Chota Diwali!

Delhi is today recovering from last night's Diwali celebrations, a culmination of a five day festival which is of equivalent importance to Hindus as Christmas is to Christians.
We were lucky enough to be invited to spend the evening with Reema, a friend of Andy's who lives in Delhi. She and her husband Ani were hosting her mother, who is from Kerala and had many interesting stories of Keralan tradition. Diwali is also known as the Festival Of Light as traditionally on the fifth day of Diwali the God Rama returns to the house after his period of exile. Many candles and lamps are lit to light his way home and traditionally all the lights in the house must be left on.
After lighting many candles and placing them on Reema's balcony we set off to her friend's apartment to observe her and her mother performing "puja", a Hindu holy ritual. All the apartments were lit up with candles and fairy lights, and it looked very like Christmas - some of the strings of lights were musical (this annoying habit seems to have caught on in India as well!) and so we were serenaded by "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" and other Christmas ditties.
At the apartment a table was set up with patterns of footprints decorating it in different colour powder. These footprints are to herald the Goddess Lakshmi, the goddess of fortune who may also be welcomed into the house. The puja was performed in front of a small altar (placed on top of the fridge to save space!) which had small statues of Ganesh and other personal gods and goddesses, marigold flowers and candles on it. Reema and her friend helped her mother with the chanting - the atmosphere was somewhat lightened by their giggling when they realised a page was missing of the chant and they couldn't remember the words...! The mother carried on regardless, taking a candle and circling it around the altar three times, then passing it on to us to do the same. Afterwards rice and flowers were scattered over the altar and around the house, and each person given a red mark on their foreheads with rice stuck to it as a blessing.
After sharing some of their delicious home made sweets (the giving of sweets has become part of the tradition) we moved on with Reema, her mother and Ani to another friend's, Aratna's, house. There we had some wine and food and chatted about the festival and the various regional difference in how it is celebrated, among other things. This was in between huge explosions which seemed to rock the entire apartment building - I have never seen so many fireworks in my life. Fireworks have become perhaps the most popular part of Diwali and as you can perhaps imagine, health and safety simply doesn't come into it. Small children were hanging around the streets and apartment car parks with enormous rockets and firecrackers, lighting them, throwing them, going back to them to see if they were lit properly.... We could hardly watch at times, convinced there was going to be an horrific injury. The fireworks continued over the entire city without a lull from late afternoon right up to about midnight. By the time we moved from Aratna's to Reema's apartment around 11pm the car parks were littered with spent fireworks which we crunched through . Several times we had to stop the car as a rocket was about to go off right in the middle of the road, and they were being lit within a couple of feet of cars, houses and crowds of people, it was unbelievable - the scene looked like something from Bloody Sunday. Aratna's take was thus; "there is no health and safety in India. There are so many of us that no-one cares if a few are killed...." By the end of the night a thick smoke hung over the entire city and the temperature actually rises a couple of degrees due to the amount of fireworks lit.
Today, finally, all is quiet - hours of sudden explosions have definitely taken their toll on our nerves which were starting to become very frayed at times last night. We have had a slow morning to recover, regrouping just enough to get going again tonight, this time on the overnight train to Amritsar....