A/N: Umm so I've never been much of a fan of this particular festival BUT it existed before firecrackers had ever been invented and that makes me think of a time when the actual spirit of Diwali was celebrated and not the capitalistic festival that it is today. Regardless, I hope you enjoy. Also, I wish my song selection was a bit better, I wanted to add some Hindi, Diwali wale songs but I couldn't find any that I recognised or liked, so you have to settle for the above ones.
There were a few things in my life that I honestly thought I would be better off without.
One among them was my preference for boys. But when I first found out though, it didn't happen like a train wreck as you'd expect, it was rather, slow and gradual.
It went from "I wished I had a body like him" to "hey, that guy's hair is kinda cute" and then finally, "holy crap I'm gay, aren't I?"
It didn't matter if I felt comfortable with my sexuality or not. I would never be accepted here and that was the truth. And by "here" you're probably wondering where it is.
I lived in Bandra, possibly the richest area in the city of Mumbai and when I was young, that kinda used to pride me. A lot.
But now, I wasn't so sure. Because whatever reasons that had driven me to like Bandra in the first place felt a bit too shallow now.
I went to a school with richer kids than I and had friends that were richer than I, their lifestyle had rubbed off on me and so must've the shallowness. I definitely wasn't like that anymore and I wasn't complaining about it either. People liked to be a certain way and who was I to judge anyway?
Anyway, I wish I could say that the change in me was due to some divine enlightenment I had under a bodhi tree during a penance. But fortunately for Buddha it came in the form of a kid in tattered jeans, without a care in the world.
'Hey. Will you attend my play? I'm playing Peter Pan,' he'd said, handing me a flyer. He was bustling with an energy undescribable, an energy that had the entire school watch it.
Mesmerised, too, I'd attended the play with the rest of the school, who were all, like me, swept by the tune of the Pan Piper.
'Did you like it?' he'd asked me, after the play. He was moving along, expecting me to congratulate him like our classmates had but-
'No.' And it was the truth. He had stopped in his tracks, a small smile on his features, looked me straight in the eye for a second and then just moved along, like it was nothing.
For an entire evening I had panicked, thinking I had finally managed to become a recluse by insulting the most popular guy in the school but the opposite had happened.
He became my friend. 'I was really jittery on the stage. I'm just glad I didn't throw up,' he'd said the next morning, standing right at my locker, smiling in a way that was unnerving and cute at the same time. We talked a bit and went our separate ways. I hadn't quite expected for us to meet again after that but he kept showing at my locker everyday and then I just couldn't imagine a day without his presence anymore.
And to this day, we didn't go more than a week without seeing each other.
'Viann, I still don't understand why we keep having this conversation. Why don't you want to go?'
That was my mom. A while back, I had written the SAT exam with the rest of my class but the difference was that I scored much higher, obviously. The inherent complex of keeping up appearances had been passed down from my parents and I couldn't possibly not carry on the tradition.
