Aalia Sayed, 23, sat on a bench in the park at Greater Kailash-2’s market, frazzled and spent. Every year she and other women from her Ahmedabad neighbourhood travel to Delhi NCR for the Karwa Chauth markets that spring up across the city: part carnival, part bazaar, with designer lehengas, puja thalis, food counters and a DJ serving up cheesy Bollywood numbers so no woman forgets the romance of the occasion.
Sayed and her friends are mehndi artists. For three days they move through the city’s neighbourhoods, bent over outstretched palms from 3 pm. until well past midnight.
On Tuesday night, around 11:30 pm., the festive hum curdled. Women applying mehndi and women waiting for it argued until someone stepped in and begged for a truce.
“Bhook lagi hai humein, khaana nahi khaya hai, tabse mehndi laga rahe hain,” said Shagufta, 39. (We are hungry. We haven’t eaten, and we’ve been applying mehndi for hours.) Some customers had objected to being asked to wait a few minutes while the artists took a break to refuel.
One customer, who declined to be named, was unmoved. “We are paying them as much as 2,500 rupees for the mehndi application! Why can’t they manage their time better? I am getting late. I have a kid to send to school at 6 a.m.!”
It is a small scene that holds a social order in miniature. Delhi has long mastered paying for a service and expecting servitude: the transaction buys not just the work but the worker, her time, her patience, even her appetite. The artists, who had travelled hundreds of miles for a festival they hold as dearly as anyone, were made to feel their hunger was an inconvenience.
The irony is hard to miss. This is a festival built around hunger.
Today, the women of North India rose before dawn for the sargi, the meal traditionally sent by the mother-in-law, and have since abstained from food and often water. When the moon appears, the fast is broken with a sip of water and a morsel from the husband. Then comes the feast: abstinence followed by indulgence.
Restaurants understand this. Special Karwa Chauth menus have been rolled out and tables readied for the post-moonrise rush. At a fine-dining restaurant in GK-2, a manager told me his staff were bracing themselves. “Everyone will come in starved and if our service isn’t quick, we know we have to expect a lot of unruly diners.”
The kitchen knows hunger shortens tempers. What the mehndi artists faced on Tuesday night, the waiters of Delhi will face this evening.
For many women, Karwa Chauth is a devotion freely given. For others, it is observed out of Bollywood’s glossy pull or a quieter sense of duty to the marriage. Whatever the motive, the fast is framed as sacrifice and humility.
And yet humility rarely travels beyond the fast itself. Those same women, empty stomachs and all, demand that others serve their ritual on their terms, with little regard for people who do not share their social background and whose hunger counts for less. A fast that teaches you what an empty stomach feels like ought to make you slower to deny someone else a plate of food.
How diners treat the person bringing the first plate tonight will say more about their devotion than any fast. Going hungry for a day is the easy part. Anyone can do it when they know exactly when it ends. The harder fast is the one in which you hold back your impatience, your entitlement and your sense that the person serving you exists for your convenience.
Break the first one at moonrise. Try to keep the second all year.