating in we barely noticed. This continued until all hell broke out on Friday (rather, Thursday morning around 2 when some kids figured out how to best throw the firecrackers so that they would explode right outside my window). That day we had planned to catch some jeeps around six thirty to head back down to Sara for the night to catch up with our ex-roommates. Throughout the day, the explosions had been steadily building in frequency and intensity, until we could barely think for the constant noise echoing down the streets and up from the valley below us. Still, we bravely went to class, got lunch at our dhaba, and otherwise went about our lives until six, when the last of us got out of our English lessons. Together, we walked down to the taxi stand only to find that it was too late, as all the drivers had gone home to celebrate. Frustrated, we walked back up to the main square where there are usually taxi drivers desperate for some business. To our horror, we found out that the usually mess of traffic and bored taxi drivers had been entirely replaced with fireworks. Even more upsetting was the fact that Diwali fireworks are not the fun, pretty things you’ll find on the 4th of july; instead, they are essentially flashbang grenades with some fun sparks thrown in. We found a bench to sit on and eat samosas (because you might as well when they are ten rupees), and slowly sank into depression, not even noticing the chaos around us. Luckily, two cabs happened to choose that moment to drive by and happily brought us to Sara, where we celebrated in a much more civilized manner (three dollar handles of whiskey).
The next day we took a 4 hour drive to tso pema, a lake of great religious significance shared across pretty much all of the local religions, and toured the lake and the cave where guru rinpoche spent some amount of time thinking about things. All in all it was fairly uneventful and probably not worth the nauseating drive through the mountains.