For someone who didn’t have a family or a tight-knit group of friends to celebrate holidays with, Moore often found herself in an awkward position when people asked her about her plans for the holiday season. More than the question on her plans, it was the underlying assumption that she would spend holidays with her kin that bothered her. “It’s absolutely better to be by yourself than with someone you don’t even like. Or whom you do like but they don’t make you feel super great,” writes Moore.

In the Indian context, festive season loneliness is seldom discussed. The only socially acceptable form of being alone at this time is when your Diwali leave isn’t approved or if you couldn’t afford the train ticket/flight back home to see your loved ones. For those who wish to keep a deliberate distance from their families, or those living in dysfunctional homes where the festivities aren’t as bright and colourful, there is little room for their experiences to exist, let alone be validated.

After all, there are so many of us Indians; we cannot all be lonely around the festive season, can we? For me, the festive season is a reminder of my father’s death — he passed away on a cold January night so naturally, my 11-year-old brain associated piercing cold with sadness and depression. Each time temperatures dip and Durga Puja pandals prop up, my seasonal depression makes a comeback. Sometimes I welcome it with a hot cuppa, other times, I let my antidepressants do their job.

Two months after performing my dad’s last rites, I found myself running in the streets of my neighbourhood, drenched in vibrant Holi colours on a sunny March afternoon. A gleeful celebration, full of colour after two months of mourning, was just what the child me needed. Except that when I got back home, I was greeted with death stares. At the time, my family was struggling to find their feet both emotionally and financially. “I have never seen you play Holi with such fervour before,” an elder remarked scornfully when I entered the room. I was asked to take a shower and put on clean clothes immediately, lest someone sees my face covered in gulaal.

How was an 11-year-old brain supposed to comprehend the customary one-year-mourning period in Hinduism? The deep-rooted culture of grief-shaming in India is so vicious that it doesn’t spare even children. As I grew up, I heard uncles in my family asking their children to not dress up for Diwali because a distant relative had just died. In hindsight, I don’t really blame my family for grief-shaming me; if a person doesn’t cry enough or isn’t seen having multiple emotional breakdowns, the general view is that they aren’t really grieving.

Come 2023, after years of harbouring conflicting ideas around grief and the festive season, I can no longer associate happiness with Diwali. This time of the year brings back horrid memories, more so because I lost my grandfather during the onset of the festive season in 2021. On the evening of Diwali immediately following his death, I stepped out onto my balcony to see the decorations in the neighbourhood.

I braced my sad inner child for the unwelcome sight of the world making merry. To my surprise, the locality was unusually silent and most houses had not put up lights. The second wave of Covid, which caused dead bodies to pile up in morgues and crematoria, had left many grieving families in its wake. Most of them didn’t put up a grand display that year.

Grieving is a complex emotion. Everyone grieves differently and has different timelines for processing the pain caused by the loss of a loved one. Since there is no yardstick or “correct” way to mourn a loss or even a standard template that can be used for reference, it is essential that our culture give sufficient breathing space to those who are recovering from an emotionally stressful period — one that involves rituals, poojas and death-related sadness, which is rarely a part of mainstream discourse.

As someone from a lower middle class family who was grief-shamed as a child, I now find the festive season difficult to embrace. I also find it difficult to think of the many children who grew up in families like mine and were grief-shamed just like I was. They too probably associate the festive season with guilt and shame.

The Grievers Holiday Bill of Rights by Bruce Conely for newhope.org, enshrines a list of rights that all those who are grieving should have around the holiday season. It includes “The right to do things differently because there is no law that says you must always do Christmas the same way you have always done” and “The right to change direction in mid-stream — you may be all ready to go somewhere or do something and suddenly you are overwhelmed”.

In his book Surviving the Holidays Without You: Navigating Grief During Special Seasons, author Gary Roe, who also wrote Please Be Patient, I am Grieving - (Good Grief) writes: “We grieve because we love. The intensity of the grief often proclaims the depth of our love”. However, the grief and its intensity isn’t always manifested in obvious ways and is therefore, often misjudged and even miscategorised as apathy.

In Understanding Your Grief, author Alan D Wolfelt writes on grief-shaming: “Shame can be described as feeling that something you are doing is bad. And you may feel that if you mourn, then you should be ashamed. If you are perceived as ‘doing well’ with your grief, you are considered ‘strong’ and ‘under control.’ The message is that the well-controlled person stays rational at all times.”

So, to fit into society’s expectations around grief, people have to walk the tightrope of grieving just enough but not too much, or as Wolfelt writes: “Society erroneously implies that if you, as a grieving person, openly express your feelings of grief, you are immature. If your feelings are fairly intense, you may be labelled ‘overly-emotional’ or ‘needy.’ If your feelings are extremely intense, you may even be referred to as ‘crazy’ or a ‘pathological mourner.” This incessant need to manage one’s emotions as per the triggers only adds to one’s distress around the festive season.

At school, I often found myself walking this tightrope with friends and teachers. I subconsciously altered my reactions so I didn’t seem too happy and hence, a cold-hearted person, or too sad and therefore, ‘crazy’. Now, I’m overwhelmed with sadness when I think about the child-me’s balancing act, the performance of someone who had barely come to terms with the magnitude of his loss. As I grieve for my father each festive season, I also grieve for my childhood self; that person who had to appear sad when he wasn’t and happy when he was having a bad day.

Having been through this trial, I decided I’d never judge anyone based on how they choose to celebrate a festival. This includes those who want to celebrate Diwali shortly after losing a loved one – maybe that’s their coping mechanism, or their way to honour the memory of someone they lost). Then there are those who might not want to celebrate Diwali even after the customary mourning period is over (because you cannot really put a deadline on grief, can you?). And those who might want to break tradition and celebrate the festive season in a way that is more conducive to their emotional needs.

If you are alone this Navratri and Diwali, or grieving the loss of a loved one, all I can tell you is that one day, it will make sense. Or as Moore says in her memoir, “You’re still here, and one day maybe you’ll have a family of your own and you’ll love the holidays. Or maybe you’ll never like this time of year. Either way, you’ll still be here, living. Sometimes that’s the bravest thing of all.”

Deepansh Duggal writes on art and culture. He tweets at Deepansh75.