You will find them in December.
There's a wedding in Kankarbagh. You pull the good kurta off the hanger, hold it up to the tubelight, and there they are. Three small holes near the right cuff. Round. Hard little edges. You don't remember catching it on anything.
You didn't. That was Diwali. That was a phuljhadi someone waved past your arm on the terrace while you were looking at the sky.
A spark doesn't burn polyester. It melts it.
Most of the festival kurtas sold around Patna Market and Hathwa Market are polyester, or a poly-cotton mix. Under shop lights they look like silk. They cost eight hundred rupees. They also behave like plastic, because that is what they are.
Cotton meets a spark and chars. You get a brown edge, a little ash, and the ash brushes off. Half the time the cloth survives.
Polyester meets a spark and runs away from it. The fibre shrinks back and hardens into a tiny bead around a perfect round hole. That bead is why the hole never closes, and why a darner can never quite hide it. The cloth isn't torn. It's gone.
This is also why the iron makes it worse. Heat on a melt bead spreads it and flattens it into a shiny patch wider than the hole was. If you find one, keep the iron off it. Get a patch put behind it from the inside instead.
What to wear on the terrace
Wear cotton on the night you'll be standing near anaars. A cotton kurta, a cotton dupatta. Keep the shiny one for the next evening, for the visits and the mithai and the photos.
A loose synthetic dupatta is the worst thing on a Diwali terrace. It floats. It finds flame, and it goes up fast. Pin it down or leave it inside.
One more thing. Deodorant and body spray are alcohol in a can. Spray, then lean over a chakri, and you have made a decision you cannot take back. Spray first, dress after, give it two minutes.
The smell isn't smoke. It's sulphur.
For three or four days after, your clothes smell of gunpowder. That is potassium nitrate and sulphur residue sitting in the weave, along with the smoke of every terrace in your lane. Spraying perfume over it produces something worse than either.
Air them first. Hang everything in the morning sun for two hours before it goes anywhere near a bucket. Sun and moving air break most of it down. Then wash, with half a mug of white vinegar in the rinse water for what's left. Detergent on its own doesn't touch that smell.
What you must not do is fold them into the almirah straight off the terrace. The smell sets, it moves into the cotton next to it, and by Chhath every folded thing in that almirah carries a trace of the same night.
The stains you can't see yet
Diya oil is the quiet one. Mustard or til oil, a small splash on the hem while you were lighting the row along the parapet. It dries clear. You see nothing. You fold the kurta away happy.
Eight weeks later there is a yellow-brown patch shaped like nothing in particular, and it will not come out. Oil oxidises in storage. That patch was there on Diwali night. It just hadn't turned colour yet.
Same story for the kheer, the ghee off a laddoo, the oily fingers you wiped on your own kurta twice without thinking.
Treat it the night you take it off. Talcum powder or maida on the spot, twenty minutes, brush it off. Then a drop of dishwashing liquid worked in with your thumb, then a normal wash. Dishwashing liquid is built for oil. Surf isn't.
Candle wax
Scrape the hardened wax off with the back of a spoon. Don't pull it, you'll take threads with it.
Then lay plain brown paper over the spot and press it with a warm iron for a few seconds. The paper drinks the wax. Change the paper and repeat until nothing more comes up. Whatever remains is dye, not wax, and detergent handles dye.
Never start with the iron. Heat on unscraped wax drives it deeper into the weave and you'll be looking at that mark for years.
Ten minutes, that night
Before you sleep, turn everything inside out and look at the cuffs, the hem and the front of the kurta under a bright light. Find the holes while there is still time to get them repaired properly. Set aside anything with oil on it instead of throwing it on the pile. Hang the rest out to air rather than dropping it on the chair.
If you'd rather not deal with any of it at one in the morning, put it in a bag and we'll collect it from Boring Road, Kankarbagh, Rajendra Nagar or Patliputra the next day, before the almirah gets a chance to set the smell.
Ten minutes on Diwali night. Or a surprise in December, at a wedding, with nothing you can do about it.
That's the whole choice.