The Day After the Festival

Last night's dandiya festival was a colorful celebration featuring scrumptious food, lively dancing, and zealous socializing. Yet, right now, the once buzzing ground is now desolate and reticent.

Yesterday's sprawling fairy lights still stretch across the ground's tight quadrangle. They aren't gleaming and luminous. Rather, their dulled, silvery glow flickers: a game of hide-and-seek with lights. They flit across the air like stars in broad daylight. Directly where the fairy lights meet lies a dilapidated, tan table. A remainder of the laziness of partygoers. Atop it sit arrays of bent, metallic tins. Once brimming with a plethora of vivid curries and sweets, it is now sprinkled with drab, noir dust and remnants of piquant oil. The pungent stench of peppers and chili wafts from the tins. So fiery; so loathsome. One tin, veiled with misty plastic wrap, holds several golden, squashed samosas. Its spicy flavor is stilled by its chilled archaism. A brisk fire in my mouth. Nowhere near last night's fiery curries.

A hollow knock of a dandiya stick against the table replicates last night's clicks of sticks to rampant music. The wind rolls its emerald body toward the table's leftmost leg. It collides relentlessly, trying to grab my attention.

The wind which shoves the dandiya stick whispers to me through the rattling thicket surrounding the ground. Yesterday, the rampaging party overpowered the forest. Today, the woods overpower the fiesta's remnants. Its charcoal remnants sway like ballet dancers onstage.

Frosty rays of sunlight illuminate the puddles of food sleeping on the pavement. Hues of crimson, amber and beryl curries splatter the ground like spiced paint against a canvas. Near the table lolls a mammoth heap of alabaster kheer: the result of a child's fussiness. The endearing aroma of roasted almonds and saffron pierces the surroundings.

Those beams of sun seep through the streams of multicolored cloths. Rose, ruby, azure and apricot pools of light form beneath the draped cloths. The ground embraces the tepid heat and color- they are little fragments of last night's blaze and elation.

The obnoxious whir of pickup trucks blasts ahead. It approaches the ground. Their massive crates gape open, ready to inhale the festival's little vestiges- till next year.