Coincidentally, she was the one I had been drawing when Mum interrupted me.

The aunties were still talking over one another. I caught snatches of “How are you?” and “What are you studying in school these days?” and then, at last, Granny wrestled her phone back and shooed them away.

“Are you having a party?” I asked her, puzzled by the unusual number of visitors in their house this late in the day. India was four and a half hours ahead of us, so it was past ten o’clock at night there.

“Only a small one,” said Granny. “It’s Dussehra.”

Dussehra is an Indian festival. It was celebrated in different ways around the country, but in Karnataka, the state where my grandparents lived, it was celebrated with lots of delicious food, elephant parades in cities like Mysore, and processions of goddess statues down the river Kaveri. Part of the festival was about celebrating Chamundeshwari’s defeat of the demon king Mahishasura.

The Kodava people of Coorg, which was where Gramps’s family came from and where Ashwini thayi used to live, celebrated the actual Kaveri instead. Their beliefs revolved around the river and our ancestors rather than gods or goddesses, so their Dussehra sometimes involved a trip to Talakaveri, the place where the river begins.

Basically, India has a lot of different traditions and cultures, probably because there was a time not so long ago when the country was a bunch of separate states and kingdoms. I didn’t even know most of the traditions, but I was pretty sure people in the north of the country celebrated Dussehra differently. They called Chamundeshwari by the name Durga, for a start, and in some places, their Dussehra celebrated the defeat of a totally different demon king by a totally different god instead.

Mum and I usually went to India once a year, during the summer, but one time, we went in October, and that was the only time I’d ever celebrated Dussehra myself. It had been a whole week of eating delicious things, which, as far as I was concerned, made it the best festival ever. Sometimes, if I tried really hard, I could almost still taste some of the treats we’d had: Mysore pak, a buttery, sugary biscuit that came in slabs; jalebis, those sweet, sticky, sunset-colored rings soaked in syrup; dosas, which were sort of like savory crepes that I’d slather with butter; and kaju katlis, diamond-shaped sweets made out of ground-up cashews and sugar.

There had been a lot of sugar involved. I was practically drooling just thinking about it now.

“I’m so jealous,” I said mournfully.

“I’ll eat an extra piece of kaju katli just for you,” Gramps said generously.

“I have a whole box of Mysore pak right here,” Granny chimed in, a very Mum-esque twinkle of mischief in her eye. “Do you want to see?”

Mum and I looked at each other in a moment of mutual sorrow that we’d been saddled with a family like this.

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