Here’s the truth: I am not a Diwali girl myself. In ’90s Calcutta where I grew up, Diwali was overshadowed by Kali Puja, which the city celebrated on a scale less grand than Durga Puja but splendid nevertheless. Lakshmi was not the goddess we automatically associated with Diwali either; that was Kali, the dark goddess of the glorious night, whose fierce form was imagined as an antithesis to the very features that made Lakshmi so dear: Her beauty, the finery of her clothes and ornaments, the glow of all-round success that radiated from her. (And yet, there was probably some secret strain of philosophical wrangling in Lakshmi too, a startling GenZ thread — why else was she always up and running?)

It was only when I became a bona fide resident of Delhi that I realised that what Durga Puja

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