Love song for hectic hearts?

The oriole is here, but I’ve not glimpsed its flashes of handsome yellow, only heard it singing each morning in some other tree. I guess I must content myself with that

What could be wrong with a festive heart? A lot, we were informed, after Durga puja. Bengalis were reeling from festive heart syndrome, said the papers. I snorted, exercising all the rights bestowed on me by my quarter Bengali ancestry, to mock Bengalis— “finally they’re ambling on from ombol.”  ‘Festive’ heart troubles apparently result from too much roaming, shouting, sweating in silks, jolly-bolly, and of course mutton, mithai, mathri and whisky-shisky yaniki average desi holiday behaviour. Later, one of those online accounts which are always trying to reform us with a perpendicular air, informed ki it is properly called hectic heart syndrome.

When are our hearts not hectic, one might ask. Isn’t that the job description?

Earlier, we would read about depression during Christmas among those in cold countries. Festival sadness, lonely heart syndrome now has crept up in these parts around Diwali we are told, it being considered a family festival. Capitalism unites us in gloom. But, isn’t it true that despite celebration, festivals are also always a sharp time of missing someone.  A loved one no longer in the world, a friend no longer a friend you wish, a you no longer so simple. This year I miss the golden oriole that arrived at the end of the rains in the tree outside my window. The tree died. The oriole is here, but I’ve not glimpsed its flashes of handsome yellow, only heard it singing each morning in some other tree. I guess I must content myself with that.

Maybe it’s easier to let the heart do the missing it needs to rather than hectically avoiding it. The season almost invites us to this with its lengthening lines of light sloping down towards winter and its quiet, deepening colours filling the bazaar. Papayas and guavas lie splayed open, cut in star-shapes to reveal their deep amber and pearly pink insides. The carts are full of things you must patiently wait to have peeled, hot-pink shrimp, smelling salty and pungent and sunshine-yellow pineapples filling the air with sticky sweetness, urging you to unite them in a passionate salad. The shy green of pears, the artless orange of tangerines, the stoic red of apples, the expensive maroon of grapes are holding up their round cheeks for you to gently cup. The greens are dark and bitter as truth, but healthful and helpful, methi’s bob-cut leaves, fat poi shaak, before-time mustard and silky-fingered green garlic. Prices can give you some hectic heart of course, but you can still walk home with an armload of Nature’s Diwali presents (and one kandeel).

You can cook them with recipes that take time, so you have their company as you contemplate all your missing and your limits and disappointments and maybe some hoping-shoping love-shove, cook it all down into a sharp and savoury or bitter-sweet dish, that gentles your heartbeat, why not? Autumnal festivals come with a bellyful of second chances—all about harvesting what you’ve sown and well, a cascade of lunar new years, but a bit of ongoing solar year available, as if to say chances come round again like the orioles in neighbourng trees and fruits in the bazaar. Maybe you will take one, maybe you will make one. Dekh lo.

I wish you lots of second chances this Diwali then. And gentle heart syndrome.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

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