Thanksgiving, Halloween and more

Streets in Pleasanton can be hauntingly quiet. No brawls are seen in miles, neither are the dharnas to bring Saurav back in the team. The leaves quietly turn from green to red and yellow, and hustle onto the ground. Clouds drift by, with the same nonchalance, over the tri-valley hills.

But then, life is not that so staid after all.

If you are a compulsive excitement seeker or just a regular cost conscious desi looking to steal a deal, Thanksgiving is just the time for you. Forget the millions of tons of turkey that must be butchered despite the fact that when the tradition initially began with the first ‘pilgrims’ thanking the Red Indians for helping them survive in their first year in the US, turkey was not even on the menu. Also forget that over the four day weekend you could get away to a beach by the Pacific coast or lose yourself in the glitzy dens of Vegas. What matter on Thanksgiving are the deals. Sample this – Laptop worth $820 being sold for $400, or, a 51” flat screen projection TV with a regular price of 1400 bucks being given away for 800. Too good to be true, huh? There has to be a catch, no? Of course, there is. All these items are limited in number, so you have to be among the first ten or fifteen to strike the shop to get the deal.

Thus, the plan was made. Yours truly and Manas and a friend of his (Raghu) would raid the shops, max out the credit cards, get what we can, hoard as we must, and then e-bay zindabad. (Even at the risk of sounding patronizing, I must mention here that e-bay is the online auction site where you can trade almost anything. Last I heard that drunken monkeys and Saddam Hussein puppets were on sale. Go figure!). Anyway, let me not digress. Our plan was simple - the shop opens at 5 am, leave at 11pm the night before, be there by 11:30, and there can't be more than 10 people in front on you on a rainy night in a rich white neighborhood. Who would beat the desi after all? The plan was executed with not much of a change. We were at the shops (split in two teams) by 12:30 am. And what do we find? 50 people, at the minimum, had reached before us. All stocked with umbrellas and garden chairs and sleeping bags. The first guy arrived at 7pm. Huh!

To cut the long story short, our dreams of making a quick buck were quickly squashed. Manas stayed back in hope of getting the TV, which he did, while Raghu and I headed back home to catch the match. With India at 56 for 4, I didn’t have any other option than to get some sleep. Read a grossly Gangulisque Telegraph’s headline the next morning – 188 all out, 156 one out.

Anyway, that is how the Thanksgiving went.

We celebrated another festival too – the Halloween. Again, for the uninitiated, this is a uniquely American pagan festival that celebrates the devil. So, you have these parties where people dress up ever so weirdly. It is sheer madness, and to witness the true extent of it, one must see the Castro Street Party in San Francisco.

Here, allow me to briefly talk about San Francisco. It is a city that I haven’t seen much, but it has a striking freshness akin to the cool breeze from the Pacific, in whose back drop the city is set. You will see in San Francisco piers that anchor clusters of yachts, and you will see high rises that glisten in the night. You will see a dark orange Golden Gate Bridge, and if you care to walk around, you will walk along undulating roads reminiscent of a hilly terrain and see the distinctive cable car. San Francisco, they will tell you, is the gay capital of the world, it is the bio-technology capital of the world; it is the city that exploded with the dot com boom and survived the subsequent bust. They will remind you that the city was burnt down to ashes in the devastating 1906 earthquake and rose like a phoenix and that it remains the fourth largest American city.

So in this San Francisco, we went to see the Castro Street Party. In shivering cold, as we parked our car in one of the many multi-storied parking lots, and walked along the narrow undulating roads to reach the Castro Street, we encountered the bizarre. Among them, some dressed as Greek philosophers (booze does keep you warm, doesn’t it?) walking alongside Playboy bunnies. In that frivolity, the quietness of the suburban America was ever so conveniently abandoned. There was music playing all around, beats from drums rising in unison. We witnessed a riotous sea of humanity (there were an estimated 300,000 people in attendance) drowning itself in revelry.

Halloween is an interesting concept. You wear masks and be what you are not. Or perhaps, for once, you let it show. And, like Holi, perhaps, it's only one human that interacts with another; not the race or religion or caste or creed. Or maybe, I am just being naïve.

Anyway, that was that for Halloween. On our way back, the drums were still echoing in my ears. But somewhere in my heart, I was missing the sound of the dhaks. Somehow, the memories of a quarter of a century’s life in Calcutta don’t want to leave. I tend to miss them, no matter what. And, the irony is that even Calcutta will never replicate those days again.

Now, let me not get sentimental.

We celebrated the Diwali too. Not as grand as it would be back home, but we did things in style. Had the diyas to light up the house. Deepika dressed in Sari. Manas and I wore kurta pajama. Rangoli was laid out at the door. Kheer and puri and sabzi. And, unlike ever before, we played cards late into the night.