Racing to Get Home
Before the Diyas Are Lit
Traffic thick with firecracker smoke, everyone else already at the door. A story about the drive home on Diwali evening.
August 2026 · 4 min read
Six Kilometers Away and Not Moving
The office Diwali party ran long, and now I'm six kilometers from home in traffic that isn't really traffic anymore, just a row of brake lights and the occasional rocket going up somewhere off to the left. Everyone else is probably already washed up and dressed, waiting for me to light the first diya, because somehow that job always falls to whoever's running latest.
The Smoke Makes It Impossible to Tell How Close Anyone Actually Is
Every year it's the same — the smoke sits low over the road by evening, visibility drops, and half the family is somewhere on the same stretch of highway trying to get home before the puja muhurat passes. Calling to ask "where are you" just adds one more distracted driver to a road that already has enough of them.
My Phone Answered the Question Nobody Wanted to Ask Out Loud
Instead of the group chat filling up with "reached?" every ten minutes, everyone could just glance at the family circle and see who was still moving and who'd already made it in. My sister's dot stopped near the temple junction, mine crawled the last stretch home, and nobody had to take their eyes off the road to type an update.
Getting There Right as the First Diya Went Down
I made it in eleven minutes before the muhurat, which felt like a personal victory after that drive. What actually mattered more, though, was that nobody at home had spent that hour anxious about where I was — they'd watched me get closer the whole time, the same way I could see my parents already home, already changed, the diyas laid out and waiting on the step.
The Best Part of Diwali Traffic Is Not Worrying Through It Alone
Nobody enjoys the drive — the smoke, the noise, the crawl through the last few kilometers every single year. But there's a real difference between sitting in that traffic wondering if your family is worried about you, and sitting in it knowing they can already see you're almost there. One of those makes the wait a lot easier to sit through.