Nope, didn’t keep karwa chauth, never will

When I was in school, I used to love Karwa Chauth — this festival where women in north India fast the entire day till the moon shows up, so that their husbands live forever. Then, in the evening, they look at the husband through a sieve, giant old-school flour sifters mostly, and feel happy. Tradition is kept alive. Yaay for wire mesh! Search Bollywood films plus Karwa Chauth for more references.

All the schools I was dispatched to hired several north Indian teachers. Asha ma’am, Neelam ma’am, Sangeeta ma’am and the whole jing bang who would turn up at school every day to kill a couple of hours and ostensibly mould the futures of every brighteyed blighter in the front. Never me. Tall like my Dad, I sat at the back, the prestigious last row.

On Karwa Chauth, KC, the teachers, poor things, would take a couple of classes in the morning and then, all dry-throated and feeling the headaches approach, retire to the staffroom. So, if you had a double maths after 11, fantastic! Your luck was up, shining bright, like the diamonds Rihanna sings about. No teacher would turn up. Yaay! Free period! Hunger, you know. Can’t teach integration as the limit of a sum when you have rats prancing in your tum.

I used to wish the festival came around more than once a year. Surely life insurance policies of husbands should be biannual, at least. Why not every quarter? — one for every season! That would be something. Free periods are what school-goers live for, or used to anyway. I don’t know about now. You keep hearing about times changing and kids “growing up too fast” that I can’t claim to know what kids live for now.

It’s important to reject what doesn’t work for you. That ‘taking a stand’ bit is, sigh, part of being an adult

Now, all I know is that as a ‘married, north Indian woman’, I don’t keep the fast. Women in my family do. I don’t because I don’t like being hungry. I don’t get the option of retiring to a staffroom just because I have a headache that I brought on to myself. And I like not being hungry more than I like playing dress up in saris and pretty earrings, brandishing a channi (sieve).

It’s important to reject what doesn’t work for you. Even if people close to you are advocates. That ‘taking a stand’ bit is, sigh, part of being an adult.

The marriage portal shaadi.com did a timely survey in India. Of the 6,537 men polled, 93 per cent said they ‘don’t want their wives to fast for them and would rather celebrate it differently’. Sweet, no? Isn’t that sensible? Men were asked also if they would fast in turn, if their wives were fasting for them, and 61 per cent responded ‘Yes’. Not bad. Too corny for me, but hurray for equality and car ads and jewellery ads that cash in on the KC fever. Six thousand men is nowhere enough to be representative of the entire country’s mindset, but heartening still in whatever small way.

One of these years, when I have enough women around doing the whole where’s-the-moon thing, when I can’t take the FOMO anymore, I might dress up and join them, and I don’t mean ironically. It isn’t Halloween yet. I might do it for a lark, for the fun, to imbibe the community feels, to document the sisterhood vibes. I’ll eat something first, of course. Scarfing down my usual 5pm snack. Looking for moon on an empty stomach is injurious to health. I can get that henna-tattooed on my right forearm. Which is the limb I’ll need to use to fetch from my handbag that life-extending, husbandim mortalisng, magic old-school flour sifter.

nivriti@khaleejtimes.com