Every year, the light gets brighter and the air gets heavier. The sound of joy is indistinguishable from war. Maybe celebration has always been a method of forgetting — and forgetting, a necessity.
You can only forget in comfort. Forgetting is a privilege of the well-fed, the well-lit. For the rest, memory is survival. When you light a diya, do you see more clearly? Do you see who inhales, who eats, who smiles?
Light helps us see, but too much light blinds us, glaring into our heads, making comprehension impossible. This kind of blindness doesn’t free us the way darkness does, where our other senses take over and we can feel our way out. Blinding light overwhelms the body. It saturates, insists, paralyses.
They say light conquers darkness. They never say what happens to the creatures that live by night. Moths, owls, lovers, labourers, all seared out of frame. The bright ones get to write the mythology; the dim ones get to live in it.
Light is the easiest metaphor. Too easy. So it keeps winning. However, brightness has never been neutral: it has long been the language of purity, surveillance, caste, cleanliness. We’ve been taught to trust what glows. Glaring, blinding light is a kind of violence disguised as virtue — meant to disorient, to exhaust, to make us forget how to perceive. Under its glare, we lose nuance, depth, discernment. We fall back on the crudest instincts: flight, fight, conformity. And we all know what we are capable of when survival becomes the only method of being.
Festivals are meant to return us to something sacred — a story, a beginning, a homecoming. But lately, everything feels like a reenactment of conquest. The crackers, the queues, the shopping, the parties, the selfies — brightness made to blur vision. The myth of Diwali says good triumphs over evil; the air says otherwise.
What if we decided to be happy without witnesses?
There’s always one kind of noise that wins. The sound of crackers, of conquest, of proving that you exist louder than someone else (who is perhaps silent). Noise is our new form of prayer — volume mistaken for devotion.
There are hundreds of Ramayanas — more than three hundred scattered across South and Southeast Asia — each singing its own truth. In some, Sita refuses to return. In others, Ram never leaves. In yet another, Ravana is not the villain but the misunderstood devotee.
The one I was taught has only ever known how to burn.
There are hundreds of Ramayanas, yes — But only one version ever gets televised. Only one is taught as gospel, retold in classrooms, stamped on calendars, weaponised in politics.
The rest survive in whispers, in theatre troupes and folk songs, in tattoos, scrolls, feminist rewritings, translations that smell of other geographies.
What does it say about a civilisation that calls multiplicity blasphemy, and uniformity tradition? That names one story divine and the others deviations?
Adults like to think of children as simple, incapable of holding complexity or contradiction, so they make up stories that begin with once upon a time and end with happily ever after. But children hardly care about either. They have questions about the middle — about the why, the who, the why not. Answers adults forgot to gather.
Maharadia Lawana — The Immortal One Who Wouldn’t Die
(From the Maranao people of Mindanao, Philippines)
In the southern islands of the Philippines, the Ramayana drifts across the sea and learns a new accent.
Here, the story is sung in okir-patterned rhythms by the Maranao around Lake Lanao. The hero is Maharadia Lawana, the radiant, many-headed ruler whose power is both blessing and curse. Lawana cannot die. No arrow, spell, or god can end him. So the epic becomes about persistence. Victory is neither pursuit nor climax. It is a story about what happens when good and evil refuse to tidy themselves into winners and losers.
The monkey armies march; the sky trembles; nothing concludes. Lawana survives, the world resets, and the song begins again.
When American and Filipino researchers first transcribed it in the 1960s, they realised the poem had completely localised itself: Indian gods had melted into Maranao spirits, the geography shifted to familiar lakes and volcanoes, and the moral lines blurred beyond recognition. But that reading is itself colonial: a lens that expects an ‘original’ and a copy. What if we don’t look at it as a rendition of what is the familiar Ramayana but a tale of its own? Difficult to fathom, harder to read.
We know only to read as adaptation once we have been primed by the idea of an ‘original’. What if we look at this as possession — like the story had entered another body.
The Maharadia Lawana reminds us that myths don’t travel intact. They breathe in new air, and the lungs they fill change their sound, with each breath the symphony comes alive in different cadences, still familiar but just as mesmerising and intoxicating.
If the Indian Ramayana ends with a coronation, the Maranao one ends with ambiguity. The hero still stands, the world continues in negotiation.
Stories are how we teach children about the world: what is right and wrong, safe and dangerous, good and evil. But stories are also how we teach them to dream, to imagine, to understand themselves — to see themselves in protagonists and their accomplices. I’ve always suspected it’s the adults who are simple: wilfully attached to binaries so they never have to sit with the complexity of the truths they hold so dear. Perhaps they fear that if they do, their truths might fall apart.
But what’s wrong with that?
What if the falling apart is the point?
What if we could reassemble the pieces into other truths — each assembly more stable than the last, less concerned with how high it rises, more with how steadily it stands?
Maybe the hater is just the one who refuses hypnosis. Who sees the machinery behind the shimmer. Who won’t clap at fireworks because she knows where the smoke settles.
Maybe that’s all celebration was ever meant to be — a method of rebuilding from broken stories, over and over again. No gleaming pinnacle, or phallic tower in vision, but to find steadier ground. Perhaps joy was never about rising higher, but about standing together without spectacle, smoke, noise, or ‘reveal’.
Maybe what we need now is not more light, but a way to temper it — to return to a glow that lets us sense and see; contour, texture, shadow, sound, safety.
We keep asserting “light wins,” but it never does. It expands until it collapses under its own glare. The hater knows this. She waits for the flicker, the blackout, the brief mercy of dark.
Because celebration, if it is to mean anything, must belong to everyone — not just to the ones who can afford abundance or visibility. It must reach the people who keep our worlds running quietly: the worker, the cleaner, the courier, the vendor, the animal on the street, the tree outside the window, the air itself struggling to breathe and yet keeping us alive.
Adbhuta Ramayana — When Sita Became the Goddess of Death
(A Sanskrit variant, “The Wondrous Ramayana”)
The Adbhuta Ramayana begins where most tellings end. Rama has already defeated Ravana, Ayodhya glitters, and peace should reign — but Valmiki, the poet-seer, senses that the story isn’t finished. Something essential has been left unsaid.
Then appears Ravana’s older brother, Mahiravana — a demon so powerful that even Rama falters. In the chaos, Sita steps forward, no longer the trembling wife (I doubt she can ever be that) but an incarnation of Mahakali herself: dark-skinned, wild-haired, garlanded with skulls.
She multiplies, roars, and destroys the demon with the ferocity of creation unbound. When she calms, the universe exhales.
In this “wondrous” Ramayana, light depends on darkness for its very existence. Sita, far from being a passive recipient or idol of virtue, is instead the engine of cosmic balance, rage, destruction, terror, et al. Here, divinity is less triumph over chaos, more power containing it all, ensuring it doesn’t go awry.
The text is brief, fragmented, and rarely told aloud. Perhaps because it unsettles everything the mainstream Ramayana assures us: that good is masculine, that virtue is gentle, that women (must) endure rather than annihilate.
The Adbhuta Ramayana whispers another possibility; that salvation sometimes needs a scream.
Maybe this Diwali, the only light worth tending is the kind that lets us see one another again.
Thanks for reading a hater* in method.
I am, your servant in fury,
You may say I’m a hater (I am), but I am not the only one.
To hate, perhaps, is to love fiercely — to demand better, to break from the stupor of helplessness; love that hurts at first.