Member-only story
As I Grieve Every Festival of Lights
The necessary pain of creating new memories
I remember when my father still seemed tall. When I had to crane my neck to be able to look him in the eye and when the warmth of his smile, no matter how rare, meant everything to me.
The first memory of Diwali that I can summon to the forefront of my consciousness is a brief one. Barely a moving picture but one that, as the cliche goes, is worth a thousand words.
In it, my father lights a sparkler and pushes the end of it into half of an overripe banana before placing it in my tiny, ecstatic, outstretched hand. A happy Diwali from my father to the banana, and from the banana to me.
At five years old, I barely understood the significance of the half-a-banana. It was still too early for me to fully grasp the sacrifice that the perfectly good fruit represented for a man who would sooner eat a moldy orange than let it go to waste.
The half-a-banana made sparklers safe for little hands. Though the falling sparks rendered the banana inedible at the end of the night, my father didn’t seem to mind. And I was more than happy to celebrate Diwali with my banana sparklers.
I scribbled in the crisp, autumn air, letting the tendrils of smoke form abstract art in the fiery glow of my sparkler. The days of banana Diwalis were the days I was certain of my father’s love for me.
In my early childhood, my family celebrated every festival of lights. We made latkes and read books about Hanukkah before I even knew that my mother was of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. I was a voracious reader, and my mother satiated my appetite for kid-literature with library books.
During the holiday season, we read about Kwanzaa and Christmas and Chinese New Year. My teachers couldn’t understand why I seemed to know about just about every festival of lights that there was. They assumed that I must have belonged to some strange religion that celebrated them all.
My mother explained that most faith traditions observed a festival of lights; something to provide a sense of hope in the bleak darkness of winter and to offset that same sense of darkness that sometimes filled us from within.
