How to Light a Lamp far away from Home

What diwali teaches you when you’re in another corner of the world

My tiny feet pad into my living room, the shadowy darkness of the early morning illuminated by a string of yellow lights draped over my windowsill that cast a warm glow over the room. A row of diyas line the passageway, a magical sense of excitement and warmth exuding from each dancing flame that flickers and sways with the wind but never goes out. Diwali day is always special - those few hours that I spend wearing a brightly coloured lehenga, stuffing my face with soft ladoos that dissolve into a puddle of sweetness on my tongue alongside the vibrantly smiling faces of my family make me feel more connected to my culture than anything else, embodying a golden thread of joy and celebration that binds me to my heritage. The frightening noise of the firecrackers at night was soon forgotten as I watched them through the window from my bed, spellbound by the breathtaking explosion of light and colour brought about by the simplicity of hundreds of completely different people celebrating the same festival.

When I was younger, Diwali was about colour, sugar, and excitement, about watching my parents’ faces glow in the reflection of diyas and feeling, in my small way, that the whole world was wrapped in gold. However, distance has a way of peeling back these layers and revealing meaning. As I’ve grown older - and further from home - I’ve realised that the essence of Diwali doesn’t live in the rituals themselves but in what they try to teach us. It’s easy to mistake a festival for simply a celebration, rather than what lies beneath it. When you no longer have the warm house full of chatter, the smell of Indian sweets wafting through the kitchen door, or the safety of familiarity, you start to understand why the festival exists at all. Its message - light over darkness, good over evil, knowledge over ignorance - begins to shift from a bedtime story you were told as a child by your grandparents to a philosophy you start to live by.

Celebrating festivals away from home forces you to translate familiar rituals into the language your new life understands. The ever flickering light of the diya becomes a metaphor for perseverance and the sweets handed out with beaming faces a lesson in generosity. Now, I am able to see Diwali less as a single day of festivity and more as a way of being. Choosing light over darkness has meant reminding myself to stay hopeful when uncertainty sneaks its cold fingers up my spine - to keep faith during long, confusing days in a new city, when homesickness hums beneath every routine. Choosing good over evil has meant allowing compassion and empathy to run through my veins and wash over others like a wave of positivity. It shines through in how I treat friends and even strangers, a way of life that is only due to the values of warmth and community imbibed within me by my culture.

They say no one can emulate the strong sense of generosity and hospitality embodied within every fabric of Indian society, and I never realised this as strongly as when I was on a completely different continent, separated from my home by the vast expanse of several seas. From being wished happy Diwali by people on my campus who I would hardly speak to otherwise, to walking through the streets of Florence on a cold evening, heading toward an Indian restaurant whose windows glow orange and gold, I begin to understand what it means to light a lamp far away from home for a festival that seems to find its way across borders.

This year, I didn’t light candles or decorate a windowsill with twinkling lights. Instead, I went to an Indian restaurant tucked between quiet Florentine streets, sitting across from new friends who are still trying to learn how to pronounce the word ‘dhanyavad’. The warmth was immediate - laughter in Hindi and Italian mingling in the air, the smell of forever familiar spices wafting through the room, a playlist of Italian songs with ethnic remixes humming in the background, and for a few hours, it didn’t feel like I was far away at all. Those moments were the proof that community can be recreated, that home can expand to include whoever chooses to gather under its light.

As I stepped out into the cool Florence night after dinner I realised that a change in location isn’t enough to change a festival, because the light, somehow, has followed me all the way here.