Pages from my childhood- Eid celebrations

For children anywhere in the world, a religious festival is hardly a religious issue. It is about having fun with family and friends, and reluctantly participating in boring domestic spiritual rituals. I was indeed lucky to have been brought up in an extremely cosmopolitan residential colony, and my dad’s company, the ONGC, had people from all over the country as employees. As a result, we had in our circle of friends people from Assam to Gujarat; and from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. Needless to say, every now and then we were either busy preparing for, or participating in one or the other festival. Holi, Diwali, Eid, Pongal, Lohri, and Christmas were celebrated with the same fervor.

The enthusiasm of Eid for us children started right from the commencement of the holy month of Ramadan, and despite the fact that we didn’t fast because children are exempt from fasting, we did enjoy the daily Iftaar spread, the fast-breaking feast. Throughout the day we savored the aroma of the delicacies that mom prepared for the Iftaar, and though she mockingly prevented us from picking on the eatables right from the stove, we exploited the fact that she had only us children as tasters of her preparations (she herself would be fasting). And our tasting sometimes extended into mini meals of sorts! The whole month used to be littered with Iftaar parties here and there, and Muslim families strived to take special care of the non-Muslim friends during such get-togethers. The second half of the month of Ramadan brought us yet another chance to be happy. Eid requires all Muslims to don new clothes for the Eid prayers, and since middle-class economic conditions prevented us from frequently buying new sets of clothes through the year, we really looked forward to carefully choosing trouser and shirt pieces, and taking time to instruct the tailor to style them according to the latest bollywood trends. Same for the footwear and sometimes even the undergarments!

The Eid festivities started with the sighting of the moon, and since those days had telephones only in rare homes, we children rushed from home to home as beaming harbingers of the good news. Mothers used to happily get busy once again in the kitchen preparing delicacies for the great festival. Early on the Eid day we used to bathe early and put on the new set of clothes, and it wasn’t very infrequent for any one of us four brothers to be slightly unhappy with either his own choice of the shirt color, or with the tailor for not giving a wide enough bottom for his bell-bottoms. Dad used to abundantly garnish us with itr, the indigenous perfume. Eid prayers by themselves did not have any charm for us children, as they were preceded by boring sermons by stern looking maulvis, and followed by prolonged lectures in Arabic that we did not understand. However, the Eidgaah (Special prayer grounds for the Eid prayers) used to be thronged by vendors of toys and goodies for the children, converting the place into a fair of sorts, and after the prayers, our dad gladly heeded our demands to buy toys, toffees and balloons. At home, we wished family and friends, and received generous ‘Eidi’(a sum of money as gift) from elders. The rest of the day was spent in receiving friends at home and visiting theirs in return. The staple Eid delicacy ‘Sevai’ was enjoyed by one and all, and by the time the day was over, we still had appetite for some more.

Over the years, perhaps by the way of becoming adults, and by having more than enough hassles of life on hand to dampen the festive spirits, I feel the enthusiasm for Eid has come down considerably since our childhood days, and all we can do now is reminiscence those wonderful years with great fondness.