BRUNSWICK, OHIO, November 12, 2007: Bowls of curry and heaps of rice. Gourds decorated like ducks and watermelon halves dressed up as boats. Mountains of cookies and stacks of flat bread and a gingerbread house with a flashing-light Deity inside. This is how the Swaminarayan Temple celebrates Diwali. “It’s the Hindu New Year, the beginning of the year for Hindus throughout the world,” said Ashok Patel, addressing hundreds of devotees gathered to celebrate the festival of light. “This is our way of saying thank you. . . . Thank you, thank you, thank you for keeping our plates full.”
In India, the traditional holiday stretches more than a week and includes cleaning house, paying off debts, worshipping the Goddess of wealth and honoring brothers and sisters. There, they close school, spread colored powder in designs on the floor, exchange food with neighbors, give money to children, string bright lights and marvel at fireworks. Here, in their adopted country, the Hindu festival is gaining attention. But the celebration is more low-key, squeezed into a weekend at the temple.
“It’s very important,” said Usha Patel of Erie, Pa., who like many of the temple’s unrelated members shares the common surname. “It’s like your Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
Inside the Swaminarayan Temple, women in brightly colored saris and men in shirts and slacks sit separately – cross-legged and barefoot, chanting and clapping and hailing God. About a dozen men and women hold silver plates with candles, circling them in the air, infusing God’s divinity into the flame.
And before them, like some fantastic dream, beneath colored lights and a fuchsia backdrop, is the annukut — the offering of food to Bhagwan Swaminarayan, the central figure of the Swaminarayan faith of Hinduism. Through an afternoon of prayer sessions, the food is sanctified. And at the end of the day, after a Sunday service, the devotees feast.
About 60 women cooked and baked the more than 500 delicacies, all vegetarian, all without eggs, to comply with the sect’s dietary guidelines. There were time-honored treats of ladu and barfi, as well as chocolate-chip cookies, pizza and quesadillas.
“I cook what I like to eat because today’s the day I get to cook for God,” said Swati Patel, 43, of Strongsville, who brought eggplant, rice pudding, fried potato chips and a milkshake.
The array is sort of symbolic, agreed Sneha Patel, 25, of Strongsville. Indian and American. Traditional and new. “God eats what we eat,” she said. “It’s fun. This is our party.”