Essay: A Diwali Away from Home by Timsi Gupta

In this heartwarming essay, Timsi Gupta shares her personal experience of celebrating Diwali away from home and the thoughts that come to her mind.

“Are you going home for Diwali?” The question landed on my heart with an unexpected weight. I had always celebrated Diwali at home. But this year, I found myself at a loss for an answer.

The first 17 years of my life, I lived with my parents and three siblings, celebrating Diwali at home year after year. In the weeks leading up to the festival, my mother would frantically conduct ‘Diwali ki safai’, the annual deep cleaning of our house. All four of us siblings would play mom’s assistants, holding the ladder she climbed to reach the cobwebs in the furthest corners of the attic, rinsing and cleaning the dusting cloth she used and collecting the dirt in a dustpan. 

The cleaning routine was followed by festive shopping. On Dhanteras, two days before Diwali, we’d make trips to the local Diwali market. We would search for beautiful bandhanwars that read “Happy Diwali” or “Shubh Deepawali” in Hindi, and designer fairy lights for our home. We also bought clay idols of Lakshmi and Ganesha, a mud hatri to place the idols, and over a hundred mitti diyas, making sure each item was perfectly shaped and free of blemishes. We’d buy gifts enmasse for exchanges with relatives, neighbors, and our household and office staff. Mom and dad would do some math to decide who deserved which gift. They would also inspect the gifts we had received and determine whom to forward them to. Didi and I were tasked with wrapping and making these gifts look presentable.