Deepavali

Deepavali or Diwali or The Festival of Light or "celebration of the inner light" celebrations have been building up all week.  Many shops close down for a couple of days before the day to have a thorough clean-up and repainting followed by decorating with flowers

Here's Amar's shop (the supplier of toilet tissue) with Amar walking away with a big grin on his face.  Unfortunate spelling mistake in the floral sign but it didn't matter as everyone is just out to enjoy themselves. 

Nearly all the shops put some sort of decoration up, it's a really important day here and seemed to be making everyone happy.

I was also invited to attend the third birthday celebration of the son of a work colleague, held at the Jaganath Temple here in Koraput.  Diwali is a very auspicious day to be able to celebrate a bithday and the kids had a wonderful time racing round the safety of the temple without anyone worrying about motorbikes or rickshaws.  The date of Diwali is decided by the lunar calendar so he won't be able to share his birthday with Diwali again for a while. 
Many people draw Rangoli patterns on the ground outside their homes  to encourage the goddess Lakshmi to enter their homes.  These patterns are common here all the time as they are used to welcome guests into the home and are traditionally drawn using rice grains, sand or chalk but seem to have got bigger and more colourful over the Diwali season, I guess they need to be bright to attract Lakshmi.

Yesterday started with a bang, everyone seems to let off crackers and 'bombs' which went on very noisily all day and only seemed to quieten down around midnight.  I was a little alarmed when I saw the fireworks on sale as they are not controlled like in UK, market stalls have open displays of their wares which seem to be sold to anyone who can pay.  Kids love letting off crackers, making me jump every time.  Many of the rockets don't seem to go up vertically but weave a horizontal path across the sky, sometimes landing worryingly close to our feet.  

Most houses had lamps and candles lit up in the windows, on doorsteps, in gateways and rowed up along the walls around the roof.  It looked wonderful in the evening.  Some people use decorative electric lights like the Christmas lights at home but more common are the small clay pots filled with oil with diyas (cotton wicks) inserted.  These are incredibly cheap, one of my colleagues got some for me at the grand total of 5 rupees for 15 pots.  I then had the problem of working out which shop to go to to buy oil, deciding the easiest way of describing what I wanted was to take a pot with me to point at while asking for oil.  I achieved success with buying castor oil (served in a flimsy plastic bag) and got very messy trying to make up my lamps, getting oil everywhere in the process.  I managed to get some going but my attempts looked a bit pathetic compared to all my neighbours but I thought the house still looked good.

Some of my work colleagues arrived at home mid-morning to perform a Hindu house-warming ceremony and banish the evil spirits from the house.  Prasant drew auspicious patterns on the wall with Turmeric, said prayers, split a coconut open, lit incense and scatter turmeric stained rice, leaves and water around the house and walls to make it safe.  It felt a real honour and I hope that means that the leaks won't return at the next monsoon.  For the house cleansing to work I had to leave the coconut water on the floor and the rice scattered.  The only problem was that rice and broken coconut shell are not great under bare feet!

So that just leaves my birds nest to sort out.  It was built in July but I don't think it was ever occupied.  I'm not sure whether to leave it as a decoration or try to remove it as it looks a bit like a really bad wig sat on a high shelf.  It will probably stay, I've got quite fond of it really and maybe the birds will return sometime to raise a family.