Shop Therapy

© 𝕾𝖆𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖍 𝕮𝖍𝖆𝖓𝖉𝖗𝖆

(originally posted Diwali 2021, following a WhatsCrapp forward advising people to shop for Diwali at the right places, you know, whose owners worship the right deities)

Dang! No wonder my childhood Diwali memories are more traumatic than dramatic, we only partly followed such... bigoted sage advice from WhatsCrapp U.

Let's see... my leaky mind isn't the best recalling the details but, at the risk of friends trolling me about Sr Carmella like memories, here goes...

Besides the idols of Ganesh & Lakshmi, and some puja samagri items, which were not high on my Diwali shopping list... this is what I recall.

Our new clothes stitched were at a tailor shop we called Khan darjee dukan. The main Khan bro had his glasses hanging from from a string around his neck, a measuring tape snaking around various parts of my body, chalk smeared fingers flying all over, gesturing furiously, talking to my parents. He never actually put his glasses on so am not sure of accuracy of the measurements. He shouted vague numbers to a sullen apprentice who muttered his responses and scribbled something down in a tattered potha. The clothes we got were tailor made for sure, but never stylish and didn't fit well. Parents firmly believed in getting larger sizes because... he will grow into it, of course. All the grief because, now I know, inappropriate Diwali shopping preferences.

The patakha's, tumris, phuljhari, rockets, azgars, etc. the high priority items on my list were procured from this thin, bearded Usman kaka who appreciated Lakshmi but did not worship... we agonized for hours at his stall, trying to get the most from the few rupees (not even double digits). No wonder half his stuff fizzled, not sizzled... sputtered rather than soared. No bang for the buck there. That heathen, non-Diwali worshipper clearly swindled us. 

My worst memory is saving few paisa's at a time till I had enough money to buy the little metallic black shooter from the stall right outside Durga Bari, you know what I am talking about, the one with revolving red charkhi with those little black dots that one put inside the shooter. It went BANG each time one pulled the trigger and the next black dot was ready to go, propped up by a spring-loaded mechanism. There were three sizes of the shooter, the smallest is what I could afford with my savings. The larger ones went for like Rs 2.50 and 4:00 and were out of reach. Disapproval but not denial by parents and I was the happy owner of one shiny such contraption. Added a couple of reels of the red black dotted charkhi ammunition to my arsenal. The next day, while brandishing the shooter triumphantly in front of my group of friends, I dropped it on a hard concrete floor. After a couple of bounces it disgorged its innards. A specific pin and spring mechanism saw the sunshine that it wasn't supposed to see. I could never make that shooter functional again. Pretty sure now that the vendor was a non-worshipper. 

It also set me forward on the path to hell... that of becoming a techie.

All because I did not shop at the proper outlets at Diwali.

 

© 𝕾𝖆𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖍 𝕮𝖍𝖆𝖓𝖉𝖗𝖆