Sunday Times 2
Playing with fancy fire
From morning, an air of evergreen-scented suspense has hung over the sealed boxes under the Tree. These are the explosives – the beautiful “bad” goodies that, strictly speaking, thinking of safety, Santa Claus should never have brought. The boxes of incendiaries are stacked in the shadow of the Tree, and will remain there till the sun goes down on Christmas ’61. Or was it ’60? Or ’59?
The red, white and blue striped rectangular boxes are surrounded by other teasing geometric objects – cylinders, rhomboids, triangles. Most of the fireworks remain hidden in their packaging, save the upright packets of sky-rockets, wrapped in orange and red cellophane, their ekel ends harmlessly pricking the overhanging branches of cypress. The brooding boxes seem quite aware of the hazardous potential within.
At noon, when Mother summons all to a lunch of curried chicken, ham, pickle, chutney and a mountain of savoury rice hidden under a layer of green peas, sultanas, sliced boiled eggs and roast cashews, we leave behind the unopened boxes of fireworks. The other gifts – the midnight-blue toy Jaguar, the Doktor Kit, the cricket bat and ball, the Davy Crocket Kit (with musket and coonskin cap), the card packs, the chessboard, the books, the badminton set, the plastic trumpet and the tin saxophone – all are lying around the house, on beds, on chairs, on the floor, under the dining table, strewn on the veranda. A December breeze blows through the house, picking up torn paper wrappers and loosened coloured pages of the Christmas Day newspaper.
The afternoon and evening are spent with the gifts – picking them up, putting them down, and picking them up again. The night is for the grand fireworks show.
The fireworks will end a long, happy, fulsome day with a hiss, a splutter, a bang, a backfire. Fiery reptiles will race round the garden and bouquets of sparkling flowers will bloom in the night sky, rising on steep silver stalks and blooming for one dazzling, incandescent instant before shattering and showering the air with splinters of light.
The previous Christmas we burnt three fingers holding a firework that misfired. Someone – Father, Mother, the servant woman – dipped our blistered digits in butter, and we spent the rest of evening watching the show from the sidelines, sucking alternately on buttered fingers and candy sticks.
Unpredictability reigns when fireworks are at play. All you can do is light, wait and watch. The firework may live up to expectations, entertain, disappoint, cause havoc. Anything can happen.
Older Brother is the Master of Pyrotechnic Ceremonies, assisted by Piyadasa, the servant boy. While Younger Brother and Middle Brother do the unpacking and sorting, they will do the lighting.
We are impatient. Covers are torn off, boxes ripped open, and their oddly shaped contents scattered on the veranda floor. A whiff of cardboard, paper packing, wood shavings and gunpowder floats in our faces, while our silver-dusted fingers separate the relatively harmless from the potentially harmful.
A tall candle guttering in a white saucer is the launch pad.
First off are the sky rockets. These are stuck upright in a metal socket in the front gate. Piyadasa goes back and forth, giving Older Brother flaming tapers to apply to the missiles. They step back and let the rocket fizz and rise in a sizzling vertical or curving streak. With a crack, the rockets open and fling off points of colour into the blackness. The last dying spark is followed by a click in the grass, on leaves, as the falling ekel, the burnt-out stub, touch ground. For devilry, a rocket is placed in the middle of the lane and aimed at the main road. The incendiary zigzags up 37th Lane and explodes against the boundary wall of College House.
Now it’s the turn of the Catherine Wheel. The plump, coiled-up thing is hung on a nail driven into the black trunk of the rata goraka tree. Spitting and spinning, the ignited wheel is a hypnotic golden eye with a black pupil that burns a hole in the middle of our eyes, the middle of our mind. Spun and spent, the wheel slows down and drips off the tree trunk and into the grass in one long, sad, smouldering red tear.
For devilry, yet again, Older Brother lights a Catherine Wheel and flings it on to the gravel. Hot and furious, the wheel travels far, ripping around the orbit of the garden and ending up stuck in a croton shrub. The burning bush shudders and blows up.
Next on is the Roman Candle. The fat squat multi-layered cylinder is planted in the middle of the driveway and lit with the fiery flakes of a sparkler.
The candle ejects a fountain of gold sparks and stars, shoots a pink ball of fire into the air, throws out more stars, then tosses up an acid-green ball, coughs up more stars, ejects a red bolt, and finally a blinding golden shot accompanied by a towering gold shower.
Between Older Brother’s manly main firework acts are the delicate silver entr’actes. This is the “sissy” part, the whispery play of sparklers. The rest of us in the fiery arena peaceably burn sheaf after sheaf of purple ekel-wands, slipping the coarse silver-coated ends into the candle flame. The smelting sticks fling off white stars, and aureoles of silver light illumine our faces as if we were a host of smiling angels.
Now it is time for the unreliable, unpredictable Squibs. These nasty little beasts are paper-labelled Snake, Frog, Salamander, Rat, Scorpion. You place them on the ground and set fire to their rear ends and watch them roar and shriek and hurtle. You leap to avoid the furious fiery critters. Piyadasa, who is dressed in a spotless white shirt and white sarong, is not fast enough. A squib screams towards his feet and goes right through, burning a hole in the sarong Santa brought him. Older Brother finds this funny. Piyadasa takes the ruined Indian sarong with good humour.
It is dinner time, and Mother is calling us to a meal of roast chicken, boiled potatoes, green peas and carrots, custard and candied fruit.
The house is filled with smoke blowing in from the garden. The smell of cordite combines with the dinner table aromas.
Father, who smokes 80 cigarettes a day and lives much of his waking hours inside a cloud of tobacco smoke, hardly notices the combination of fumes.
Post-dinner, there is one last, ear-drum drubbing round, and that is the lighting of the crackers. These are the linked explosives that go off like a volley of rifle shots and shake up the quiet of Queen’s Road. Detonated in the middle of the lane, outside the gate, the explosions strike sparks off the macadam, and the bullet-hard reports ricochet off the boundary walls of Weimar and Lakshmigiri, setting off echoes as far as the grounds of Villa Venezia, Morven, Highlands and Hatton Court.
Then, one year, the fireworks came to an end. No one thought of buying any that Christmas. Or the next. No one missed playing with coloured fire. We had outgrown fireworks. We had grown up.
We thought we had grown up.
You don’t outgrow fireworks.
This we realised only many years later, when we went to live in the Land that Invented Gunpowder and Fireworks. There, in China, on the first day of the Lunar New Year, they come in multitudes, of all ages – children, fathers, mothers, grandparents – to see their ancestors’ most brilliant invention. Wonder and delight is revealed in thousands of upturned faces, all reflecting the magnificent man-made fires in the night sky.