Deepavali Eternal: The Lamps Lit Forever
On the evening of Deepavali, as the city had celebrated for centuries, lamps were lit from the city center outward. This year, like every year before, the ritual was performed—merchants forgiving debts, families gathering across boundaries of labor and status, the city pausing to remember what it cared about and recommitting to it.
But this year, something new happened. People who had moved to cities in the network brought the festival with them, and those cities lit lamps too. And cities that had heard of the practice through stories and the historian's accounts decided to begin their own versions, adapted to their circumstances but carrying the same intention: a moment of remembrance, a ceremony of recommitment, a gathering around the principle that each person is a light and the city's glory is in the lighting of all lights together.
A child, no older than five, asked her grandmother why they lit lamps. The grandmother, whose own grandmother had been young when Pradyumna still governed, began not with abstract principles but with a story: "Long ago, a leader came and asked the city: what do we truly value? And we discovered that we value each person's light. So we light lamps to remember that every person matters, and every light matters. When all the lights are lit, the city can see itself clearly, and in seeing itself, it remembers what it is."
The child asked: "Will we always light lamps?" The grandmother paused, and in that pause lay wisdom. "As long as the city remembers why," she said. "And the city remembers because we tell the stories, and we light the lamps, and our children ask why, and we answer by telling the stories again. If we stop telling the stories or stop asking why, the lamps might still be lit, but they would be empty. But I think—I hope—that someone will always ask why. And someone will always have an answer."
In that conversation between grandmother and child lay the secret that Dvaraka had discovered and continually rediscovered: that tradition survives not through enforcement but through love, that values persist not through monuments but through the living practice of choosing them again, that the city endures because each generation encounters it afresh and decides, often through struggle and questioning, that these are the principles worth keeping.
As darkness deepened and lamps multiplied—in Dvaraka and in the network of cities beyond it, in gardens and marketplaces and homes, in the hearts of those who lit them and those who watched them burn—the light wrote a message that had been constant for centuries: We choose this. We choose to value each person. We choose dignity over domination. We choose participation over passivity. We choose, and in choosing, we continue. The lamps burned bright, and in their burning, a city lived—imperfect, struggling, questioning, and beautiful. Not a kingdom that had arrived at permanence but a community committed to the endless work of becoming itself, generation after generation, lamp by lamp, choice by choice, story by story, forever.