“I miss the precious intimacy of festivals”
The artist recalls a time when celebrations were more meaningful
I remember our forays into the heap of junk at the back of the building that we once lived in. We collected anything that we could lay our hands on for the various decorations appropriate for different occasions. There were mostly pieces of broken furniture, wires, bent nails, cotton from the mattresses or spokes from discarded umbrellas to make small structures or lanterns covered with coloured paper, paint and flowers. I even remember using the sofa springs and a toy motor to help make a movable mouse that normally sat next to the idol of Ganesha. The precious little funds available to us were used to buy electric bulbs, wires and other necessary things.
Simpler Times, Simpler Celebrations
This was perhaps the only time when there
was a general acceptance and appreciation for our activities outside of the school curriculum. During my adolescence, there was a lot of stress on academics that presumably would provide us with a secure job and a better future, but besides that, there was also an inadvertent learning of a mix of cultures and languages. The brand of Hindi we spoke, sometimes laughably so, was mix of varied influences of Marathi, Dakhani, Gujarati and so on.
Community Bonding
We lived in a tenement in a lower middle class cosmopolitan neighbourhood in Mumbai. All festivals came as reasons to celebrate. The homemade sweets during Diwali or the biryani and sevaiya during Eid; it was party time, every time. The neighbours came together leaving their strict cultural or other personal differences back at their 10 by 20 feet homes, perhaps to find a release from their tough daily lives. Occasionally, there would be Hindi film songs played on loud speakers that people actually listened and hummed to the tunes of. This was a time when television set was a distant future – and not every household had record players or the radio sets.
Intimacy Missing Today
The excitement of celebration was somewhat intimate and contained within each community or clusters of tenements, as oppose to some of the garish and an alienating grandeur that we see today. I sometimes travel during the festivals to homes of some friends and relatives within the city. I often find myself looking for the traces of that precious intimacy of these festivals that perhaps mostly lives within each of us from that generation.