It's Deepavali time, and how different it all is this year, with most of Malaysia under a Conditional Movement Control Order.

Last year, we were photographing the Cat in his Deepavali outfit, eating out, and checking out the malls for mandalas. This year the Cat never wears anything except a mask (a consistency that's a fitting symbol of the sheer monotony of this year); we don't eat out; and we go to malls only when absolutely necessary. (Plus, the Dragon Boat Regatta, which -- though totally unrelated to Deepavali -- shared that post last year, has been cancelled.)

But we did what we could.

Yesterday I made oven-baked tandoori chicken, which we ate with a vegetable curry and my low-carb take on garlic naan (made with that amazingly versatile low-carb pizza dough, topped with butter, garlic, and cumin).


And we watched Hotel Salvation. This is a story about an elderly Indian, Daya, who decides he's near death, and takes up residence in one of Varanasi's "salvation homes" (which are popular places to die in, because it is believed that departing this life in holy Varanasi frees you from the cycle of reincarnation, and allows you to directly attain salvation).





This sounds like a heavy topic for the festival of lights, but it's not really. The administrator of the Mukti Bhawan (Liberation Home), the lodging house whose fictional counterpart is featured in the film, puts it like this: "We do not fear death. We celebrate it. People come here with hope, not fear... It's the city of Lord Shiva" -- the Shiva who destroys in order to recreate.





Nor is the film constructed in a heavy or portentous manner. Rather, it's a warm, compassionate look at family relationships. (Daya is accompanied to Varanasi by his work-harassed, anxious, but long-suffering son, Rajiv. The two manage to get some old sores out in the open, and forgive each other. Daya's daughter-in-law and granddaughter also come to visit, and he is the first to pick up on, and pass on, his granddaughter's less than enthusiastic attitude to her upcoming marriage. One of the funniest scenes has Rajiv trying to communicate with his wife and daughter over a dodgy video connection in an internet cafe. The sequence is full of truncated sentences, picture freezes, and "hallo? hallo?")

Hotel Salvation sheds a warm glow on community relationships, too. (Vimla is a sprightly, kind old widow, who has been waiting her turn to die for decades. At one point, she, Daya, and his granddaughter check out Varanasi's marijuana lassis, and it's a giggly trio that heads to the boat for a Ganges evening cruise. The terminal residents of the salvation home are also addicted to Flying Saucer, a TV series they watch on the impossibly high television in the common room.)







Director Shubhashish Bhutiani's photography is impeccable, and every scene is a beautifully designed and evocative little cameo. It was a fabulous reminder of our brief time in Varanasi, when the year 2017 was still a youngster:


We loved this city. It was full of life, its funeral business notwithstanding. Yet that constant presence of death lent an extra poignancy to its street and river scenes.







My current audiobook is The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota. More on this when I've finished it, but the hardheaded yet sympathetic treatment of the topic -- the lives and backstories of four illegal Indian migrants who have ended up in the UK -- makes it a riveting listen.

The "what would I do in their shoes?" question -- the key question evoked by any literature that is worth reading -- hangs heavy in this book. When Sahota (whose grandfather came to the UK in the 1960s, and who grew up there himself) returns to India to visit his maternal grandmother, he becomes involved in conversation with some young men who had returned after stints in England: "I told them I was working on a book, and they said, ‘Are you going to put us in a positive light, because everyone seemed to hate us?’. They said, ‘Tell them we work really hard, that we’re happy to work whenever, that we work really long hours, that we’re competitively priced’..." Your heart goes out to them. At the end of the day we're all driven by our search for opportunity.







Malaysians of Indian descent don't have it easy either, as these pieces by Mangai Balasegaram and Preeta Samarasan make clear...

But Deepavali is all about light overcoming darkness, so let's end with something beautiful: