I’ve slept in some difficult spots. There was the night in Boy Scouts, lying alone and on the ground in the middle of the woods wrapped in a blue tarp like a burrito while the rain pounded down for hours. I slept once in a bathtub in the Cayman Islands when we didn’t have quite enough beds in my friend’s time share. And then there was that night sleeping on the display playground equipment in a Lowe’s parking lot in Louisville. And let’s not forget the dozens of horrible, grotty hotel rooms I’ve gotten intimate with all over south Asia, with the fan-less power cuts and the cockroaches and walls stained almost as much as the sheets. Sound like difficult places to grab a few Zs? They were.
But they were nothing like last night. It wasn’t the hotel room though, because while small it was actually quite nice, with a great view from above the Ganges River. It wasn’t bugs or dirty sheets or sticky, fan-less tossing about that made last night hard. Last night, it was the explosions. They had started earlier in the day as I was walking through the narrow alleyways of Old Varanasi, India’s holy city. I had just rounded a corner when a boy came at me full speed, his little, finely-combed black head meeting my stomach with a "thud." He shouted something I couldn’t understand before grabbing my hand and running in the direction from which I had come. In my confusion I turned back towards where he had been just as a clay pot set in the middle of the alley exploded with the force of more M80s than we ever used to tie together when I was in high school. That’s one thing I learned quickly about Indian fireworks; they’re not so much concerned with the lights or the pretty colors that shoot off in streams and swirls. They could do without the sparks or the little bit of screaming that a quality bottle rocket will give you before it pops. No, in India they care about one thing: the raw, chest cavity thumping power of the boom.
Walking around last night I pointed at a firework going off in the sky and asked a young man standing next to me what the Hindi name for it was. And fittingly, he replied, with the long "o" sound of the Indian accent, "Bomb." "Well, at least they’re honest about it," I thought to myself. The longer I spent meandering the street on this festival night, however, the less and less safe I felt. I shouldn’t have been surprised, in a country where safety is very much a secondary concern, where the driving is lunatic, drinking the water is just as dangerous, and one of my favorite pastimes is standing in the open door of the moving train because no one tells me not to. Dewali is a lot like the Fourth of July if you just took the Fourth of July and removed all the safety precautions used in making fireworks, jack up the power to an unreasonably dangerous level, and then while you’re at it, take away people like police and parents who are there to protect their children or tell them "no" when they’re about to light a hodge-podged pile of explosives in the middle of a busy intersection.
And there’s no governmental fireworks display here, either, like one might go downtown to see back home. Here people buy what they can afford, and the more well-to-do families end up in a sort of competition, seeing whether the Sings or the Guptas can set off a better show from the open roofs of their villas in the heart of this old, claustrophobic city. I was standing in an alley just beside one such family’s house as they set of their grand finale last night, snapping a few photos of some of the only whites and greens and reds I had seen. It wasn’t until a burning cinder landed on my shoulder that I jumped under a tin roof with two other Indian men who chuckled as the burning embers came plinking down all over the street like some sort of plague they forgot to mention in Exodus. I gave them an added boost in their laughter when they saw my frightened eyes and the paranoid, twitchy brushing of my shoulders whenever I felt fiery phantom particles making their way through my cotton shirt.
On the way home I passed some men standing around, looking up at a tarp that had a wide, burning hole in it, the black plastic melting and dripping down onto the concrete, smelling exactly like the styrofoam cups we used to toss into the campfire before these newfangled terms like "greenhouse gases" or "global warming" popped into the media. I snapped a few photos, trying not to breath the fumes too deeply, until they started pouring water on the blaze from above. I walked over to a nearby ledge where some men were sitting and put my camera back in my bag.
"Happy Diwali!" they said to me with their silly, alcohol-induced smiles.
"Yeah, happy Diwali," I replied, right before flinching my way through another heart-stopping blast.
The guys thought it was hilarious.
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But they were nothing like last night. It wasn’t the hotel room though, because while small it was actually quite nice, with a great view from above the Ganges River. It wasn’t bugs or dirty sheets or sticky, fan-less tossing about that made last night hard. Last night, it was the explosions. They had started earlier in the day as I was walking through the narrow alleyways of Old Varanasi, India’s holy city. I had just rounded a corner when a boy came at me full speed, his little, finely-combed black head meeting my stomach with a "thud." He shouted something I couldn’t understand before grabbing my hand and running in the direction from which I had come. In my confusion I turned back towards where he had been just as a clay pot set in the middle of the alley exploded with the force of more M80s than we ever used to tie together when I was in high school. That’s one thing I learned quickly about Indian fireworks; they’re not so much concerned with the lights or the pretty colors that shoot off in streams and swirls. They could do without the sparks or the little bit of screaming that a quality bottle rocket will give you before it pops. No, in India they care about one thing: the raw, chest cavity thumping power of the boom.
Walking around last night I pointed at a firework going off in the sky and asked a young man standing next to me what the Hindi name for it was. And fittingly, he replied, with the long "o" sound of the Indian accent, "Bomb." "Well, at least they’re honest about it," I thought to myself. The longer I spent meandering the street on this festival night, however, the less and less safe I felt. I shouldn’t have been surprised, in a country where safety is very much a secondary concern, where the driving is lunatic, drinking the water is just as dangerous, and one of my favorite pastimes is standing in the open door of the moving train because no one tells me not to. Dewali is a lot like the Fourth of July if you just took the Fourth of July and removed all the safety precautions used in making fireworks, jack up the power to an unreasonably dangerous level, and then while you’re at it, take away people like police and parents who are there to protect their children or tell them "no" when they’re about to light a hodge-podged pile of explosives in the middle of a busy intersection.
And there’s no governmental fireworks display here, either, like one might go downtown to see back home. Here people buy what they can afford, and the more well-to-do families end up in a sort of competition, seeing whether the Sings or the Guptas can set off a better show from the open roofs of their villas in the heart of this old, claustrophobic city. I was standing in an alley just beside one such family’s house as they set of their grand finale last night, snapping a few photos of some of the only whites and greens and reds I had seen. It wasn’t until a burning cinder landed on my shoulder that I jumped under a tin roof with two other Indian men who chuckled as the burning embers came plinking down all over the street like some sort of plague they forgot to mention in Exodus. I gave them an added boost in their laughter when they saw my frightened eyes and the paranoid, twitchy brushing of my shoulders whenever I felt fiery phantom particles making their way through my cotton shirt.
On the way home I passed some men standing around, looking up at a tarp that had a wide, burning hole in it, the black plastic melting and dripping down onto the concrete, smelling exactly like the styrofoam cups we used to toss into the campfire before these newfangled terms like "greenhouse gases" or "global warming" popped into the media. I snapped a few photos, trying not to breath the fumes too deeply, until they started pouring water on the blaze from above. I walked over to a nearby ledge where some men were sitting and put my camera back in my bag.
"Happy Diwali!" they said to me with their silly, alcohol-induced smiles.
"Yeah, happy Diwali," I replied, right before flinching my way through another heart-stopping blast.
The guys thought it was hilarious.