Gudi Padwa at Tiny Tots

Gudi Padwa is the Marathi new year, and it arrives in spring with a bright doorway: a bamboo
pole, a length of silk, neem and mango leaves, a garland of sugar crystals and an inverted
copper pot on top. Every street in Talegaon has one up by nine in the morning.

Raising our own

We raise a gudi in the garden, deliberately low — at a height the children can reach, tie
things to and stand next to. A festival object at adult height is decoration; at child height it
is theirs.

They tie the cloth, thread the garland and argue at length about the arrangement of the mango
leaves. Then everybody stands underneath it and looks pleased.

Neem and jaggery

The tradition is to eat neem leaves with jaggery: bitter with sweet, together, at the start of
the year. The children are told exactly why — the year will have both in it — and
they get a very small piece of neem with a considerably larger piece of gul.

The faces are magnificent. Roughly a third refuse outright, which is allowed. Nobody is made to
eat anything, and the ones who try it are extremely proud of themselves for the rest of the day.

Rangoli

Rangoli at the doorway, drawn by the children with coloured powder, is one of the better fine
motor exercises of the year without pretending to be anything but a decoration: a pinch of
powder released in a controlled trickle is exactly the grip and control a pencil later needs.

Why we mark a new year in March

Children in Maharashtra grow up with several new years — the calendar one, the financial
one, the school one, and this one. Marking Gudi Padwa says that the one their grandparents keep
counts here too, which for a small child is a quiet but real message about whether they belong
in the building.

The gudi stays up all day. By home time somebody has tied a shoelace to it.