It’s that time of the year when friends and members of my diverse, multi-religious family are either fasting or discreetly feasting. Our house emanates the earthy smell that only wheat and gur being sauted in ghee and can create. The plump little elephant god is hardly fussy (as I understand it, he will eat anything made with love and some amount of sugar) but his worshippers are a more demanding lot. So there are the steamed modaks of Maharashtra, decadent churma ladoos from Gujarat and for the South, a bowl of chana spiced up with mango, mustard and curry leaf.

I wonder what kind of dinner-table conversations the laddoo loving, happy-go-lucky Ganesh had with his more austere father. Shiva is pleased with the simplest things – raw milk, flowers and leaves. Motu must have exasperated him with his penchant for sweets like modaks which require a high degree of patience and kitchenskillery to make. Not to mention the cholesterol counts and the enlarged lipid profiles?

B and I are the presiding pandits and are innocently making a royal hash of it. We aren’t helped at all by people like the Fraud, who loudly asks for divine help in finding out who transferred the songs of Speedy Singh to his Ipod.

We mix up the order.
The modaks are not perfect.
CI forgets to formally ask if we will “pass exam”.

And yet, it’s really quite okay. Either way.

Our plate is full. And I hope yours is too.