Celebrating Indian Festivals Abroad Alone, Quietly, in a Country That Doesn't Know It's Happening

We build little temples in foreign kitchens. A brass diya from the Indian store three bus stops away. An incense stick that smells almost right but not the same as the ones Ma buys from the shop near Hanuman Mandir. A printout of Lakshmi taped to the cabinet because we forgot to pack the framed one and Amazon doesn't deliver gods with the right expression. We arrange these things on the counter between the toaster and the kettle, and we light the diya, and we close our eyes, and for a moment the kitchen in Manchester or Melbourne or Munich becomes a temple, the way a child's blanket fort becomes a castle: through the sheer force of wanting it to be so.

The effort

We wake up early on Diwali morning and scrub the apartment. This is tradition. The cleaning is sacred, Ma always said, you are making room for Lakshmi, she won't enter a dirty house. So we clean, alone, in a flat that doesn't need sacred cleaning because it is already clean, because one person living alone does not generate the kind of chaos that a family of five produces in the weeks before Diwali. We clean anyway. The ritual matters. The doing of it matters. We are performing an act of faith, not in god exactly, but in the idea that distance does not have to mean disconnection, that a diya lit in a foreign kitchen still counts, still reaches, still carries whatever it is supposed to carry across the ocean to the house where the real Diwali is happening without us.

The group chat

Someone posts a photo of the rangoli. Someone posts a video of the puja. The crackers are going off in the background and we can hear them through the phone's tiny speaker, the sound compressed and tinny but recognisable, the way a voice on a bad phone line is still the voice of someone you love. We send heart emojis. We send "Happy Diwali" with extra exclamation marks. We do not send what we are actually feeling, which is a homesickness so precise it has a taste, a smell, a temperature. It tastes like the mathri Ma makes only once a year. It smells like sulphur and marigold. It is the exact temperature of an October evening in Delhi when the air is cool enough for a shawl but warm enough to sit on the terrace.

The party

We go to the Diwali party organised by the Indian students' association or the desi community group or the one friend who has a living room large enough to hold fifteen people sitting cross-legged on the floor eating from paper plates. The food is good, close enough to home that we eat too much and feel the particular contentment of a full stomach that recognises what it has been given. We sing along to something Bollywood. We laugh. We take photos for the family WhatsApp group. And when we get home afterward, alone, to the quiet flat with the diya still burning on the kitchen counter, we sit down and the silence has a different quality than usual. It is the silence of a festival experienced at a distance, where the joy is real but borrowed, transmitted through screens and group chats and paper plates. The version we carry home is a photocopy of the original. Legible, but faded.

The call

We call home. Ma is busy. There are guests. The background is loud and chaotic and alive in a way our flat is not. She says "Happy Diwali, beta" and her voice cracks slightly, or maybe ours does, and the conversation is short because she has twenty people to feed and we have a diya to blow out before bed. We hang up. We blow out the diya. We wash the one plate we used. The kitchen returns to being a kitchen.

The morning after

November 1st. The world outside does not know it was Diwali yesterday. The bus comes on time. The office is normal. Nobody mentions it. We carry the festival inside us like a secret, folded small, tucked somewhere between the ribs. We go about the day and the day goes about us. Somewhere, in a Haven conversation we started at midnight between the party and the sleep, we typed "it doesn't feel like Diwali here" and someone understood what that sentence weighed. Because some sentences weigh more than their words. And that one weighed a country.