Across the wasteland

Glittering balls of fire ‘spinning and dancing like flamy fire-spouts in the dark’

OCTOBER in Durban. The excitement of Diwali is everywhere. Traders from India, laden with goods, pour seamlessly into the city.

A fairground dragon-ride sits patiently, waiting to be fired up. The skies waver betwixt sun and rain. And people all over the city prepare for the annual celebration of light.

Nottingham, England. Over three decades ago. The very first Hindu families across the wasteland. People muttering. Racism has a long reach. Women in saris. Boys and girls my age, tanned, scurry away when they see me.

And then suddenly the darkness is lit up. Showers of fireworks and laughter rain down. “Do Indians also remember Guy Fawkes?” I asked my mum? She chuckled. “No,” she said. “This is the time of Diwali, the Hindu Christmas.”

She told me of Indians from Uganda, who were forced out of their homes to shiver in another world. I was confused – Indians in Africa? Then the seeds of transmigration were sown in my mind.

Slowly, I crossed the boundary. We too had our Group Areas. And there I was on the doorstep of a magical world. Children played with sparklers. Sky rockets shot into the air. Lamps flickered in the wind but refused to die.

Someone spotted me and waved me over. I did not hesitate. I entered the yard and became part of a whole new world. I felt like Alice in Wonderland. The Indians were dancing and eating and feeding me. Sweets, they kept saying.

Sweets. I had never seen sweets that were oblong and triangular and round with a hole in the middle, like sticky Catherine wheels. And how sweet they were.

The people swayed and gyrated to sounds I had not heard before. My mother had warned me not to take sweets from strangers. But these strangers were a strange strain of strangers. Gypsies without caravans. I was entranced. I was home.

A couple of weeks later, “Remember, remember the fifth of November” – Guy Fawkes night. The smell of autumn, the promise of change, the burnings.

The wild wasteland at the back of the house was the place, the annual pilgrimage for the bonfire. Showers of fireworks and laughter. It was the smoky smell I remember most. That whiff still ignites in me a spark of childish delight.

The build-up was the best time. A Guy Fawkes was fashioned out of old clothes, stuffed with granny’s old tan-coloured tights and tied together with wool. Endless rounds of the neighbourhood ensued, with Guy shoved into a doll’s pram, a sign hanging forlornly around its neck.

We collected wood, twigs, branches, newspapers, clothes, anything combustible. My brothers collected the money. What they intended to spend it on, I was never to know.

We kept the wood in the shed. In these parts too, the rain kept threatening. Then a few days before, building the mountain of fire commenced. A towering, magnificent, jumbled pyramid of wood. We were all pyromaniacs at heart.

The night before, my father, a gentle but subversive man, told me the history of Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot. The tale was embellished with stories of the high seas, treason, hanging, drawing and quartering. Firing my imagination.

He recounted how Guy and his gang conspired to blow up parliament, assassinate the king and install a Catholic head of state. One author was reputed to have said that Fawkes was the last honest man to enter parliament.

On bonfire night, we debated whether to burn the Guy. After all, the Catholic Church was nearby.

“Then nighttime, and the dark umbrella of the sky flashing with meteors” (Amit Chaudhuri).

The fireworks came in thin cardboard boxes, blue and orange rockets on the front. The flames of vitality. Sparklers came in paper sleeves. We each drew one out, and sparklers were lit from a single flame. United in light. Our cheeks glowed with warmth.

A totem pole of Catherine wheels was lit, each one in turn reeling radiance into the darkness.

The neighbour’s kitchen window released tantalising aromas of hot dogs, crinkly baked potatoes, beans and toffee apples, into the crackling night sky. The subtle art of toasting marshmallows, loaded on to sticks, pastel colours darkening in the fire, their gooey centres oozing. A tin bucket was filled with water and children’s heads bobbed up and down, trying in vain to seize the apples. Squeals of laughter echoed throughout the night. And the big boy with the big mouth ran away with all the apples.

A time of wonder, of crossing the wasteland.

This is a story of darkness and light, of exile and the return home. Diwali. A gypsy without a caravan.

Today, I live in Durban. Tens of thousands of miles from the wasteland. Will I return? Will the home fires still burn? Will my mother be laughing? Will there still be plotters trying to blow up parliament?

With South African campuses burning, communities of bonding disappearing, neighbours becoming strangers, are we not all living a kind of exile? Robert Macfarlane tells us of an old Christian prayer which says that “All human life is seen as an exile. The chant, when sung, sounds ancient and disquieting. It is unmistakably about wildness, an ancient vision of wildness, and it still has the capacity to move us.”

Because, where there is fire, there is purging, there is light, and there will be change.