My memories of Diwali in Delhi are as colourful as the celebration.
As a student of Delhi University, I celebrated this Festival with gusto and on one memorable year with 1000 bottles of Pepsi, a roulette wheel and Delhi Police.
The catalyst for this adventure was an amazing man called Chintu Chawla, a proud resident of Rajouri Garden and entrepreneur extraordinaire.
Like many Sikhs, he made the best of friends and the worst of enemies.
Despite his outwardly aggressive Delhi persona that involved charismatic tirades of Punjabi abuse that would have made (former Indian Railway Minister) Lalu Prasad Yadav blush, he was big- hearted to a fault and wept every time we had a chicken slaughtered.
Despite his habit of loudly threatening drivers that cut him off with dire sexual consequences to their next of kin, I sentimentally remember him threatening to kill me if I swore within a kilometre of Bangla Sahib, the Great Sikh Temple in Delhi.
‘Media Hub’
I was fortunate to befriend Chintu in Sri Venkateswara College when I was still struggling to spell it. I soon found out, before the days of Twitter or even mobiles that he was a human social media hub and knew everything that was going on in West Delhi to a supernatural extent.
“Nirula at D-28 were raided last night by the ITO. They had three crores under their mattress! My cousin’s bhabhi’s Grandfather owns three illegal rifles and last week shot a monkey!”
Chintu not only knew everything that happened, but also desperately wanted to be there when it did. That meant long laughter filled nights jumping off and on the Mudrika (Ring Road bus) or if we were lucky, in his families temperamental Maruti 800 chasing down the latest Old Monk and later get together or in this case the latest high stakes Diwali ‘Flash’ game.
Twenty years on, I clearly remember Diwali flash parties at the Chawlas.
Even then, the joint family was an institution under attack but the Chawlas had gallantly swum against a strong tide of change and a matrix of relatives lived in a huge house in D Block.
Diwali would see the lounge filled with enormous Sikhs, constructed with stiff Patialas and paddling pool-sized servings of butter chicken, jealously nursing their two dealt playing cards.
They looked like a range of the Himalayas with two dwarfed checker patterned billboards on the side of each mountain.
The Gamblers
Punjabis are a jovial lot but when money is involved, there can be a sudden air of intense seriousness and uncharacteristic silence.
The tradition of gambling during Diwali was no exception. It was a very serious business indeed, with little eye contact between poker faces, just a flurry of suspicious side-glances and nonchalant throws of money into the pot.
This mesmerising meditation would be broken by truly violent eruptions of cheating accusations and heart stopping drama. Truly not for the faint hearted. During my first few visits to the Chawlas, I thought they were suffering an almighty ongoing row and confided this to Chintu who doubled over laughing and said “Nahi yaar, that is how Punjabis talk only!”
We students would have our game away from the high rollers.
The puritan Methodist Church plays a large part in my family’s heritage and no matter how hard we tried, none of us could dance or play cards without bystanders thinking that we were suffering the onset of a terrible tropical disease. We were hopeless and my wildly optimistic drams of chucking college and becoming a professional gambler playing against the likes of streetwise Chintu came unstuck just before I signed my first IOU note.
Chintu may have had a truly sensitive protective instinct of condemned chickens but I soon found this did extend to his fellowmen. Diwali night in the streets and Rajouri Garden was to relive the Lebanese civil wall, on a bad night.
It is beyond description. India has not heard of occupational health and safety and her fireworks are not the effeminate ones of my youth.
Ferocious fireworks
They really should be stored in ammo dumps under armed guard.
Much to my delight, they do not have crackers; they have patakas.
These annually claim thousands of fingers and under our command made enormous holes in an aluminium billboards advertising VIP underpants.
Skyrockets were designed to be fired vertically but West Delhites find a well- intended horizontal launch very satisfactory and in the direction of a neighbour’s face infinitely more satisfying. Multiply that by a thousand neighbours, slash combatants, and you have some idea of the ferocity of the celebration.
The exhausting swing of my emotions from an instinct of self-preservation, fighting a strong impulse to dive head first in to the ditch, and the wonderfully liberating experience of firing kilos of gunpowder at young families.
In hindsight, I can see why Chintu is such a good survivor, although we nearly did not survive Diwali during the following years.
Chintu, naturally entrepreneurial, had heard on his amazing radar that people were making a small fortune in the Diwali fairs selling the new multinational soft drinks. Thick as thieves, we pulled resources and in no time, we were riding in a truck, the proud guardians of 1000 bottles of Pepsi.
Setting up our stall in Green Park mela, it did not take long to realise that we were in deep trouble. We had been duped into believing that we would have the monopoly and our prices plummeted from a level that would have seen the proceeds purchase a years supply of Old Monk from the Army Canteen to a level that would have seen a years supply of ruthless ridicule.
We had not even dented the skyscrapers of Pepsi crates, which formed a towering backdrop to our depressingly quiet stall. That night we barely slept as we nervously pondered how we were to sell more bottles and I had never slept on Pepsi crates before (because we could not risk any bottles being stolen).
It was a dangerous manoeuvre as we had not sold six crates and we were dangerously high off the ground.
Despite his deep reservations, Chintu listened to me and we made a clown’s face with holes for eyes and a mouth to charge punters an exorbitant fee to take a chance at throwing a ball through and claiming a Pepsi as a prize.
Clever decisions
This was reminiscent of my later business decisions. I clearly should have seen that establishing a game, where our fiscal survival depended on Indians not having any cricket skills, was not sound.
We got rid of a lot of Pepsi but it was next to free.
Cricket guns with seriously strong throwing arms consistently found their mark and in no time the hardboard clown, to their great delight, was firewood.
Then Chintu looked dangerously preoccupied, genius was in motion. As genius is just a slip away from madness, we found ourselves at a toyshop buying a miniature roulette table.
Incredibly we moved the supplies to Lajpat Nagar where we slept again on the crates and I have a very clear memory of wrapping myself up against the swarm of mosquitoes in a clothe street sign for woman’s unmentionables in Central Market and drifting off to the calls of the night watchman as he made his rounds around the market.
We were nervous. Chintu’s Chacha (uncle) had lent most of the money and he scared the living hell out of us.
Flying roulette
But Chintu had come through. The roulette table was the hit of the fair and we did not know where to put the bundles of cash that were being so enthusiastically thrown at us. Chintu had had the courage to give the wrong odds without our customers knowing any better.
We could see ourselves buying a bungalow in Vasant Vihaar in no time at all.
Then as I greedily looked down at the glorious piles of crumpled notes ready to sweep yet another avalanche into our moneybox I only just missed having all my fingers broken.
A lathi (truncheon) was brought down with such force on our table that the roulette wheel flew in to the air closely followed by 100 rupees notes and the grasping hands of their owners. A Jaat contestable who looked like a well made public building screamed a string of abuses that even Chintu, though having a wide open mouth and decidedly paler, could not help feel some admiration for its colourful delivery.
Trembling, Chintu said, “Bhaisahib, please come to the side and we can work this out.” The cop erupted, “Do you think I am dishonest cop?”
We all shook our heads no furiously.
“If I take money, I take it front of the people!” he said.
Roy Lange is a New Zealander with a passion for India. He lives with his family in Melbourne, Australia.
