Peace in Divali
on the darkest night of the new moon, but it is either that the moon is darker on the other side of the Atlantic and Indian oceans, or that our astronomers and politicians here are so benighted that they can’t tell one area of darkness from another.
In Guyana, the celebration of Divali today, instead of tomorrow, is an issue that the Hindu Dharmic Sabha is not taking lightly. It accused the minister of public security of imposing a date and seeking to perpetuate discord within the Hindu community. I understand that there will be light in the heart of darkness since many people believe the event is more important than the date.
ANIMAL CELEBRATION
The more mundane story of Diwali is that it started as a harvest festival, which Wikipedia says “is an annual celebration that occurs around the time of the main harvest of a given region”.
Given the differences in climate and crops around the world, harvest festivals can be found at various times at different places. For example, in the Caribbean, each country had the equivalent of a Crop Over festival. The Grand Kadooment in Barbados is part of the Crop Over. When I was growing up in Trinidad’s sugar belt, Crop Over was a major celebration with official competitions for the best decorated carts and bicycles, and unofficial ones for who could drink the most rum. In fact, every day in the sugar belt was like that.
What goes unnoticed in the Caribbean is that Divali is also the beginning of the new financial year. National Geographic explains, “India was an agricultural society where people would seek the divine blessing of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, as they closed their accounting books and prayed for success at the outset of a new financial year. Today this practice extends to businesses all over the Indian subcontinent, which mark the day after Divali as the first day of the new financial year.”
None of this mattered when I was young. For weeks before Divali, we ‘fasted’ or stopped eating meat, and some made the ultimate sacrifice of giving up alcohol. My father claimed that he stopped drinking, but his ruddy complexion always gave him away. None of these things affected me since the food and lights were all I really cared about.
Days before the event, my father, uncles, neighbours – the entire village in fact – were busy cutting and splitting bamboo poles with their sharp machetes to shape artistically into arches on which little clay cups or lamps called ‘deyas’, filled with coconut oil, were placed. At exactly six o’clock in the evening, the adults prayed and we fidgeted. As soon as they stopped, we enthusiastically lit the deyas, and after a cursory survey of the surrounding competition, declared our display the best and laid into the array of food on the dining table and the kitchen counter.
GOOD FRIDAY
It never mattered to us in those days whether Good Friday fell on a Sunday, so whether we had the right date was not an issue. What mattered was that the community – every race, colour and creed – celebrated Divali together.
When we moved to Antigua in 2006, we opened our box of deyas that had travelled with us from Trinidad to Belize and then to Antigua. Lights have always been our big thing. Wherever