Ganesh Festival

Ganpati Bappa Morya.

For ten days the house fills with people, sweets and smoke, and that is exactly as it should be. This page is about the small choices inside the festival - the ones that decide how everyone feels on the eleventh day, and what the lake looks like in October.

## Modak, steamed rather than fried

The ukadiche modak is a steamed dumpling: rice flour, fresh coconut, jaggery. Fried modak is a modern shortcut. Steaming asks for nothing but a steamer plate and ten minutes, and jaggery carries iron and minerals that refined sugar has had taken out of it. It is still sugar - eat it like a sweet, not like a health food.

## An idol that goes back to the water

Shadu mati - river clay - softens and disperses within hours. Plaster of Paris does not: it sits on the bed of the lake for years, and the paints that go with it carry heavy metals into water that people and animals use. A clay idol with natural colours is the older practice, not a new rule.

## Colours that come off

Synthetic rangoli powders and some festival colours are sold for brightness, not for skin. Children put their hands in them for ten days. Herbal and food-grade colours cost a little more and wash out of both the doorstep and the child.

## The air in the room

Incense, camphor, oil lamps and a full house in September: the air indoors gets genuinely heavy, and it is hardest on anyone with asthma. Open two windows on opposite walls for ten minutes an hour - that does more than anything you can buy. A filter helps in a closed room; it is not a substitute for the window.

## And the eleventh day

Anant Chaturdashi is 25 September this year. However the days are kept, the part worth carrying forward is the one that was there before the sweets: everyone in one room, eating together.