Jaipur – Happy Diwali

Hotel Abhinandan, 100 Rs

Today is Diwali, the most important Hindu celebration in India (pretty sure that Balinese Hindus not celebrating Diwali). I am alone in Jaipur, and my Malaysian friend said that she was going to come today. After being ramped in Delhi with lots of bureaucracy problems, somehow I lost any mood of travelling, and I was waiting for her to give me some fresh mind.

I spent the whole morning in the old city, seeing how the market started by preparing lots of sweets (and mind you, Indian sweets are really, really sweet, even for Javanese sweet standard). Some temples were crowded by the people. I tried to go to Internet cafe, and the electricity suddenly went down, maybe because of the festival, which kept me about 1 hour waiting in the cafe.

I met my Malaysian friend in the afternoon, as she suddenly came to the same hotel where I live. She said that she was invited by a rickshaw walla to go to their house to celebrate Diwali. She is always suspisicious towards Indians, maybe mind-setted already by the stories from other travellers, and today she decided to open a little bit her door. The rickshaw driver picked her up at 4.30 pm and said that only women could go (which aroused my friend’s suspiciousness again). The driver promised to deliver her back after two hours.

Meanwhile, I wsa waiting for her in my hotel, wishing that nothing wrong would happen. It is indeed very risky to just go with a rickshaw driver whom you never know before. The hotel staff chatted with me during this time, and they are indeed very friendly. It was really a good chance also for me to practise my Urdu, and he was amused by my vocabulary. We even listened to some Indonesian songs together. The hotel staff are
all Muslims, but they do celebrate Diwali and not doing fasting during Ramazan.

This year the puja time is from 7.52 – 8.08 pm (8 minutes before and after 8 o’clock), which is decided by the astrologers. People with business will do the puja according the time announced in newspaper if they want to have a prosperous year. My hotel staff is so friendly, that he tried to find someone I can celebrate Diwali with. And at last, his cousin came, and he asked this cousin to take me to a Hindu family to witness the puja. The roads were blocked, that we had to go around the old city to reach the family house, and by the time we arrived there the puja was almost finished. The muslim guy also did puja (quite interesting to see how people here mix Islam with Hindu ceremonies) and received tika blessing from the head of the family.

Diwali is also day of crackers, that almost everybody put firecrackers in their house ground, alley, and even main road. It does sound like gun fired in Baghdad, and the smells of gunpowder was everywhere. It is a dangerous time to go around, once I felt fire on my head when we passed an exploding firecrackers by motobike.

I went around the old city. The hotel staff returned back to the hotel after I insisted him that I would be OK (this is a special service from a hotel, isnt it?). The old city was crowded by thousands of people, with many shops selling sweets and some game stalls. Plus the heartbitting firecrackers. That’s all.

My Malaysian friend came back safe at the hotel. And there was really another intention of the rickshaw driver to invite her home.