DIWALI!!!! (Oct. 26)

So here in India the Hindus seem to have a festival every month or so and this month is no exception! We’ve had 3 major Hindu festivals since our arrival 7 weeks ago! The festival that fell on this day is the festival called Diwali. It’s the festival of lights as well as fireworks and firecrackers! This sounded great but experiencing it was what really made it absolutely incredible!

We were playing volleyball like we do every evening here and as the sun set the firecrackers could be heard all over town. Thirty minutes or so after sundown our tiny town of Nuzvid sounded like Baghdad on the night the US started the Iraqi war…

Needless to say Zach and I couldn’t resist the urge to head into town and see what all the firecrackers were about! We started walking into town and almost immediately we knew this was shaping up to be a crazy evening. What people do for Diwali is light candles and put up strings of lights and then the best part, they buy boxes of fireworks and shoot them off in the streets!

Now these fireworks aren’t anything like the pansy fireworks we have in the US… These things have 10 times the bang with a tenth of a fuse! Also, safety is not even thought of. People toss lit firecrackers out in the street regardless of who is walking, driving, or crawling by! We immediately saw it was our responsibility to make sure we didn’t catch a firecracker in the face by watching every side! The streets of Nuzvid were extremely hazy with smoke from all the firecrackers and you couldn’t walk 50 feet without having a firecracker blow up 15 feet away from you!

As we continued through the streets we finally found some shelter at our favorite street food vendor who sells some of the best samosas I’ve had for the price! They cost 5 rupees per samosas, which is about 10 cents. So Zach and I always get 2 or 3! As we sat there under the awning eating the frenzy of fireworks only increased.

We finished eating and heading down the main street. This is where things got a bit more nerve wracking. A guy threw a firecracker into the street not 5 feet in front of me and maybe 8 feet from Zach and it went off. You could feel the shockwave from the explosion and my left ear was immediately ringing! It was pretty crazy but we kept walking and finally decided to head down to one of the icecream shops in town to buy cookies for our trip to Narsupor in the morning.

The shop was closed, but as we turned around to head back to the hospital a family waved us over to their house and asked if we wanted to shoot off some “crackers” with them. Of course we did! They told us in broken English how to light the firecrackers and IMMEDIATELY throw them into the street. There was quite a bit of emphasis on ‘immediately’ so that’s what we did. It was soon apparent why immediately was so important; the firecrackers had the most deceptively short fuses I’ve ever seen! The fuse was over an inch long but burned for only 1 second at the most! It was amazing how loud these things were and sometimes they exploded no more than 5 feet from where you had thrown them! It was so much fun lighting and throwing these things because you really did feel like one little slip up could hurt really badly!

The mother of the house suddenly invited us into the courtyard of the house and made us sit down. She then proceeded to bring out sweet cakes and a sweet noodle and yogurt treat, which we ate with spoons out of metal cups. The cake was “burfi” and the noodle stuff was “simya”. It wasn’t half bad but I didn’t feel like I could have eaten more than she gave us. We chatted with them some more while one of her sons set off more firecrackers in the yard about 10 feet away, that was safe! We then headed back out to the street to intending to leave and head back to the hospital but they handed us more firecrackers to blow off so we stayed a bit longer.

Now several things happened while we were blowing these things off. I threw one into the street but it didn’t go off and we thought it was a dud. It wasn’t though, and about a minute after I threw it a lady was walking by it and it exploded right before she almost stepped on it! She jumped, turned around and began yelling at us. I’m assuming she was swearing at us but she kept walking. It was so funny but I did sympathize with her since almost the same thing had happened to us earlier. Also, whenever one didn’t go off immediately our gracious and crazy hosts would run over and check it and try and light it off by lighting a piece of newspaper on fire and putting it next to the wick. This seemed a bit dangerous to me but hey, like I said before, safety isn’t really thought of here in India.

Another thing that was really crazy was when one of the girls in the family lit a firecracker and didn’t through it fast enough. It ended up exploding 1 to 2 feet from her hand and Zach and I were standing right next to her so of course we felt the whole thing. Thankfully she was fine but we were pretty scared! Also, our ears were now ringing like gongs!

After setting off a few more we said goodbye to our new friends and headed back towards the hospital but we literally had to run from safe spot to safe spot until we got off on a quieter street and even then every once in awhile someone would be lighting off more firecrackers.

We finally made it safely back inside the hospital compound and the safety of our room! It was by far the craziest thing I’ve ever experience with firecrackers and I pretty sure this is my new favorite festival! I think we should celebrate it back in the US just for fun!