Ask anyone why we celebrate Diwali and the answer usually comes quickly: Lord Ram returned to Ayodhya after fourteen years of exile, and the city lit up to welcome him. Most of us grew up on this story. It is a good one, and it is true for millions of homes. But Diwali is bigger than any one house, and the moment we step outside our own tradition, the answer starts to change.

In Maharashtra and Goa, Diwali belongs to Krishna and the death of Narakasura. People bathe before dawn, and in many homes a small bitter fruit is crushed under the heel, as if the demon himself is being finished off. In the Telugu tradition, it is Satyabhama who kills the demon. In Gujarat, the day is tied to King Bali, the generous king whom Vamana pushed down into the netherworld. The lamps are lit because he is allowed to return once a year to see his people. In Braj, Krishna appears again, this time lifting the Govardhan hill, and people heap mountains of food in front of it. In Bengal, the night of Diwali is Kali’s night, and there is no moon in the sky. In Odisha, families burn jute stalks and call out to their ancestors, lighting the road for them. Jains remember the nirvana of Mahavira. And traders see Lakshmi, the goddess who came out of the ocean of milk, and welcome her with new account books.

If we look at all this together, something interesting shows up. In some places Diwali is a homecoming, in some a victory, in some a farewell. We call it the festival of lights, but it sits right in the middle of the dark. It falls on the new moon, the darkest night of the month. Nobody lights a lamp on a bright night. We light it because we need it.

There is a way of looking at Diwali that I found worth thinking about. It comes at the end of Chaturmas, the four months when Vishnu is believed to sleep, from Ashadhi Ekadashi to Prabodhini Ekadashi in Kartik. Those were the months of rain. Roads turned to mud, rivers flooded, monks stopped travelling and traders waited. Then the rains end, the harvest comes in, and the roads open again. Seen like this, Diwali is a hinge between two seasons. People clean their houses, settle their accounts, send the dead back and welcome wealth. Perhaps this is why one festival could hold so many stories. It was never a single event. It was the moment in the year when everyone had something to close and something to begin.

Interestingly, the old Vedic rituals say almost nothing about Diwali. The fire sacrifices, the soma and the hymns of the Rig Veda do not describe a festival of lamps like this one. Diwali seems to have grown from somewhere else: from courtyards, kitchens and threshing floors, from the vratas of women, the calendars of farmers and the ledgers of traders. It may even be older than the Vedic world, since clay lamps, cotton wicks and sesame oil have been found in ancient ruins. We can only speculate. But the thought stays with me. A festival that nobody wrote down, and that survived only because people kept doing it.

Some traditions also remember that Lakshmi has an elder sister, Alakshmi, who stands for waste, ash and decay. Both come from the same ocean. So when we clean our houses to welcome Lakshmi, we are also asking where the waste goes. The festival does not pretend that wealth and loss live in different homes.

For many families, wealth is not an idea at all. It is something they can hold in their hands. On Dhanteras and Diwali, old silver coins that have passed down from one generation to the next are taken out, washed, bathed in panchamrit, and worshipped as Lakshmi herself. The thinking is the same as the morning offering of water to the rising sun. We do not offer it to a picture of the sun, we offer it to the sun. In the same way, the coin is not a symbol of Lakshmi, it is her form. The puja used to be held in the eldest relative’s house with the whole family gathered. In many homes now, it is only the immediate family. Even a tradition so old changes quietly with the times.

The Sikh story is a different one altogether. For Sikhs, Diwali is Bandi Chhor Divas, the day of release. Guru Hargobind, the sixth Guru, was imprisoned in Gwalior Fort by the Mughal emperor Jahangir. When the emperor agreed to release him, the Guru insisted that the 52 princes held in the same fort be freed with him. Jahangir answered that only those who could hold on to the Guru’s robe could walk out. So the Guru had a robe made with 52 tassels, and every one of the kings came out holding on to one. When he reached Amritsar, the city lit up to welcome him, and the Golden Temple is lit up in the same way every year. I find this the most moving of all the Diwali stories, because it is about a man who refused to take freedom for himself alone.

Bengal adds the darkest layer. A day or two before Kali Puja comes Bhoot Chaturdashi, when folklore says the living and the dead come close to each other. Among the spirits are the shakchunnis, ghosts of married women who haunt kitchens and long for fish and jewellery, things they were often not free to enjoy in life. These ghosts are not really frightening. They are women whose appetites survived even after the world declared them dead, and who come back to tell the lives that nobody was listening to. The lamps of Diwali, then, are not only for gods and kings. They are for the people the house forgot to make room for.

India has always made room for many ways of seeing the same truth. The Rig Veda says that truth is one, but the wise speak of it in many ways. Swami Vivekananda, speaking in Chicago in 1893, said that India does not merely tolerate other paths, it accepts all of them as true. We often repeat these lines in essays and speeches. Diwali is where they are actually lived. Every family lights its lamp for its own reason, and every family feels it is right.

A few words for the aspirants reading this. A result, whenever it comes and whatever it says, is only one page of a long book. It tells you where you stand today, not who you are. The years you gave to your preparation stay with you as discipline, patience and strength, and they keep lighting your way. I hope that very soon every one of you finds the light you have worked so long for.

May the lamps you light tonight bring happiness, peace and good news to your home.

Happy Diwali to all of you, from all of us at Circular Learnings.