divya's deepavali

Divya is my best friend and she lives next door, and once a year her whole house fills up with light.

I have watched it happen my whole life. The little lamps come out and go along the step. The doorway gets a pattern made of coloured powder, laid down a pinch at a time. There are sweets I do not know the names of and cannot stop thinking about for the rest of the year. New clothes. Everybody barefoot. The whole house smells of warm ghee and flowers.

And every year I have watched it from the edge. I am the neighbour kid. I come for an hour, I get given a sweet, I say thank you very much, and I go home, while the real day keeps going without me.

This year I had decided I was going all the way in.

"I am bringing a delegation," I told Divya.

"A what?"

"A cultural delegation. To help. Properly. We will be very useful."

Divya looked at me for a long time. "Just come," she said. "You don't need a delegation. You need to take your slippers off at the door."

But I brought the delegation anyway, because that is who I am.

I brought Hana, who can carry anything and will hold it until told to stop. I brought Aiman, in case there was a budget. I brought Kavi. I brought Pei Pei, who does not talk, which turned out to be the best decision I made all day. And Ah Wei came on his own the second he heard the word sweets, carrying nothing for once, because for once he had come to receive.

We arrived in a line. I had us in a line. I thought a line looked official.

Divya's amma opened the door and looked at the line of us and laughed, not unkindly, the way grown-ups laugh when children have organised themselves for no reason.

"Masuk, masuk," she said. Come in, come in. And then, because she knows me, "Slippers."

The first thing I tried to take command of was the pattern at the door.

I crouched down next to Divya's paati, who is Divya's grandmother, and who was already halfway through laying the pattern with her thumb and one finger, calm as anything.

"Right," I said. "What is the plan. Where do you want the team."

Paati did not answer in any language I had. She just looked at me, then looked at the small bowl of red powder, then looked at my hand.

I took a big confident pinch and put it down where I was sure it should go.

It was the wrong colour, and it was far too much, and it sat there in the middle of paati's careful pattern looking exactly as lost as I was. Because here is the truth. I did not know the steps. I had never known the steps. I had just always assumed I would pick them up by being confident, which is the same way I have ruined a great many things.

Nobody told me off. Paati just brushed my pinch gently away with the side of her hand, like it had never happened, and went on with her thin certain line, the one she has been drawing since before my mother was born.

She did not need my help. But she did not send me away either.

Instead she pointed at a stack of small clay lamps, and then at the kitchen, and she said one word I did not know, and Divya translated.

"She says you carry the lamps. Don't drop them. They're not full yet."

A job. A real one. I straightened up so fast I nearly took the door with me.

"Understood," I said. "Lamp logistics. I will need a team. Hana, you are on lamps. We will establish a supply chain. We will move the lamps from the kitchen to the step in an orderly "

"You carry the lamps," said Divya. "That's the whole job. There's no chain. Can you do a small job?"

I have never in my life done a small job without quietly turning it into a large one. But I looked at Divya. New clothes, her own house, the one day of the year that is the most hers. And for once I did not argue. I just carried the lamps.

One at a time. Carefully. To the step and back. And the day kept including me anyway, with no chain, no team, no objective at all.

The delegation, meanwhile, was being folded into the house one by one, whether it liked it or not.

Kavi found out that you cannot be Kavi indoors at Deepavali. He came in at full volume and Divya's appa put a hand on his shoulder, gentle, and Kavi's volume just went out of him like air out of a balloon with a slow leak. By the afternoon Kavi was sitting on the floor with Divya's little brother, stacking sweets into a tower and whispering. Kavi. Whispering. I did not know it was a thing he could physically do.

Aiman tried to ask the price of a sweet. He got as far as "how much " before Divya's amma put a whole plate in his hands and walked away. Aiman sat holding the plate, looking at it. There was no price. The price was that there was no price. I watched it break something in him in a good way.

Ah Wei did what Ah Wei does, which is eat the evidence, except at Deepavali a kid eating everything you put in front of him is apparently a compliment, and Ah Wei is the most complimentary person alive.

And Pei Pei, who does not talk, just quietly helped. She folded the banana leaves into a neat stack. She held the bowl steady for paati without being asked. By the end paati had decided Pei Pei was the only sensible one of us, and she was right, and I was not even hurt about it. Much.

In the late afternoon they sat me down to help press the sweets.

I sat on the floor between Divya and her paati, pressing the soft sweet stuff into little rounds the way they showed me, getting it a bit wrong and then a bit less wrong, while the house filled up around us. Aunties and uncles I had never met. The light coming in low. The lamps lined up empty on the step, waiting for the dark.

I had been a guest in this house every Deepavali of my life. Today they gave me a small job and sat me down in the middle of it. I had been trying to do this backwards for years, with a delegation and a supply chain, when the whole time the way in was to be handed one small thing and just do it.

So I kept pressing the next sweet, and I did not try to run a single thing, and that was the best I have ever been at anything.

When it got dark, they lit the lamps.

Divya's appa lit the first one, and then everyone took a lamp and went along the step, and the little flames went on, one, one, one, all the way down. Paati handed me one. Not the first. Not an important one. Just the next one in the row.

"Where," I started to ask, "should "

"Here," said Divya, and pointed at the spot, right next to hers. "Just here. Next to mine."

So I knelt down in the row of light, next to my best friend, on the day that is the most hers, and I put my lamp down exactly where she told me to.

It was the best job I have ever had.