I glanced around me – it was Deepavali, and all of us children, parents, and grandparents at the party, looked delighted. Who wouldn’t be? Many of us were clutching sparklers, and watching the tiny stars produced by them in awe. The beautiful fountain pot spouted its joy towards the world a few feet away, and the oohs-and-aaahs were enough to melt hearts. Deepavali fireworks, especially in the US, are not exactly spectacular, but it is joyful all the same.
Watching fireworks has always been magical. The little sparks ignite something else altogether in our spirits. Watching everyone around me, I could well imagine the children of ancient China watching in wonder as the first gunpowder produced magical effects. Or the hobbits as they all watched Gandalf’s spectacular fireworks in Hobbiton. Every time we go to DisneyLand, waiting for the fireworks in the cold, with thousands of people, it is magical.
I was so glad to have an equally delightful book to read that week-end, The Firework Maker’s Daughter – By Philip Pullman.
The Firework Maker’s Daughter – By Philip Pullman
A delightful tale of adventure, replete with a plucky heroine (Lila), a hero (Chulak) with gumption, and a talking elephant (Hamlet, who is in love with the elephant at the zoo, named Frangipani).
In the Firework Maker’s Daughter, the firework maker, Lalchand’s daughter, Lila, wants more than anything to become a fireworks maker. At a young age, Lila invented Tumbling Demons & Shimmering Coins.
“My father won’t tell me the final secret of fireworks-making, “ said Lila. “I’ve learned all there is to know about flyaway powder and thunder grains, and scorpion oil and spark repellant, and glimmer juice and salts-of-shadow, but there’s something else I need to know, and he won’t tell me.”
But of course, the poor girl is not allowed to become a firework maker, for her father intends to get her married off. So, with the help of the white, talking elephant, Hamlet and his keeper, Chulak, she takes off to find the secrets of firework making all the same.
It is a whimsical book, and the descriptions of the fireworks in the end makes for a marvelous read.
If only the joys of learning to do these things (like making fireworks), were still available to us, instead of being locked behind factory doors, how wonderful it would be. As I remembered all the different types of fireworks – the ones that burst into a thousand patterns in the sky, the ones that take their time like a rocket lift-off, the spinning chakras, the little pops of bursting noises, the ‘Lakshmi bombs’ ( the loud bombs), and the serial-wallahs,(the strings of explosive that went off for minutes at a time) – the imagination took off with the fireworks too. How could it not? How inventive these firework makers must be.
I sat down willing to write about the marvelous joys of fireworks, but came up wanting. How can you capture the soaring of the heart in words? How can show feel a definite lifting of the spirits when only you can feel it?
Nourish-n-Cherish 