My room smells like gunpowder

What began on Sunday evening as a spatter of sparklers down the street has, by last night, morphed into a full-on war zone of firecrackers and various other assorted (and probably illegal) explosives.

Having spent most of Diwali thus far locked in our rooms (me, studying; K, undergoing the worst of Ayurvedic pancakarma) K suggested that we go out on the town to celebrate the unbelievable mix of Christmas, New Year’s, Eid-al-Fitr, the Fourth of July, and a Typical Indian Wedding that is Diwali. Our first stop yesterday evening was the chai stand on the corner, where the world’s best chai – I know, I know, I say that about every chai place I visit – is served in thimble-sized plastic cups to autorickshaw-wallahs and guys who work in cell phone stores. K needed the chai energy more than I did: for the past three days he has lived on nothing but the leftover water you get when you boil one part rice in eight parts water. (He has also, much to my amusement, started to question his European-football-fan-like devotion to Ayurveda. As he mused the other day, “How can anyone do this and live a normal life at the same time?”)

We hopped in a rickshaw to visit Pune’s big Parvati temple, which is appropriately located on Parvati Hill (“Parvati Parvata,” hah). The streets were crammed with huge piles of marigolds sold to passerby, and glowed with the bright lights of sweet shops from which overflowed teetering stacks of boxes of “sveets” all wrapped in shiny paper. Our driver dropped us off on the side of a road and pointed at a path that basically led straight up the mountain. We paid him and set off. Kids scampered across the cement pathway, running off to the clusters of houses that dot the hillside so that they could set off fireworks. By the time we reached the top and had paid some attention to the various temples that make up Parvati’s compound, the sky had darkened and the pyrotechnics had started in a serious way. We walked along the parapet that runs around the perimeter of the main Parvati temple, and joined a surprisingly small number of families who had gathered at the highest point in Pune to watch the fireworks.

The view was incredible: all three hundred and sixty degrees of Pune exploding in bursts of color and light. Every building, every street, every hilltop – not one was without its telltale volcanic eruption of sparks and technicolor. And constantly, too, for there was no grand finale to this firework display. When a serious cloud of smoke had settled over the city, we said our goodbyes to the view and headed down.

Then the fun started. “Do you want to walk for a bit?” I innocently asked K. “Sure,” he responded, and before we knew it, we had set off on the most nerve-wracking walk of our lives. All over, people were lighting firecrackers and rockets. In a bit of a wrong turn, we found ourselves walking on the side of a road, not exactly in a slum but in a slum-ish area, where large groups of kids were setting off fireworks on every spare patch of earth. We watched as, one by one, they scampered into the road, set down a firework, ran away, and waited for it to explode in the face of an unsuspecting motorcycle driver or autorickshaw-wallah. Defiant, they drove right over the sparkling bangs. If this was how Rama was welcomed back to Ayodhya back in the day, I'm surprised he didn't turn around and make a beeline straight back to Lanka.

We found that we had passed our fire-trial of sorts (Sita ain’t gone through nothing compared to this!) when we reached a big intersection. Understandably, very few autorickshaws were doing business last night: we finally got hold of one, however, who would take us relatively near to our apartment. Then, in an ill-fated attempt to cap off our night with a quiet round of e-mail, we walked up Prabhat Road to the bigger internet café on Law College Road. Prabhat Road, being in a fairly well-to-do neighborhood, wasn’t as bad, explosive-wise, as the Parvati Hill environs, but there were definitely just as many sparklers in action. Prabhat Road folks seemed to favor actual fireworks – the kind that go up into the sky and burst in a shower of color there – as well as the bright sparklers that don’t make any noise, but which turn around themselves at incredible speeds and have their way of getting into the road (and again, under the wheels of innocent cars). There were also plenty of sparklers which, when set on fire, burst open from the sidewalk in a ten-foot-tall fountain of light that makes them remarkably hard to distinguish from an electrical circuit problem gone wrong. And, of course, there were the usual large groups of teenagers, who set off the same kinds of fireworks as the slum kids – the ones with far more bang and far less light – except in huge piles, so that instead of hearing the sound of a single gunshot, passers-by will witness what sounds like an entire battle.

To top it all off, the internet café was closed when we got there. So we stopped by the vegetable seller on the side of the road and had him hack open two coconuts for us. We sipped the cool, calming coconut milk through straws and jumped together at the particularly loud bangs.

We arrived home to find all the kids from our building setting off the REALLY, almost obnoxiously, loud kind of firework right outside the windows of our apartment. I almost cried. K suggested I put cotton and ghee in my ears. Such is life here.

Shubha Deepavali, everyone!