This Diwali, I’m thinking of

In my first Diwali home after two years, the festival stretched across the entire month like a string of lights gradually illuminating the darkness. I spent my days wandering through nearby melas, watching the city slowly light up, decorating the house, and buying mithai. Yet in everything I’ve done this past month, I’ve also been thinking of grief both far and near.

There was this moment where I saw kids dancing and their loved ones clapping at their adorably misremembered steps. I thought of all those years ago when my friend who passed this year and I danced to Maahi ve, our young moms clapping in the audience the same way. Their house, which was always the brightest on our floor, stands bare and shut this year. It will probably look like this for years to come, a light extinguished too soon.

This past year, we’ve seen whole constellations of human experience being erased. I am thinking of every Palestinian child mangled, buried under rubble, being hopelessly carried away. Of every person lit on fire, all the dust-covered faces, watching a genocide unfold, a generation decimated on a small screen in my hand. I am thinking of how each one was a whole universe — to themselves and to everybody they knew. They had lives as complex, joyful, and difficult as yours, as mine. It kills me. I’ll never get numb to it. I refuse to.

There have been so many moments of joy. Dressing up in shiny clothes, carefully applying my eyeliner in the mirror, rushing to the shops with my sister who makes even mundane tasks adventurous. Eating pizza with my mom under twinkly lights, buying a necklace for my sister just because, holding hands with someone I am slowly starting to like. Seeing marigolds spill out from autos everywhere, watching my mom go out with new friends for sindoor khela, learning kathak, slowly finding my footing at my new job, and so many more moments.

These joys are mundane and I have the privilege of experiencing them again and again. I want to cling to these joys, want them to be so small that no one would want to take them away from me. Sometimes I want to make them smaller, less noticeable — so much so that even writing this seems like too much. When life is so harsh and people dream of mundanity, I want to hold on to these joys steadfastly with the knowledge they could slip away. Maybe this might be my resistance.