Life in the Corps: Festival of Lights

I’m sure many of you reading the title of this post, in conjunction of its timing are assuming that it’s about Channukah and how I'm going to celebrate here in Guyana. Well no. Despite Channukah starting this week, this post is actually about the other “festival of lights.”

On the weekend of November 3^rd I went back to my first host family that I spent training with, since they're Hindu, to celebrate Diwali with them. Diwali (also spelled Deepavali) is a Hindu holiday, similar in a sense to other “winter time” holidays (i.e. Channukah and Christmas). In fact when a neighbor walked by as we were cooking outside my host dad told his neighbor that “… today [Diwali] is my Christmas.” To me it seemed like a fusion of Channukah and Thanksgiving. The entire day we spent at home cooking and hanging out which really reminded me of Thanksgiving; spending all day long cooking a big dinner and spending time together waiting for the big meal. All the food was prepared inside in the kitchen and cooked outside on the fireside. One major difference between Diwali and Thanksgiving is that everything we cooked for dinner we weren’t allowed to even taste. Everything had to be prepared using only sight and smell to determine if it was seasoned correctly. Which was pretty darn impressive since we were making A LOT of food and using A LOT of seasoning in all of the dishes (imagine doing that for Thanksgiving?!). I'm still not exactly sure why this was; I was told it has something to do with the religious aspect of the holiday, something about not being allowed to be the first to eat as the first piece of all the different foods had to be sacrificed to the specific deity that the holiday focused around. We also weren’t allowed to eat until after 6pm.

This I really didn’t question too much as I assumed (similar to Judaism) that it had to do with waiting until sunset. But I decided to ask my host sister why we wait until 6pm. Why not sunset? Why not until X amount of stars in the sky? Was 6 a symbolic number in Hinduism? She shrugged her shoulders and told me that this was a question for “the old people.” Damn. There must really be a deep mystical reason for waiting until 6pm that not even my host sister knows. So I went back outside to ask my host dad why we had to wait until 6pm to eat. And to my surprise, he shrugged his shoulders and said “tradition!” which I couldn’t help but laugh. At least I got an answer.

The biggest similarity between Diwali and Channukah is the lighting of diyas, hence why Diwali is called the “festival of lights.” They’re little clay dishes filled with ghee and a cotton wick to make a small lamp. Since I had only lit candles in my channukeahs before I never really saw how an oil lamp was made (ironic since that is the original channukeah). It’s super easy; just lay the cotton wick at the bottom of the dish and take a big spoonful of ghee (or coconut oil) and place it in on top of the wick and rub the wick sticking out with the ghee/oil and light. There’s no set number of diyas that people light (unlike Channukah). Normally families lay hundreds of diyas all around their house, yards, and balcony’s and leave them lit all night long. However my host dad’s uncle died a month or so ago and in Hinduism a sign of morning is not to light diyas or do much celebrating for one year (pretty similar to Judaism) after a death in the family. So we only lit 3; one on the gate to the house, one on the balcony outside, and one on the family’s altar alongside the sacrificial plate of sweet meats to the deities.

For Diwali we can’t eat any meat, just “sweet meats” and vegetarian foods. For dinner we cooked the famed 7 curry that we eat with our hands out of a giant leaf. Each of the 7 curries is prepared separately and spiced just a little differently. The curries are: dal (split peas), catahar/”old cloth,” balanje (eggplant) and edoe, bagee (greens like spinach), pumpkin and aloo (potato), channah (chick peas), and achar (mango relish). In the leaf goes a big mound of rice and bit of each of the 7 curries to make one big serving. I started to eat each of the curries separately to taste them all, but then I looked over and saw all my host sisters had mixed all the curries and rice together and just ate everything at once. So I followed suit. It was good, really really good. And the best part about eating with my hands is that there really is no graceful way of doing it. I thought I looked like a slob making a mess shoveling food in my mouth, but when I looked around I was pretty on par with my family so I felt a lot better about my abilities. After the 7 curry came the “sweet meats” which was just what they call different desserts: parasat (something like halvah, its roasted flour with ghee and coconut milk), vermicelli (something like kugel), coconut stuffed empanada like things, mini doughnut bites, and this type of cookie made by just mixing condensed milk with powdered milk. We made plenty of food to share out to neighbors who would come by to try the sweet meats and the “VIP neighbors” and friends would also get a leaf stuffed with 7 curry. The leaf makes it really easy to transport; a container and plate all-in-one.

Then after we ate plenty of 7 curry and a few sweet meats me and my host sisters, dressed in their sari’s, walked around the community to go look at the other houses to show me what it looks like when people lay out hundreds of diyas. It’s really a pretty sight to see all these small oil lamps laid out everywhere giving a warm glow to the entire home. Although I’m not too sure how people walk around their yards without knocking any diyas over as they're all about a foot apart from one another. Throughout the neighborhood people were playing with sparklers and lighting off fireworks and firecrackers. I’m sure there’s some religious reason as to why everyone lights off fireworks, but I didn’t ask about that; only if I could set off a big one.

It was really nice to spend time with this family again and a blast to celebrate Diwali with them. I’m really excited to do it again next year, if anything to have some more 7 curry!

And for the rest of you, enjoy your “festival of lights,” happy Channukah!