Deepauli

Check out the pictures!

The Hindu festival of lights, known as Diwali in other parts of the country, started off with a bang and quieted down from there. We’re at the farm for this major holiday after spending Monday and Tuesday at the office. The neighbors, who welcome any opportunities to scare the monkeys out of their areca trees, are lighting off fireworks at seven in the morning. Time for me to get up anyway.
In the kitchen, Sunita is already lighting the fire under the geezer, or wood-fired hot water heater. This is always quite a task because it’s so damp here, even newspaper must be coaxed into burning. But winter is moving in, it’s a chilly, misty morning, and hot water feels extra nice on days like this. Besides, it’s part of the pooja, or Deepauli ritual, to have a thorough scrub before moving on to the day’s other activities.
We have our baths (this is the common term, although dumping cups of water over yourself from a bucket feels more like a slow-paced shower to me) and head up to Mangu and Savithri’s house. Mangu is Sunita’s farmhand and since they live just a couple hundred feet away, it makes sense to combine activities. Besides, our biogas burner is malfunctioning (Again. There’s always plenty of gas but the stove itself always manages to break down). Since the central focus of Deepauli is on a midday feast, not having a stove is a hindrance.
As I clumsily grate coconut on the floor of Savithri’s kitchen, using a special round knife mounted on a board, Sunita toasts cashews in ghee (clarified butter that is to Indians what chocolate is to us) for paisa. Paisa is a pudding made from milk, molasses, vermicilli (a thin spaghetti-like pasta), and dried fruit and nuts. After that, I peel the turmeric roots, staining my fingers yellow. Between the red mosquito bites dotting my hands, the product of my night at the office when I forgot my repellant, and the new yellow tinge, I’m beginning to look like an Easter egg. Savithri and Mangu run around making flower and leaf garlands for the cows.
Deepauli is a three-day festival, each day focused on a different aspect of celebrations and rituals. Yesterday was the shopkeeper’s day, and they all hung the garlands in their stores, hired live musicians, and did pooja in their shops. Today is cow day, and it happens to fall on the day Sunita and I usually stay home from the office (the bumpy commute more than two times a week is too much). Plus, we’re on a farm, and that’s a great excuse to celebrate her four cows, who keep us in ample supplies of milk, yogurt, butter, ghee, buttermilk, and paneer cheese.
Around 1 pm, we all assemble at the cowshed. Savihtri has dusted white rangoli patterns on the dirt outside, accented with flowers. Sunita lights incense cones and a small brass lamp. Chanting quietly, she hangs mango leaves and holy basil (both sacred plants) on a line above the door, and rubs red kumkum powder and yellow turmeric on either side of the entrance.
Then the cow pooja begins. First, Mangu goes in and rubs the red and yellow powders on the cows’ foreheads. They’re already wearing their flower garlands and looking quite pretty. However, I get the distinct impression that they’d rather be out grazing, even though they’re curious about all the attention they’re suddenly getting. “Maybe there’s food involved,” I can almost here them telling each other. After the powder comes more flowers placed in the cavity behind their heads (these cows are significantly bonier than any American variety, though not skinny). Then Mangu waves the brass lamp around their heads, bathes their feet in water, and douses them with fresh coconut milk. Savithri follows with more kumkum.
Then, much to the cows’ relief, comes the food. The other three haven’t eaten all day (I only lasted till 10), because the pooja requires first offering the food to the cows before eating yourself. From a silver tray, we hand them bananas, apples, and balls of sweets. Then Savithri brings out the lunch itself: full meals laid out on banana leaves. The first cow seems more interested in the leaf than the rice, chutney and other dishes on top of it, but the others politely lick up the people food before devouring the leaves.
After that, spurred by the delicious smells now wafting from the cowshed, we apply the kumkum to our own foreheads and head inside to eat.
While I was grating and peeling, Savithri had prepared a feast. One by one, she ladles out her concoctions on my leaf. Rice topped with sambar, a liquidy, spicy dish with large chunks of colocasia root (a hearty tuber). A dahl made from lentils. Fried papads, which resemble large potato chips but are made from rice flour. A steamed rice flour loaf called carbu sliced into thick round pieces, topped with ghee. Cucumber and coconut salad. And, finally, a delicious turmeric chutney, sweet and spicy and lightly coconut-y at the same time. Of course, for dessert there is paisa. All of the food and flavors are specific to this area – Karnataka’s cuisine varies from one village to the next due to both their isolation and the particular vegetables and grains that are grown there. Colocasia and turmeric, for example, are found in every garden, so it’s not coincidence that they’re considered vital to the local Deepauli feast.
Having sampled everything thoroughly (the chutney three or four times), I am barely able to roll myself back down the path to Sunita’s house. The only thing to do now is take a long nap in the afternoon heat.

Mushtaq, the driver, is scheduled to come at 4:00 to take us on a few Deepauli visits. A bit like trick-or-treaters, Indians on Deepauli go around and visit all their friends and neighbors, bringing snacks from home and receiving even more snacks at every house. There’s even a sort of costuming involved – tradition states that everyone should wear new clothes. In anticipation of this, I’d happily gone to a mall in Bangalore (a surreal experience after a month on a farm) and purchased a new skirt and blouse. Unfortunately, I’d had no clean clothes upon arriving back at Sunita’s after the Bangalore trip, and needed something nice to wear for a festival in Yellapur. So I busted out the new clothes, assuming that they would stay new enough for Deepauli. It turned out to be a particularly rough day not only because the blouse spontaneously decided to lose a couple of its buttons (luckily most sari-wearers have plenty of safety pins), but also with the unexpected challenges of some intestinal trouble, village boys attempting to take pictures of me with camera phones, and a couple of conversion-bent Hindu men.
Anyway, all this meant that (since I am a great procrastinator) I would need to cut my nap short to sew my buttons back on and make sure that this time, there would be no wardrobe malfunctions in front of traditional women dressed in their finest.
When all has been secured, Sunita and I walk up the road to meet Mushtaq at the gate, carrying a large stalk of bananas and a basket with apples, oranges and containers of leftover paisa (Sunita cooked enough for a hungry elephant).
The first stop is Manorama’s. She’s a very active member of Vanastree and also one of Sunita’s good friends. Although she doesn’t speak much English, I’ve found it impossible not to like her – she’s incredibly multi-talented, churning out dried bananas for sale, running a seed exchange group, managing her farm and home garden, and of course working in the Vanastree office a couple of days out of the week. Going back to her house always reminds me of my second day in India, when she’d shown up with her son, Vivek, at Sunita’s needing a photographer. She was taking a class in environmental journalism and they were asking her to provide pictures for a story she was writing on her dried banana business. With my new camera and new-intern enthusiasm, it seemed I was the person for the job. They squeezed me on to the back of the family motorcycle, which was pretty thrilling for me, considering it was probably my second or third motorcycle ride, ever, and of course the first with no helmet and two other passengers, whizzing down bumpy narrow roads in the jungle. At her house, Manorama introduced me to her daughter and made us dosas, the paper-thin rice flour pancakes dipped in molasses and ghee that I’ve come to consider probably the tastiest food in the country. Her dosas still stand out in my mind as the best, maybe just because they were the first, or maybe because I want to believe that the quality of the person determines the quality of the dosa.
I was delighted then, when Manorama ushered us into the kitchen for special Deepauli dosas, which include ground cucumber and colocasia in the batter. It was only after I’d automatically settled down on the floor and dug in with my fingers that I realized how far I’ve come – that first dosa meal, I was very confused as to why she was putting food on leaves on the floor in front of a polished wooden board with little legs. Luckily her daughter sat down on her board first and didn’t laugh when I said “Ohhhhhh...”
Manorama’s Deepauli dosas were also delicious, crisp and hot, although the lingering fullness from the afternoon meal kept me from having more than a couple. We finished off with chai and then said goodbye, begging off offers for more food.
The next stop is a woman named Ganga’s place. She lives four kilometers from the village, a distance she covers regularly by foot carrying her vegetables to sell at the market. She’s also a member of Vanastree, and one of the things they recently received funding for was installing a phone at her house, which adds some degree of convenience to her life. In return, she raises tree saplings and sells them to locals, although the land she’s using is ironically encroached forest land itself. Basically, this means the land is officially under the Karnataka Forest Department’s jurisdiction and meant as a tree preserve, although in practice the department is so involved in illegal logging operations it would be difficult to say they play any role in conservation. Of course, if you haven’t bribed your local official lately, they’re quick to jump down your throat as soon as you take down a tree that’s in your way. There’s a new law in congress now, the Forest Rights Act, that could make it easier to persecute encroachers like Ganga. Tribal-rights organizations and environmental groups are working to amend it it, saying the officials will only go after these smaller cases and ignore the bigger issues, such as government-approved hydroelectric dams that swallow up hundreds of acres of forests.
I have to duck to enter the doorway of Ganga’s small house. They don’t have electricity all the way out here, so it’s a bit cavelike inside. A dog is tied up by the window on the far side, distracting me long enough to miss seeing a man sitting on the floor to my left. Sunita introduces him as Ganga’s husband. He’d broken both his legs harvesting areca nuts from the tall, pole-like trees a few months ago. A traditional Ayurvedic bone setter in the village set his legs, and he’s now able to walk around, but must find new employment.
Ganga sits us down and puts the red kumkum powder on our foreheads. Then she and Sunita begin discussing in Kannada an upcoming student workshop we’re hosting, and I tune out to take in the view visible through the side doorway. The house is on a hillside and most of it has been cleared, allowing for expansive views of the valley below, only obstructed by a single pair of red underpants hanging on the line in the yard. The sun is just beginning to set behind the leafy, crooked-branched trees. Despite the day-to-day difficulties, I get the feeling that life is fairly peaceful out here.
We’re spared from having to stuff in more Deepauli treats, because Ganga has actually listened to our protestations and packed us a little to-go bag of food. We break off Mushtaq’s conversation with Ganga’s son and climb back in the van. Heading back into the village, we note that most houses have lights on and have a mini celebration – we’ve been experiencing scheduled power cuts every evening for the past week. Apparently this is a little festival-of-lights gift from the electric authorities.
The third visit is at Radhka’s, who I spent a weekend with earlier this month. Compared to Ganga, she’s very well off, with a large, well-lit house near the village. But she’s also another person I really like – easy to laugh, pleasantly plump, and a devout Hindu. She explains to us the story of Deepauli, and Sunita translates: Essentially, Deepauli is the celebration of the triumph of good over evil. Legend has it that the lord Vishnu, the destroyer, had banished the good demon Bali to the underworld by stepping on his head. On the third day of Deepauli (which is today) Bali makes his triumphant return, restoring balance to the world.
Radhka gives us more blessings and powder, and then we’re off to our last stop, the house of a couple I’ve met only briefly before. It’s completely dark now, and the stars are out in full force. In fact, the sky is thick with them, to the point where it seems more silver than black. Those lights are reflected in the pathway leading up to the house we’re visiting, where they’ve placed oil lamps (small dishes filled with oil and a wick) along the edges. The fancy rangoli pattern is also surrounded by candles. The orangey glow of the lights reminds me a bit of Halloween, and I realized my recent sadness at missing this holiday at home was premature – we’ve practically recreated it here.
After a short visit and some more snacks (deep-fried bananas, very good), we head for home. It’s time to light our own lamps.
Deepauli lamps are more than a representation of the good that is supposed to prevail around this time; they are also lit in reverence to the people you’re thinking of and wish could be celebrating the holiday with you. Sunita, who’s a transplant from Bangalore with many friends too busy to come visit, has a lot of lamps to light. After nearly two months away from home, so do I. One by one, we add tiny flames to her porch, until it looks like a cruise ship at night. The last lamp is set on the holy basil shrine at the edge of the small lawn. We sit on the porch for a long time, listening to the chorus of cicadas and frogs, eating fruit and thinking our own thoughts. Then the lights all start blurring into blob of sleepiness and I know it’s time for bed.