Diwali is festive warfare, an almost narcotic experience of noise and cordite ingestion. This festival of lights, this evocation of Maha Lakshmi, the mother of prosperity and good fortune, has an ever-expanding religious subtext. It is an old story that has ramified and multiplied to cover most of the country’s pantechnicon of religions, faiths, gods, goddesses, and gurus—real, self-invented or marijuana-manifested.

The core of Diwali comes from one of the Ramayana tales: the return of Ram, after fourteen years in exile with his wife and his brother, Sita and Lakshman, having killed the demon king Ravan in Lanka.

Further along in the liquid chronology of Hindu scripture Lord Krishna destroyed the demon Narakasura the day before Diwali. The news of this divine victory spread fast and gave the people a double reason for celebration.

And from the elevated to the earthy, it is also the equivalent of the Harvest Festival for farmers, a time of giving thanks in the fields for their crops, even prostrating themselves in front of their manure heaps in gratitude for their powers of fertilisation, a ritual not unlike that of the Romans paying homage to Sterculius, their dung god.

From these the ripples circle on and out into Sikhism, Jainism and beyond, with the religious paraphernalia of each adding to the mix but, above all, Diwali is the goddess Lakshmi’s day and night, she of the opening gambit of good luck and good fortune. With this theme as the driving force the festival has stumbled into the culture of cellophane-wrapped bribery. Increasingly it has become about the giving of corporate gifts to oil the wheels for another year of good deals. Another trait in the devotion to Lakshmi has been channelled, with a faintly Las Vegan taint, into long nights of card playing in the weeks leading up to Diwali. These have a strange shape all off their own, the players hunkering down on a white sheet in a sitting room of some over-furnished and gold-knobbed and knockered Delhi des. res.  Round after round of teen-pati, a kind of three card stud, is played while the whisky circulates with enough regularity to make it a bawdy and raucous affair, much more Las Vegas than a tribute to the sacred mother of all things nice and lucky.

The whisky at Diwali card parties is not the only cause of the ratcheted volume, you have to shout in order to be heard above the barrage of fireworks and crackers being let off outside as kids take to the streets lighting whole arsenals of firecrackers at a time. The great Indianess of all this is that one of the central ideas of Diwali is based on this festival of light being a time of quietly flickering butter lamps in doorways and windows, their silent flames pushing away the shadows that might fall over the families that live within.

This seemingly peaceful idea of lighting our passage into the future detonates across the country as the hot season is leached away by the first edges of the cooler sun at the end of October, the date swinging around with the moon, and again, like so many things Indian, it has an easy flexibility to it that verges on the gymnastic.

Seen from above Diwali sucks an air-traveller right into the Indian gallimaufry. From a plane window you float above an exploding world that fuses Disney effects with a 21st century television war zone.

I was flying on that night last autumn. A Scandinavian woman in the window seat next to me pressed her face against the inner plastic and squeaked. Her excitement was countered by a smoothly presented but tired Non-Resident Indian on the other side, sighing through the tail end of his take-off champagne hangover.

‘Better seen from up here,’ he mused. ‘So much filth and noise down there.’

He now lives in New York and seemed bored by the idea of coming home for the holiday season. The filth and noise, the gallimaufry, are no longer to his taste. The enthusiastic Swede, on the other hand, seemed to see it as an expanding theme park of colour, smells, lights, and cross-cultural adventure, all naturally underpinned by a deep vein of potential bliss to be had from ethno-spirituality-lite. In short, she was off on the three week temple and palace tour to help burn through the endlessness of Scandinavian winter. Her enthusiasm faded somewhat as we fought our way through the taxi touts outside the airport. She clutched a handkerchief to her face, her eyebrows hiked up with shock at the fuggy density of the smog.  It wrapped itself around us with the same cellophane-enthusiasm of those omni-present Diwali gift baskets and boxes of sealed up mangoes and Munchicrunchi-Choclite bars.

Scene-setting of a kind but not just for the firework display: the near and far of Diwali night echo the relative attitudes towards Indian writers writing in English. From afar the foreign readership gulps down the Indian novel in English and begs for more, particularly the sharply marketed output from Indian writers outside India. Here is a cash cow stable many of whom were not even born in India, or have been away from it long enough to portray a diluted, Noble Savage, courage-in-poverty version of a country that, if they did live here, they left long ago as soon as a tertiary education in Europe or the US beckoned. While the foreign market, the squeaking Scandinavian and the other broadsheet book review-reading cohorts, drink these authors in, wreathing them in plaudits and prizes, the crowd back home are more critical of many of these sanitized or cloying versions of the raw reality in which they are living—the barrage of noise and the smog of Diwali on the streets of Delhi, year after year.

This is where there is another natural division in opinion on Indians writing in English; this one between those writing from outside the motherland, and those producing directly from the cacophony of the streets, or at least closer to the reality than a Midtown apartment with a view of Central Park, Starbucks on the corner, and a medical system that will repair every moving and unmoving part at the first sign of fluffy arteries. Meanwhile, back in the motherland, the harried and hurrying home boy, or girl, still gets caught in gridlock traffic by Madam Plastic-Bag-Munching-Cow, the very same beast that the Non-Resident Indian-on-Central-Park views as a charming pour memoire of a land that they think they still know, and so regurgitate in a liquid language of a thousand adjectives.

There are two ways of winding up a youngish Indian who has been educated abroad and then returned: the filth on the streets of his or her hometown, and every other town besides, and the extent to which ex-patriot Indian writers are over-hyped, over there, and overpaid, while so much of the serious talent back home struggles to even find a foreign distributor.

Why name names? We have all seen the output and saturating coverage of the gang who invented and then honed the new voice of India, tales fecund and surreal spun in language that usually leaves the reader with a mixture of amazement and literary indigestion. If you wish to drown in garam-masala-flavoured chocolate fudge sauce then these are your men and women, hoarding site high, adored,  sometimes even smacked about by tall poppy syndrome, but they need no further advertisement.

Rohinton Mistry stands apart, as though he has managed to find a use of language that conveys both the proximity and the distance, the two different views of the Diwali night from the plane window, the tired voice of the returning Indian with the fresh eye of the newcomer. He has the ability to portray compassion and humanity right in the midst of the daily depraved grind that so much of urban India has no option but to follow. Each of his novels, Such a Long Journey, A Fine Balance, and Family Matters has been nominated for The Booker, or The Mann Booker in the latter case. Each time his beautifully crafted tales of the survival of the Parsis, the Emergency, and the anatomy of Parsi family life have been passed over in favour of twinkling, shiny, lesser works perhaps because Mistry does not share the habit of so many prize-winners: he writes stories without literary devices. He just writes.

Mistry is a product of a double diaspora in a sense, not that it is an entirely accurate use of the term either to apply it to the brain drain of Indians from the mother country to North America, Europe and beyond, or to the flight of Zoroastrians from Iran in the face of Islamic conquest in the 8th century. He is from a Parsi family and he was born in Bombay in 1952 into a community of people, Iranian Zoroastrians, who had moulded themselves to the Indian culture to become one of the most successful integrations both pre- and post-Independence, mainly due to the Parsi ability to adapt with such grace and speed to a new environment, both in  cultural and business terms.  He then left Bombay in 1975 to emigrate to Canada, partly in response to peer pressure:

‘To get an education, to find a job in another country, that is how success is defined by Indians. So that is why I say that coming to Canada was in some ways decided for me,’ Mistry said in 1996 when his second novel A Fine Balance won the Commonwealth Writer’s prize.

This is a man, a unique storyteller, who left India when he was 23 with his young wife to become a bank clerk in Canada. Of course life in a bank did not satisfy him and he enrolled on a part-time four year course in English and Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He took two sick days from the bank and wrote the first draft of a story about Parsi life in an apartment building that won a prize, that then went on to become one of the stories in a collection of short stories that was published in 1987, Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag. Mistry assumed that the standard round of rejections would follow but his first novel, Such a Long Journey, pulled in a crop of first novel awards and nominations for its allegorical story of a poor Parsi family in Bombay. His third novel, Family Matters, is for me his masterpiece to date, another Parsi family story from Bombay but, instead of seeming foreign and unfamiliar in its cultural setting, the tale of the end of Nariman Varkeel’s life threads through all aspects of family life. Through it we witness how both the best and worst of human nature comes out around those we are related to and in it we see ourselves. It is a lyrical parable.

Skipping about in Mistry’s literary chronology it is his second novel that completes this circle and carries us back to the plane, the window, the Swede and the returning Indian. Such a Fine Balance not only reaffirmed Mistry’s growing status as an important writer but it also made him a controversial figure, not of his own making. When it was on the Booker shortlist in 1996 Germaine Greer let rip on a television discussion show leading up to the prize giving.

‘I hate this book. I absolutely hate it,’ she said.

Greer went on to explain that she had spent four months teaching at a women’s college in Bombay and that she had never experienced the disgusting degradation of the squalor that Mistry portrayed in his novel.

‘I do not recognize this dismal, dreary city,’ she said. ‘It’s a Canadian book about India. What could be worse? What could be more terrible?’ laughed the woman with a four month depth of understanding of a culture and place where Mistry had been born, educated, and culturally conditioned.

India invites appalling judgement and ill-made generalisations from those who enter and immediately want to integrate with the dirty exotic. Fortunately India also produces softly spoken writers, in tiny quantities, who, even if they do leave, carry with them images so sharp, and stories so clearly told that they almost make fine the balance with the deluded conclusions and abuse of some outsiders.

Published in Slightly Foxed and on Travel Intelligence