Happy Diwali

Diwali aka Deepavali was one of those festival that we, as kids, looked forward for every year... The amount of money that got burnt off in the form of fireworks excited us so much...Even while enjoying burning our fireworks, our eyes and ears used to be at the neighbour's house to see, if ours or theirs were better...There were times when we used to hide majority of our fireworks, just to use them later...once the neighbours were done with their stock...We loved showing off...lol!!!

To say stories of Deepavali would be a whole lot...still would love to share atleast one or two of them...

STORY 1

I had this Over confidence in myself that I was toooo brave and strong…and fearless…I always made sure that I gave a similar portrait of myself to people around me… for the same reason and maybe for a bit of show off, I always used to be the first one to lit the fireworks, especially the bombs and the different types of crackers…

During one such occasion, some 12-14 years back…I was at my door step…along with some of my neighbours enjoying the Diwali eve by burning off loads of crackers and fire works…Among the different crackers, there was this small cigarette shaped cracker… the cracker being really small in size but at the same time very powerful had to be handled very carefully….

I being the stupid SHOW OFF Heroine…took some of them…placed my ass near a lit candle on one of the steps at our front porch and started lighting the cracker and throwing it away as soon as I saw the first spark in the stub…The thing was so quick that, as soon as I throw it, the thing would explode in mid air…my younger cousins awed at me in admiration…and I felt proud…I was acting really smart and kept on throwing the lit crackers into the air and enjoyed the fun of it…

But as the saying goes “Pride comes before a fall…”… I took one of the piece and lit it on the candle light…and just as I was to throw it, suddenly I had this strange feeling, that the stub has not caught fire…to examine it on a close view I was just bringing it closer to me…and BOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMM….. for some moment, I could feel nothing…I thought I had no hand or ears….I thought my face had flown off from me…but soon, I understood my ears were still working normal…only thing, I hated knowing that…bcoz, all I could hear was all my spectators laughing and making fun of me…As I sat there with a blank expression, one hand up as if holding a rose…

And I still wonder, how I escaped such a fatal accident without even a scratch…Forget the Vibration inside my ears for days….

STORY 2

As I said before…we as kids always wanted to show our neigbours that we had more crackers with us...When we were some 10 year old…we made an alliance with two of my neighboring friends… we decided to share all our crackers and burn them together so that we had the most when compared to many other houses around us…

That specific year, somehow, my dad was tooooo generous or was it he got it on a Discount, god knows….we got a real big treasure full of crackers…all sort of crackers filled the front porch of our house that night…along with my neighbors, we started burning them one by one…But then, Anything if too much gets stale…after hours, we started getting bored and wished the stock was over…we just wanted to get back home and give our eyes and ears some rest…

As we learnt that every body in the team had the same mind, we came upon an agreement…we got hold of a big aluminium pot…emptied all the crackers into the pot and loosely closed it’s mouth…and then dropped in a spark into it…what we were expecting was some Boooom, Baaams and Dooooms and finished….

But what happened was horrifying…the aluminium vessel started jumping and flying all around the pouch…with every single cracker bursting inside….to make matter worse, it hit the Iron gate with a bang and then jumped up and hit the glass window of the house (not to mention, it shattered into pieces…) and around and around it went…it even banged against my brother’s cycle parked in the garage…(Thank god, my dad’s car was not there then…)

Don’t mention about the clothes that caught fire from the rockets that escaped thru the lid of the Pot…haaaaaaaa…U can imagine the expression of the kids, including me…my mom had the shock of her life when she heard our screams and the glass window shattering…Anyways, one of the boy, who was elder to all of us suddenly came back to his sense and switched on the Water pump and ran behind the moving pot and washed the fire off…Anyways, it couldn’t save much of the cleaning clothes that was hanging in the Clothe Liner….nor did we were spared from the still louder EXPLOSIONS from our parents the remaining nights….

Anyways, today I miss all those days…and I feel bad for my son who could not enjoy days that we had enjoyed years back…Hoping to be back home atleast next year to show my son what is the real…

Happy Diwali…