Diwali: Festival of Lights (Lakshmi Puja)

I had celebrated Diwali one time before this year.

Four years ago, a deaf friend of mine who is married to a deaf Indian man (neither of them identifies as Hindu) invited me to a combination Diwali/Ramadan celebration hosted by the Greater Washington Asian Deaf Association.

This was before I was truly competent in ASL (I had a hard time following the details of the skit depicting Krishna's slaying of Narakasura), and also before I understood how the Muslim calendar works. I didn’t get up to speed on the Muslim calendar until last year. I had failed to attend a combination Yom Kippur/Ramadan break-the-fast to which I had been invited, and I thought to myself, "I should have gone, but hopefully I will find a combination celebration next year."

Nope.

While both the Muslim and Jewish calendars follow a lunar cycle, the Jewish calendar adds a leap month every four years or so, to keep roughly aligned with the Gregorian calendar. The Muslim calendar does not do this, and loses therefore about 11 days per year, sliding backward along the Gregorian calendar, spiraling its holidays throughout all of the seasons. Though Yom Kippur and Ramadan overlapped last year, this year is a Jewish leap year, so the holidays separated. They will not again overlap until 2038, when I will be 64 years old.

When I attended the Diwali/Ramadan four years ago, the new moon that meant Diwali had arrived was the same new moon that signaled the end of Ramadan, but since the Hindu calendar also follows a leap-month strategy, the two holidays won't be linked again for another 27 years. In 2035, Diwali’s new moon will fall on Halloween, and will trigger the beginning of Ramadan the next day, on Samhain/All Saint's Day.

This year, Diwali’s new moon happens this coming Tuesday, October 28. We'll be entering into the Hindu month of Karttika, the Muslim month of Dhu al-Q'idah, and the Jewish month of Chechvan. Also, Diwali and the new moon mark the Hindu new year, so... Happy New Year... again.

When I started looking for a Diwali celebration this year, I discovered that the Hindu (and some Jain) temples in my area were all cooperating together on a collective Diwali Mela, to be held on the Saturday before Diwali (yesterday) at Mariner Arena in Baltimore. The event was scheduled from noon to 10PM, so I decided to attend in the afternoon, and then use my Diwali trip as an excuse to visit a Baltimore friend in the evening.

I caught a combination of Metro, bus, and light-rail to Baltimore on a very windy and slightly drizzly late Saturday morning and arrived at Mariner Arena around 1:30.

I paid my $5 for a ticket at the downstairs box office and followed my nose upstairs to where I could tell lunch awaited. Lining the corridors where vendors normally sell nachos and hot dogs and beer sat tables overflowing with vats of biryani and chana masala and dal. Platters mounded high with pakoras and samosas sat next to giant bowls of mint chutney and tamarind. The food was selling for a flat fee of $5 for any two menu items on a plate. Starving, I bought a double for $10 and took a seat in the arena to chow down while listening to the musicians playing bhajans on the stage.

Mariner Arena can hold 11,000 people. It is home to Baltimore's soccer team, but more often it hosts shows like Disney on Ice, Motocross, or Ringling Brothers' Circus. Inside, three levels of stadium-style seating, in a U shape, look down on the large, sporting-event-sized floor, with a wide stage at the flat end of the U.

On the floor, about thirty or forty rows of chairs provided prime additional seating for watching the stage, and behind those rows were assembled fifty to sixty booths made of blue curtains and metal piping for vendors to sell their wares. Several hundred people filled the arena, some sitting in the stadium seats like me, plates of food balanced on their laps, while others milled about the booths or lined the seats on the floor.

I wore a dark flannel shirt and jeans and felt that I did not look terribly out of place among the men, who ranged from low-end casual to business suits, with only the very occasional kurta. The women, on the other hand, skewed toward maybe 75-percent traditional dress, which, seen from the height of the stadium seats, presented a delightfully classy and colorful sea of humanity.

After bolting my food and pitching my plate, I made my way down to the floor to see what I might see. In addition to the predictable booths for saris and jewelry and Hindu art, I saw booths for life insurance, blood pressure testing, and services for wiring money to India. Booths for kids offered the chance to fill in black-and-white lotus drawings with glue and colorful powders, as well as children's picture books about the gods and goddesses, and dolls manufactured by Mattel labeled "Barbie Goes to India."

Other booths offered vast arrays of Bollywood films and music, cosmetics, oil lamps, the services of traditional wedding decorators, and back issues of a magazine called The Indian American that has placed Barack Obama on the cover of its current issue. I thumbed the literature on the table of the Vedanta booth, reading short sections of text about how to interpret the Upanishads to reach self-realization and cosmic consciousness. The man staffing this booth never stopped talking on his cell phone while I stood there, but I took note of a banner overhead that linked the booth with someone called Swami Chinmayananda, so I made a note to follow up.

Elsewhere on the exhibition floor, I looked amongst the assorted god and goddess figures for a Lakshmi.

I have a small silver Ganesha statue that a friend gave me for Holi in the spring, and I thought I might like to place a matching goddess of wealth next to him, as America gnaws its collective nails over the economy. Alas, all of the Lakshmis were painted in garish colors that I didn't like, though I did see some attractive Buddhas fashioned in silver (which was a surprise to me).

The cultural program began around 2:30, with each of the temples allowed about fifteen minutes of stage time for a performance. Each temple took its turn presenting choreographed dances, often dedicated to a god or goddess (Ganesha, Shiva, Lord Nataraja the God of Dance), with some described without a god-reference ("a Gujarati folk dance," "beats from the State of Punjab"), and one described as "a hymn to God, the Divine Life that is our best friend in every way."

After about three temples' presentations, I noticed that either by design or by happenstance, the performances did not seem to involve men, boys, or older women. Only girls and young women were taking the stage to sing and dance, and I reflected that if I were a young Hindu boy I might likely feel jealous. The highly stylized choreography looked fun to perform, and the fanciful costumes looked fun to wear. Most of the pre-recorded music was loud, fast, inspiring, and exhilarating -- with a heavy beat that wouldn't have been out of place in a nightclub.

Later, during the time I slipped out to purchase a dish of masala chai ice cream, a boy-performer did take the stage. He was the drummer for a female dance troupe, and when I returned with my sweet treat, he stood at the microphone praying. The boy called God our creator and our sustainer, but did not mention any names like Brahma or Vishnu. And when he called on God to give us prosperity in the new year, he did not mention either Lakshmi or Ganesha, with his connection to auspicious beginnings. He asked God to guide us all down the noble path.

After a few more dances, a man in a suit took to the stage to announce the start of Lakshmi Puja.

While he spoke, several others -- men in suits, one man in a saffron-colored kurta, a woman in a rose-and-white sari -- began to transform the stage. They brought out two large images, about the size of college dorm-room posters, framed in gold, and leaned them against a long table covered in a gold cloth that was already sitting to the rear of the stage. The image on the left showed Lakshmi, two arms raised, two arms outstretched, standing on a lotus flower with a white elephant emerging from a river behind her. The image on the right showed a pink and white Ganesha.

Between these images, the men and woman placed a huge pile of bananas, and then they rolled out a red cloth on the floor before the images. At the corners of the red cloth, they rolled out two more red cloths, forming an inward-slanting rectangle with its arms open toward the audience.

The man at the microphone asked for all of the board members of the Association of Hindu and Jain Temples to come to the stage, along with two children from each temple. The adults who came forward knelt on the first red cloth, facing the images. The children knelt on the two other cloths, facing the audience. While the man at the microphone spoke about Lakshmi and Diwali and the New Year and thanked various people, the other men and the woman provided the kneeling worshipers with various objects -- cups of water, and red plates covered with I knew not what.

When the man at the microphone was finished, a different unseen man began reciting prayers in Hindi. His words triggered actions among the worshipers on the stage. They touched or moved things on their plates, or raised their hands above their heads.

Occasionally, the praying man would give a partial instruction in English ("now the rice and flowers," "now the mango leaves," “run the rice through your fingers"). He paused to give voice to drawn-out ohms occasionally, and every now and then, from somewhere, a bell would ring. This went on for nearly forty minutes.

Whether Hebrew or Arabic or Hindi, Latin or Greek or German, there is possibly no other boredom in this world like the boredom of listening to never-ending prayers in a language you don't understand.

I know this is my fault for not knowing another spoken language, and I know I'm totally in the wrong for thinking this, but as much as I wanted to enjoy and learn from the worship of Lakshmi, I found it irritating. “Enough, already,” I thought, as the prayers grew repetitive and monotonous, “I'm sure Lakshmi gets it.”

I selfishly wanted the program to return to the dances ("Entertain me!"), and to top it off, my phone kept vibrating with my Baltimore friend apparently trying to contact me about our evening plans. I felt like a jerk for not answering my friend's call as I outwardly respected the ceremony taking place on the stage, and like a bigger jerk for inwardly barely respecting the ceremony at all.

When a bell started ringing non-stop, I hoped fervently that it might signal the end of the ceremony.

It did. The adults rose and warmed their hands over oil lamps situated on the table behind the two images. The man in the saffron kurta began tossing flower petals over everyone, and then the children rose to warm their hands as well. The stage began to clear, as the man in saffron moved the oil lamps to the edge of the stage. Men and women from the audience drew near to the lamps, placing their hands above the flames, then touching their faces, running their fingers through their hair, and bowing with a namaste.

I should have at least offered Mariner Arena my own namaste before rushing outside to call my friend back, but I did not.