Why Festival Season Makes Missing Home Hit Harder

The fairy lights went up on the neighbour's balcony three days before Navratri, and from her kitchen window she could see them blinking in a rhythm that was almost cheerful, almost festive, the way a greeting card is almost personal. She stood at the sink washing a single cup, a single plate, a single spoon, and the lights blinked, and somewhere two floors down a family was playing garba music loud enough for the bass to travel through the walls, and the bass entered her flat and sat down and made itself at home in a way that no person had done in months.

Festival season in India does not knock. It arrives like weather, everywhere at once, inescapable. The markets fill with marigold. The air smells of sugar and smoke. WhatsApp groups come alive with forwarded greetings, images of gods and goddesses wrapped in glitter fonts, messages that say "Happy Diwali to you and your family" and the word "family" lands differently when you are reading it alone at 10pm in a rented flat where the only decoration is a calendar from the insurance company your landlord left behind.

He remembers festival season as a child the way one remembers a song heard long ago, not every word, but the feeling of it. The kitchen in chaos. His grandmother's hands moving through dough with a speed that suggested the dough owed her something. Cousins running through the house. The particular sound of an Indian household in celebration, which is not a single sound but a layering of many, voices over music over pressure cookers over laughter, a wall of noise so thick and warm that silence, by comparison, would have felt like standing naked in winter.

And now

I light a diya on Diwali because the ritual requires it, or perhaps because I require the ritual. The flame is small and it flickers in the draught from the window I cannot fully close, and I cup my hands around it the way you cup your hands around something precious and fragile, and for a moment the flat is a temple and I am a devotee and the god I am praying to is the god of belonging, of being somewhere that feels like home on a night when home is a concept rather than a coordinate. The rangoli I made is small. YouTube taught me. It sits near the door where nobody will see it except the delivery person tomorrow, and the delivery person will step on it without noticing, and that is fine, that is absolutely fine, I did not make it for the delivery person, I made it for the version of myself that still believes that performing a festival alone is better than not performing it at all.

The loneliness of festival season is not like ordinary loneliness. Ordinary loneliness is a low hum, constant, manageable, the kind you learn to live alongside the way you learn to live alongside traffic noise or a dripping tap. Festival loneliness is a spike. It is sharp and sudden and it arrives with the first string of lights, the first forwarded WhatsApp, the first "what are your plans for Diwali" from a colleague who is making conversation and does not know that the question is a small blade. Plans. The word assumes options. It assumes people. It assumes a version of the festival that involves more than one person and a diya and a rangoli that will be stepped on by a man delivering groceries.

They call it the most wonderful time of the year, or words to that effect, in every culture. The assumption is universal: festivity equals happiness, celebration equals togetherness, lights and music and sweets equal joy. And for many people, this is true. The festivals are wonderful. The togetherness is real. But for those on the outside of that togetherness, for those watching the celebration from across a distance that is measured not in kilometres but in absence, the wonderfulness of the season is a mirror held up to everything they are missing. The lights are beautiful. They are also a reminder. The music is joyful. It is also loud enough to fill the shape of the silence that follows when the song ends and the flat is quiet again and the diya has burned down to a stub and the festival, for you, is over, and tomorrow the world will carry on and the fairy lights on the neighbour's balcony will blink for a few more days and then go dark, and ordinary loneliness will return, and you will almost be relieved, because ordinary loneliness, at least, does not pretend to be something it is not.