Diwali Special – Lights and Metal! – {Ep.175.5} – Stories From India Podcast

I know we just did an episode yesterday, but it’s Diwali! Happy Diwali! And as a treat here’s a bonus mini episode featuring one of many explanations for the origin for some Diwali traditions.

Let’s start this story with a wedding! It was a royal wedding. Between a Prince and a Princess. No major economic divide or feuding families here. But if everything was 100% fine it wouldn’t be much of a story.

The problem arose the day after the wedding. I was visiting this new couple. It’s a regular habit with me. I think the day after the wedding is the best time to visit couples. That’s when you get to properly say hello, and not when you are rushed on and off stage just for the space of time it takes the wedding photographer to snap a picture of you with the happy couple. Oh I am getting confused here. Photographers weren’t invented yet. But yeah, the rest of the stuff was true.

So that morning, I had breakfast with the couple. Now I am also not very good at selecting wedding presents. So I just ask them and deliver the gifts later. That allows me to impinge on their hospitality a second time when I’m delivering the gift.

No such outcome this time however. The bride, let’s call her Dulhan, didn’t ask for anything material. She asked for knowledge. Specifically what the couple had to look forward to. Normally I politely decline such requests. Knowledge of the future changes the outcome and not in a good way. It leads to stress and anxiety. But in this case I could see that it was necessary to provide transparency.

I told Dulhan somberly that her new husband, whose name was Dulha by the way, would pass away on the 4th day after the wedding.

Hold on, timeout. That’s what you said would happen to Satyavan and Savitri in Episode 31. Are you getting your lines crossed?

But I assured her that there were some differences between her situation and Savitri’s which would all become apparent when we got to the show notes.

“4 days! That’s all the time we have left together?” She asked, still in shock. 

“Well no” I corrected her. “3 days is what you have left. I am counting from your wedding day which was yesterday”

That didn’t make it any more pleasant. But my thinking had been that in the little time they had left they might make the most of it. 

“We’ll at least tell me precisely when Yama will come for him and how”

I did. Yama, the God of Death, would arrive as a serpent and bite Dulha in the middle of the night when he was asleep.

And then she asked the question that invariably everyone asks whenever they hear a prediction of mine. Free will vs Fate

 Were my predictions guaranteed to happen or was there any room for changing the outcome.

I answered that honestly if I looked too hard to determine if this was a guaranteed outcome I might end up guaranteeing it. She understood and didn’t want to take the risk. No one does.

I left her advising her again to maximize the time she had left. She did, but not in the way I had meant. So Dulhan spent the next 2 days, not making memories but doing research. She spoke to about a dozen of the best herpetologists and several of the best interior decorators.

Now in case you don’t know- herpetologists are snake experts. Given Yama would be appearing as a snake this made sense. She was looking for a way to find some weakness she could exploit. The interior decorators were pulled into the discussions when she realized that Snakes really don’t prefer bright spaces. They are shy creatures preferring the night time and preferring the darkness of their homes, except when they are Yama in disguise trying to capture an unsuspecting Groom days after his wedding.

But anyway, the Snake’s preference for darkness caught Dulhan’s attention. And that’s where the interior decorators came in.

Dulhan described to them what she wanted. Maximum brightness. In her bedroom that night it should be brighter than daylight on a cloudless summer day. It should be like the Sun himself had stepped into the room.

“Then you could just ask the Sun to step into the room?”

“I tried. Even leaving aside the impropriety of having another man in my bedroom, Surya, the Sun God is on holiday. So that doesn’t work”

The interior decorators group suggested the next best thing. Lights. Lots of candles.

Dulhan shook her head “Not bright enough”

One apprentice interior decorator had been hesitant to speak, but she finally raised her hand and did so now. “You could amplify the light, by reflection”

Mirrors? No, metal! Lots of metal. Gold preferably, but other kinds were perfectly fine too.

So with a few hours remaining, Dulhan went about buying every bit of metal she could find. Her jewelry, the silverware, the dishes they ate out of.

As evening approached and Dulha entered the bedroom he protested that if Yama didn’t kill him he was certainly going to go blind here. The room was full of metal, of all kinds and candles strategically placed so as to cause maximum reflection. 

“At least I can put on an eye mask and sleep,” Dulha said.

“Sorry, no sleep for you tonight. Narada was very clear. Yama was going to bite you in your sleep. So if Yama does overcome all this brightness, he still can’t bite you if you aren’t sleeping. At least I hope so”

It was a good backup plan, but Dulhan needn’t have bothered. Her plan worked perfectly. Yama entered that night in the form of a Snake, but he was so confused and disoriented that he just spent the whole night in a small golden bowl in a place where he got some relief from the brightness. Snakes do not have eyelids, so he couldn’t just close his eyes either.

In the morning, when the appointed hour of Dulha’s death had passed, without any harm coming to Dulha, Yama decided to move on without his victim. He sighed and marked Dulha’s ticket with a “Revisit in 50 years” stamp, and that was that.

That’s all for now

Some notes on the show

So there are lots of parallels with the Satyavan and Savitri story, as Dulhan herself pointed out. But the difference is that Savitri technically brought Satyavan back past the point of theoretical no-return. Yama in this case appeared as a Snake to cause Death, and in Savitri’s case only appeared after Death had occurred, and had only come to collect his soul.

The story suggests the origin of a couple of traditions – the lighting of lamps, and the collection of metals. People buy metal on Dhanteras. It has just passed this time, so I am slightly late with this portion. But the tradition of lighting lamps is something people do on Diwali.

Also, check out this link to last year’s Diwali bonus episode providing an alternative explanation for the tradition of lighting lamps

In keeping with the tradition of this show, the names of the characters are derived from the roles they play. Dulhan and Dulha are Hindi words for bride and groom.

That’s all for now. 

Next Time

In the next episode, we’ll go back to our regular schedule with the story of Tilottama next weekend.