Any festival small or big is observed and enjoyed the most in villages. Since the villages are small in size and the houses are adjacent to other anything is done in one corner of the villages is spread to all over the village within no time – no social networks, no internet that time only the word of mouth which even now plays an important part if spreading the news. Particularly in villages since almost all the villagers are farmers, labourers when they come back from the fields they sit at a place where all sit and chat. This one will find in all streets of the village.
When it comes to festivals people may be poor or rich all keep savings for each festival to buy new clothes and other household items in advance for the festivals.
Deepavali (people also call Diwali) is the festival of lights and people use crackers etc. Since that time no electricity and you will find all the houses are illuminated with lights (Deepas – a small earthern cup filled with oil which will have a wick which is lit and as long as the oil is there the lights glows hence people try and fill them up when they see the oil is coming to an end.
During the Deepavali day people take bath early in the morning and wear clothes and perform Pujas. In the evening the houses are decoraged with lamps depending on the capacity each household lit as many lights as they can afford to. We also use Castor oil branch and take out the leaves in between and keep the only branch – most of us keep five and each of them are covered with cotton wicks and they are lit and each individual in the family lit these and the other side of the branch is put inside clay and put near the Goddess photo. We also prepare pita – sweet and hot dishes are made to offer to God and once the puja is over that is distributed to family members as Prasad. Many fruits are used and particularly custard apple, sugarcane pieces,ragi cakes and so on. Once the puja is over and all the people in the village start lighting crackers, bombs, rackets etc. which last for one or two hours.
Now a days the crackers are available in the market and people go and buy whatever their choice of crackers. However, during those days, very limited options were there. And particularly in villages, the villagers used to make the crackers on their own. This is done not only in our village but also neighbouring villages. In my house i used to sit with my brothers to prepare these crackers which are prepared a week in advance as they have to keep in Sun for drying up. We buy the chemicals from Salur town which is about 4 kms from my villages. In Salur there are one or two big shops where they used to sell the materials. For each type of cracker, there is different combination of chemical powders are used. We used to do these on our own in the villages. This will cost less and you can do the combination as per your wish. i.e. for rackets to go high and to make noise different quantity of different mix is used. In villages we used to prepare Sisindhri (a smal finger size cone) – for this we used to prepare the cones using glazing old papers and i still remember that time in our house we used to Russian magazines free of cost and those magazines used to have very cozy and strong papers and we used to cut them into small square sheets and roll them as a cone and put paste at the end and dry them in the sun. As we all know that people used to do some new things. Though i was very young i used to observe how my brothers and others in the neighbouring houses used to prepare these crackers etc. For Sisindhri (a sort of racket but with small quantity of mix but its very powerful and as soon as you lit it goes around and at times it may hit people. We used to keep this mix (for this we used to prepared charcol powder using particularly of the light wood) and mix with the other powders like potash, gandhak etc. So, once this mix is prepared we used to keep in front of us and fill this powder with the mix for this we need to prepare different wooden tools to ensure the mix is going inside the cone and tight as when it is tight and wehn you lit the power will be more. After filling the cones we close the other end (these looks like Bidis). We have been doing this for some time. However, something new i wanted to do and we used to get reels which makes little noice when you put inside the toy guns. I want to see if these reel point if we keep inside the Sisindhri and cover it – when we lit it will go around and also make a noise. So i started filling the powder keeping this reel piece inside. As i said if you keep the powder tight they will go higher and faster so what i did was to press it as hard as possible. Since the reel is very small and cannot keep the pressure suddenly it bursted and flame came and since the sisindhri cone also has powder a big flame came out and suddenly fell the whole mix in front of me so you can understand how big the flame must be and that too we were doing this in a closed room. My right side face burnt became black. You can understand how dangerous was the situation. You cant control the pain as the fire is not normal and the mix is having all sort of chemicals and powders – so i never expected my face will be come normal in my life. So i had to bear the pain and with treatment after a week or two slowly slowly the wound recovered. In spite of this we did celebrate the Diwali that year. The below image is a sort but the Sisindhris looks like a cone.
So, it is very important that we should not do experiments with these fire hazard things and even now you will find these are prepared in rural places and sell them in the market. Also it is important to be with children during Deepavali festival and they lit the crackers etc.