Diwali festival in Pushkar

Diwali is the Hindu festival of light. It is a 5-day festival celebrated some time between mid-October to mid November according to the Hindu calendar. The illumination of homes and the lighting of the skies with fireworks is an expression of deferential respect to the heavens for the attainment of health, wealth, knowledge, peace and prosperity. Hindus clean their homes and light candles day and night, both inside and outside their homes, in a welcoming gesture to the Gods. It is really pretty seeing everything lit up.



Holi is a different Indian festival and is the festival of colour, where people celebrate wildly by throwing coloured powder over one another. Although Diwali is the festival of lights and not colour, it doesn't stop the powder sellers getting out their wares. It's really just any old excuse to have a party and behave like children!

Diwali festival is the peak time for selling and buying sugar cane. It is used for making sweets and as an offering to the gods.

Taking home the sugar cane.

The fireworks are just crazy day and night. It's really scarey seeing young children lighting fireworks and then, when they don't go off, going straight back to the firework, leaning right over it and trying to re-light it. Bad enough with any firework, but with an Indian made one?

We headed back to the Sai Baba guest house to celebrate with Fatu and others. That day we had gone to the local town of Ajmer about 15kms from Pushkar to eat some meat and buy some alcohol for the celebrations. When we got to Sai Baba the whole courtyard was shin deep in water and the staff were all trying in vain to mop it up. There was also a waterfall falling from the top floor right outside our room door. Fatu came up to us laughing and told us the torrent of water was coming out of our room and had been for several hours. I remembered that in the morning I had turned on the shower and there was no water. I also turned on the bathroom taps to see if they had water and obviously I hadn't turned any of them back off before we went out. Hence when the water did come back on it overflowed and started pouring out of our room. As we always use our own heavy duty padlock to lock our room door there was no way the staff could get into our room. I apologised profusely but Fatu just shrugged and said 'it needed cleaned anyway'.

We had a great night of Diwali festivities on the roof of the guest house. There were too many boxes of fireworks to count. Fatu was mental, putting fireworks into beer bottles, which he was holding in his hand, and shooting them into the sky or firing them across the floor of the roof amongst hoots of screaming and laughter. It was amazing no one was injured.

The following morning I woke up feeling very ill - headache, photophobia, vomiting and fever and chills. Colin was convinced I had a hangover but I knew it wasn't that simple. By evening I was getting a lot worse, so we had to go to the local medical centre as we don't take anti-malarial tablets so the worsening symptoms were a bit concerning. Turns out I had dengue fever. I didn't want to go to the main hospital in Ajmer as I had Dr Colin to look after me. The doctor wanted to give me IV fluids in the medical centre and an anti-sickness injection. I refused and said I would be fine when I got back to the room. One step out of the medical centre and I was vomiting over the street, so it was back in for that anti-sickness injection.

In hindsight we shouldn't have gone to Ajmer to stuff our faces with meat, brought whiskey back to a Holy Town and flooded the haveli - and especially on Dawali. It was bad karma!