divya's deepavali

Divya lives next door, and once a year her whole house fills up with light.

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

And every year I watch it from the edge. I am the neighbour kid. I come for an hour, I get a sweet, I say thank you very much, and I go home, while the real day carries on 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 extremely useful."

Divya looked at me for a long time. Divya can look at you for a long time. It is her main way of saying no.

"Just come," she said. "You do not need a delegation. You need to take your slippers off at the door."

I brought the delegation anyway. That is who I am.

I brought Hana, who can carry anything and will hold it until you tell her to stop, even if you forget to tell her. 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 moment he heard the word sweets, carrying nothing for once, because for once he had come to receive.

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

"What is Hana holding," said Divya.

Hana was holding a cardboard box. I had told Hana to bring supplies, and Hana always does exactly what you say, so the box had in it three bottles of water, a torch, and a roll of tape, in case the celebration needed taping.

"Supplies," I said.

"It is Deepavali," said Divya. "Not a flood."

Divya's amma opened the door, looked at the line of us, and laughed. Not in a mean way. The way grown-ups laugh when children have organised themselves for no reason at all.

"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.

Divya's paati, which is her grandmother, was already halfway through it. She was kneeling on the step, laying down a red line with her thumb and one finger, calm as a person who has all the time there has ever been.

"Right," I said, crouching next to her. "What is the plan. Where do you want the team."

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

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

It was the wrong colour. It was far too much. It sat there in the middle of paati's careful pattern looking exactly as lost as I felt.

Paati did not tell me off. She brushed my pinch away with the side of her hand, gentle, like it had never happened, and went back to her thin certain line, the one she has been drawing since before my mother was born.

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

She pointed at a stack of small clay lamps. Then at the kitchen. Then she said one word I did not know.

"She says you carry the lamps," said Divya. "Do not drop them. They are not full yet."

A job. A real one. I stood up so fast I nearly took the door off its frame.

"Understood. Lamp logistics. I will need a team. Hana, you are on lamps. We set up a supply chain, kitchen to step, and we move them in an orderly "

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

I have never once done a small job without turning it into a large one. I could feel the large one starting already. A relay. A counting system. Hana at one end, me at the other, Kavi calling the numbers across the house.

So I picked up six lamps at the same time, to save trips, because saving trips is a kind of genius.

You cannot carry six empty clay lamps. I want that written down somewhere official. Six is too many. Six lamps want to go six different ways at once. By the time I reached the kitchen door they had started to leave my arms, one and then another, in a slow clatter. I did the dance you do. The one where you try to catch falling things with your chin and your knees and your hope.

Divya took four of them off me without a word. Paati, from the step, did not even look up. She held up two fingers.

"Two," said Divya. "Paati says two. One in each hand."

Hana appeared at my elbow with the roll of tape, ready, because Hana had been waiting all day for the celebration to need taping.

"Nobody needs taping, Hana."

"I will stand by," said Hana, and she stood by, holding the tape, the most prepared person at the whole of Deepavali.

So I carried the lamps two at a time, one in each hand, to the step and back. And the day kept letting me in anyway, with no chain, no team, no numbers, and nobody once saluting.

The rest of the delegation was getting taken apart, very gently, one by one.

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

Aiman tried to ask the price of a sweet. He got as far as "how much " before Divya's amma put a whole plate into his hands and walked off. Aiman sat there holding the plate, looking at it, waiting for the catch. There was no catch. The sweets were just a gift, and that was the part Aiman could not believe. You could see it on his face: first he was all confused, and then he was happy.

Ah Wei did the thing Ah Wei does, which is eat everything in front of him before anyone could blink. Except at Deepavali a boy who eats everything you put in front of him turns out to be a compliment, and Ah Wei is the most complimentary boy alive. Divya's amma loved him on sight. She kept finding him with a plate. She found him the way the makcik network finds things, before he even knew he was lost.

And Pei Pei, who does not talk, just helped. She stacked the banana leaves into a neat pile. She held the bowl steady for paati before paati had to ask. By the evening paati had decided Pei Pei was the only sensible one of us, and she was right, and I was only a little bit hurt about it.

The aunties and uncles kept arriving, more and more of them, names I did not have and faces I had never met. Some had driven up that morning from across the Causeway, from the Singapore side. They came in tired and creased from the jam and were fed before they had even sat down. In this house, if you have come a long way, they feed you straight away, the same as anybody who says they are hungry.

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

I sat on the floor between Divya and her paati and pressed the soft sweet stuff into little rounds the way they showed me. Divya's little brother, who is five, showed me how to do it properly, getting his perfect, then ate his, then showed me again. He was a better teacher than me at everything, and he was five. I got mine wrong. Then I got it a bit less wrong. Paati watched my hands and made a small sound that I decided was approval, because you are allowed to decide a thing like that in your own favour.

I did not try to run any of it. I did not start a single system. I just pressed the next one, and the next one, while the house filled up around us, the light coming in low and gold, the lamps lined up empty along the step, waiting for the dark.

When it got dark, they lit them.

Divya's appa lit the first one. Then everybody took a lamp and went along the step, and the little flames came up down the whole row, the next and the next and the next, all the way to the end.

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. She 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 and I put my lamp down exactly where she told me to.

Then Ah Wei reached for a sweet off the little tray by the door, the one that was not for eating. Three aunties said his name at the exact same time. The whole step laughed, and not one of the lamps even flickered. They were used to us now.