Deepavali Ladaai

From August to January or February is kaluvapoola season for Bandar and it is quite customary for it"s denizens, on every festival day that comes in between, to wake up to the calls of the cycled hawkers , pedalling along the streets at 5"o" clock it self, singing "kalepoolu, kalepoolu"....well....almost singing...... Though on Vinayaka Chavithi these flowers are mandatory, people do tend to buy them other days as well.....So,..one gets up at the ungodly hour and peers out of the windows at the sky to ascertain how the weather is faring......For diwali time is always a stormy season for the east coast and many times it plays spoil sport.....throwing cold water on the celebrations literally......Ofcource, Bandar darkly remembers how it"s blackest day happens to be on Deepavali....Well....one wonders how the sea could have tided on an amavasya.....Thank heavens the storm was not timed on a full moon day....

In our childhood, elders tended to gather the kids around them to tell us about the stories of the famous Bandar Ladaai...I suspect they themselves had never seen it and got it from their own peers as a legend....But it used to be a mighty pleasing one to hear... In days of yore , it was said that all of our enterprising residents of Bandar used to swarm on to the Koneru center,...formed two battle camps ,..lined up as if they were the gladiators and yodhas from the distant past of Mahabharatha or Ramayan and hurled fiery missiles at each other.....like aagneyastrams and vaarunastrams.....to prove their battling skills and decide the important question of which camp was superior, i suppose....





It was actually not a real battle, my dad would assure us, the frightened kids....Ofcource the intent was not to hurt, just sport.....Both the parties fired up tharajuvvalu, thuutalu, pichikalu, tankaalu...just to see which one of them burned more of the pataasu.....and whose rockets went farther up the sky......Just like the periodic wars India and Pakistan...or for that matter Americans, rig up when their respective commanders inspect their arsenals and found them too packed with overflowing weapons or in need of updating....Then they convene a meeting, decide on an auspicious day by mutual agreement, go wage war, fire up all the obsolete ammunition,...and sit down leisurely to estimate on how many vacancies now have got to be filled up and go shopping for some latest arms.....,Well......I knew my dad was a glib talker....and not all his words are to be taken seriously....But i did hear of this ladaai from other non-Bandareans too.....


Nowadays i find that the crackers have gone through a metamorphosis.....The earthenpot chichubuddis that we fired in our childhood are coming in measly paper backed containers...They do not last too long and go out as fast as the careers of new film heroines....You thought they reached peak too quickly and died down too soon.....As kids we used to have a lot of day long entertainment with ..Vullipayalu...or onions if you wish for a translation....you hurl them at the floor and they explode with a mighty bang....you do not see them anymore....Then there were ..nelatapaakaayalu,...thataaku tapaakayalu which made earth shattering noise,...Mataabulu, which emit beautiful magnesium flowers are also becoming quite scarce.....

But , the ones that i personally miss most are jillies....Electric or current jillies, as they are called.....I really never saw them anywhere except Bandar.....A current jilly is smaller than a normal cigarette, packed in a hard oil paper cylinder...slimmer than a finger....you could light an end of it and throw...But mazaa is when you make a small tear in it"s middle and put fire to it.....By god.....it really goes mad.....going berserk is the right word for it....It flits around so fast and does such acrimonious things.....you will sit down in helpless laughter with tears ......It is"nt dangerous.....very cheap...and a lot of hard and harmless entertainment....

Ofcource rarely ever one fires thuutaas these days....No wonder...since it takes a strong heart to play with them....Incidentally i have noted with amusement how while the strongest of men seem to quail before diwali crackers, some very non-decrepit , and supposedly meekest of the species----at least for looks-----seem to sport with them with a degree of nonchalance that was wonderful.....An illustration of this would be none other than our neighbour from the opposite house at Bandar..----Padma"s brother....Usually , he was a very mild-mannered, pussy-cat of a man, who would just greet and scurry off at the sight of others,...but, come Deepavali and he turned into a virtual tiger....For he seemed to have made a vow not to light up any cracker except a thuuta.....He always started late....By the time, we, kids have put stoves under the feet of moms to hasten up with deepams and exhausted our supplies,...He used to come out of the house,....fired in quick succession some twenty to twenty-five thuttas,..nothing else, and calmly went inside the home again...as we watched with our tongues out.....

Now...to those who do not know what a thuuta is.....It is an enormous cigarette,.... Two to two and half inches in diameter and may be a half foot in length....One tip has a sandy end..so that you can hold it..and is packed with MANDU....This is where the trick is....For a thuuta is a tricky customer if ever there was one.....Extremely temperamental.... If too tightly packed it is going to explode in your hands and then you would not simply have a hand at all for the rest of your life... A loosely packed one would cough and splutter like an old gentleman....and then suddenly flush out fire like a dragon and you would panic.....A neatly packed thuuta would burn evenly,with a slight pulled in sensation in the hand, and held at elbow level would spew a rain of fire up to three yards.....The holder would do well to to revolve it slowly in half circle, and it is a treat to watch it,...a beautiful shower of sodium sparks.....

While on the subject of selective firing of crackers,..i remember one aunty i had seen when i was telve......She used to start late too.....She had an only son and most of the time she used to assist him with the crackers and supervising over the diyas lest they might run out of oil etc.....But after a while, she would come out into open with her pallu neatly tucked in....Then she would revolve a what you would call a thousandwallah these days, over her head in an amazing display of showmanship and bravery for few minutes and then calmly went back.....As if the legendary SAtyabhama herself took life again....

PICHIKALU ...are another favourite of mine....( ofcource, only to watch )....I daresay these are still being fired at all places and everybody knows how they look......Small earthen paani puris..with a mark of lime as moustaches...That is how i fondly think of them......You put fire to it and have to release it...neither too slow ..nor too fast... They have to run along the earth for few seconds before they can neatly ascend and shoot up into the sky.....Just like aircrafts...and ofcource as unpredictable as our rockets from Thumba rocket center....and extremely dangerous.......One deepavali, my uncle introduced a wiry, tongue-tied youngman to the house and said he was one who could send a PICHIKA with such precission,even ... through specified bars of a window if you so wanted....It seems he is in great demand every deepavali for the still tireless sportsmen of Bandar who are indulging in localised ladaais these days, though not on the scale and standards as set up by their grandfathers.....