Happy Diwali!

Very Happy Diwali everyone!

Of all the world's festivals, this would have to be my favourite.

Diwali in Fiji is always HUGE. Truly a multiracial event because everyone gets into it, mainly because the lights are so pretty and even the poorest folk are able to do something spectacular, and also because the food is so totally yummy.

Hey, you remember our old trick for "The Festival of Light"? Sure, rich Indians would go all out with the Christmas lights and all, but we used to copy the poor people because we always liked that better: just get brown paper bags, fill the bottom with sand and stick a candle inside? Place them all along the driveway. Looks spectacular.

Or that other one where we'd put four sticks in the ground and wrap it with all different coloured crepe paper and stick a candle in the middle, and line the roads with 'em. Looked amazing.

And the Fijians always make all these bamboo cannons and the whole night reverberates with the booms! Yeah, and the Fijians throw water and flour on everyone passing, and you really have to get it off immediately or it sticks like glue, which is really is, and it's virtually impossible to get off.

And there was always the huge temple action. Remember all those miles of beggars sitting in the gutters around the temple and hordes of rich would walk along the line with massive bags of coins and drop a few in each begging bowl or outstretched hand. Oh yeah, and you remember that year ... we were in Suva for the day and the kids went missing so the mad hunt was on and ... well, passing Fijians, who we didn't even know but who absolutely knew what we were looking for, kept pointing our way up the hill to the temple ... and there they were, instant eye-magnets with their blond hair, sitting in the gutters along with the beggars, hands out, accepting the Hindu annual charity. We didn't want to cause a scene so it was all instant disavowing and disowning and pretending we'd never seen these little rats before in our lives, and when we finally got them away it was all "But they were handing out free money!" We made them give everything to the beggars and, boy, did we have a lot of explaining about how the world works to do!

Fun, fun times!

Oh, and I'll tell you a funny story that's only vaguely related to this. In Australia, decades back, one Diwali, I had a real hunger for Fiji-style "parcel curry-roti" and hunted high and low for 'sharps' to make the roti, and I couldn't find any anywhere, until finally I got a small packet in an Asian supermarket. But then, next time we were back in Fiji, I noticed all the Indians making roti with flour. "Why do you use flour these days instead of sharps?" I asked.

"Because back then we were so poor we couldn't afford flour, and sharps is simply the waste product from flour, so we used that instead. These days, we can afford real flour, so that what we now use."

I always thought sharps was some really exotic Indian grain! Mmmm, silly me, huh!