Celebrating Indian Festivals While Working Abroad: A Practical Guide

The first Diwali I spent away from home, I lit a single diya on my apartment windowsill in New Jersey and sat on the floor next to it for twenty minutes, just watching the flame. My roommate — a guy from Rajasthan who'd been in the US for four years already — walked in, looked at me, and said "First year is the worst. It gets... different. Not better. Different." He was right. It does get different. I'm still not sure it gets better.

That was 2018. The apartment was tiny, one of those third-floor walk-ups where the kitchen was basically a hallway with a stove. I'd bought the diya from a small Indian grocery store in Edison that had a whole Diwali section set up — diyas, rangoli colors, little Ganesh idols, boxes of mithai that were okay but not like what you'd get at the shop near your house back home. I also bought a packet of sparklers, which I couldn't actually use because apparently setting off fireworks in an apartment complex in New Jersey is, quote, "a lease violation." My roommate found that hilarious. I did not.

The thing about Indian festivals abroad is that they exist in this strange space between celebration and mourning. You're celebrating the festival, yes, but you're also mourning the version of it you grew up with. Every Diwali here reminds me of every Diwali there. The smell of my mother's Diwali cleaning — that particular mix of Lizol and fresh marigolds. The sound of crackers starting around 4 PM and not stopping until midnight. The new clothes laid out on the bed. The way the whole neighborhood would be lit up, not just your house, so you'd step outside and everywhere you looked there was light and noise and smoke and people shouting "Happy Diwali" at each other from their balconies.

Here, you light your one diya in your apartment and close the curtains because your neighbors don't know what Diwali is and might think you're setting your apartment on fire.

Asking for Time Off (The Logistical Nightmare)

Let's talk about the practical stuff, because nobody does, and it matters. Indian festivals don't align with the American holiday calendar. Diwali doesn't show up on your company's list of paid holidays. Neither does Holi, or Navratri, or Pongal, or Onam, or Eid, or Baisakhi, or any of the festivals that structure our emotional year. You get Thanksgiving and Christmas and the Fourth of July, and that's great, but none of those are YOUR holidays in the way that matters deep down.

So you have to use your PTO. This feels weird the first time. You're spending a vacation day to celebrate a festival that, in India, would have been a national holiday where the entire country shuts down. Here, it's Tuesday. Everyone else is working. The world doesn't acknowledge that today is special. And you're burning a vacation day for it.

My advice: do it anyway. Take the day. Every single year. I used to feel guilty about "wasting" PTO on festivals instead of saving it for a "real" vacation. That's a trap. Your festivals ARE important. They're the thread connecting you to who you were before you moved here, and if you let that thread thin out too much, you'll wake up one day feeling like a stranger to yourself.

When you request the time off, keep it simple. You don't need to write a three-paragraph email explaining the mythological significance of Diwali. Just "Taking PTO on [date] for a religious holiday" is enough. If your manager asks about it (most won't, because Americans are generally cautious about asking questions related to religion), a brief "It's Diwali — the biggest festival in India, kind of like Christmas for us" gives them enough context. Most people respond positively. Some will say "Oh, Happy Diwali!" and they'll mean it. A few companies, especially those with large Indian employee populations, are starting to recognize Diwali and other festivals. Google, Microsoft, a handful of others — they'll have events, decorations, maybe catered Indian food. It's nice when that happens. It doesn't replace home, but it's nice.

Explaining Festivals to Coworkers Without Becoming the Cultural Ambassador

Here's something nobody warns you about: the moment you take a day off for Diwali, you become The Person Who Explains Indian Things. Coworkers will ask you about Diwali, which is fine. They'll also ask you about every other Indian festival for the rest of your time at that company. They'll ask you about Indian food, Bollywood, yoga, arranged marriages, "that color festival," cricket, and whether you know their other Indian friend, Priya, who lives in a completely different city.

I'm being a bit unfair. Most people ask out of genuine curiosity, and honestly, it's a good thing. It's a chance to share something you love. The tricky part is managing the energy it takes. Some days you want to enthusiastically explain the story of Rama and Sita and the significance of lights and new beginnings. Other days you just want to eat your lunch without giving a TED talk on South Asian culture. Both are valid. You don't owe anyone a cultural education just because you're Indian.

What I've found works well: bring in treats. Seriously. On Diwali, bring a box of mithai or some homemade snacks to the office. Nothing explains a festival faster than food. People eat a gulab jamun and suddenly they're interested. "What is this? This is amazing. What festival is this for? Tell me everything." Food is a universal language, and Indian food, mainly Indian sweets, is a cheat code for cultural exchange. I've converted entire teams into Diwali enthusiasts through strategic distribution of kaju katli.

Cooking Festival Food in a Tiny Apartment

Okay, let's be real about the cooking situation. If you're used to your mom's Diwali spread — the twenty different sweets, the namkeen, the special dinner — you're not replicating that in a studio apartment in San Francisco with a two-burner stove and a smoke detector that goes off if you look at it too hard.

But you can do something. And the something matters more than the scale.

My first Diwali, I tried to make besan laddoo from a YouTube recipe. I burned the besan. The entire apartment smelled like charred chickpea flour for three days. My smoke detector went off twice. The laddoos were terrible — dense and bitter and the wrong color. But I'd made them. With my own hands, in my own kitchen, six thousand miles from home. And when I bit into one, terrible as it was, I cried. Because the taste, even burned, was connected to a thousand memories of watching my grandmother make them every year, her hands moving with a speed and confidence that I'll never have.

Each year it gets easier. You figure out which recipes translate well to a small kitchen (halwa — super forgiving), which ones don't (anything deep-fried in a kitchen without proper ventilation), and which ones you should just buy from the Indian store (mithai, honestly, unless you have serious skills). You learn to plan ahead — order specialty ingredients online if your local Indian store doesn't carry everything, buy decorations in advance because they sell out, and clean the apartment the weekend before because Diwali ki safai is non-negotiable even in New Jersey.

For Holi, the cooking is simpler but the celebration is harder. You can make thandai and gujiya, sure. But playing Holi — with colors, with water, with that joyful chaos — is basically impossible unless you find a community event. More on that in a second.

Navratri is interesting because the fasting aspect actually becomes easier abroad in some ways. You're already used to cooking for yourself, you control your own kitchen, and nobody at work is going to peer at your lunch and say "Arre, you're eating THAT during Navratri?" The garba nights, though — you need a community for that. You can't do garba alone in your apartment. Well, you can, but it's just sad cardio at that point.

Onam is a festival I didn't appreciate until I was abroad. I'm not Malayali, but my college roommate was, and he invited me to an Onam celebration organized by the Kerala Association in the Bay Area during my second year in the US. The sadya was incredible — twenty-something dishes served on a banana leaf, just like back home. Watching a room full of Malayalis in mundu and kasavu saree, thousands of miles from Kerala, serving each other food and singing and performing Thiruvathira — it was one of the most beautiful things I've seen in this country. That was the day I understood why diaspora communities form around festivals. It's not just nostalgia. It's survival.

Finding Your People

The single most important thing you can do for your festival life abroad is find community. Not just Indian friends — though those help — but organized community groups that plan and execute festival celebrations. They exist in every major city and most mid-sized ones.

Start with Facebook groups. Search for "[Your City] Indians," "[Your City] Desi Community," or more specific ones like "[Your City] Telugu Association" or "[Your City] Gujarati Samaj." These groups are goldmines. They organize Diwali melas, Holi events, Navratri garba nights, Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations, Durga Puja pandals — the whole thing. The scale varies. In the Bay Area or New Jersey, these events can be massive, like thousands-of-people massive, with professional decorations and catered food and live music. In smaller cities, it might be fifty people in someone's backyard, but honestly, the smaller ones are sometimes better because they feel more intimate, more real.

Temples are another anchor point. Hindu temples in the US go all out for major festivals. The Balaji temple in Aurora, Illinois, the Ganesh Temple in Flushing, New York, the Livermore Temple in the Bay Area — these places become home during festivals. The smell of camphor and flowers, the sound of bells and mantras, the press of people in their best clothes — it's the closest you'll get to the real thing. Even if you're not particularly religious (I'm not), there's something grounding about being in a temple during Diwali. It connects you to something larger than your apartment and your job and your immigration paperwork.

If you're in a city with a large Indian population, you'll find that Diwali especially has started to bleed into mainstream awareness. Times Square lights up for Diwali now. The White House has had Diwali celebrations. Your local Indian restaurant probably does a special Diwali dinner. None of this replaces home, but it helps create a version of the festival that belongs to this new life you're building.

The Video Call Home

Every festival, you video call home. Every single one. This is non-negotiable and also terrible.

It's terrible because you see everything you're missing. The house is decorated. Your mom is wearing the good saree. Your dad has that specific festival energy where he's pretending to be annoyed by all the chaos but is clearly loving every second. If you have siblings, they're running around. Relatives have come over. There's food covering every surface of the kitchen. The TV is blasting something festive. And your entire family gathers around one phone screen to talk to you, and everyone talks at once, and your grandmother gets too close to the camera so all you see is her forehead, and someone shows you the rangoli, and someone shows you the sweets, and someone says "dekhna, tumhara favorite bana hai" and holds up a plate to the camera and you can't eat it, you can't smell it, you can't be there, and you smile and say "bohot achha hai" while your chest clenches.

After the call ends, you sit in your apartment and the silence is so loud it hurts.

I don't have advice for making this easier. It doesn't get easier. The calls get shorter over the years, not because you love your family less but because the contrast between their celebration and your quiet apartment becomes harder to hold. What I will say is: make the call. Even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts. Because the alternative — not calling, letting the distance become normal, letting festivals slide by without that connection — is worse. That's how you lose yourself.

Creating New Traditions

Something I wish someone had told me earlier: you're allowed to create new traditions. Your festivals abroad don't have to be a pale imitation of festivals back home. They can be their own thing — different but real.

My Diwali now looks nothing like my Diwali growing up. Here's what it looks like: I take the day off work. Morning, I clean the apartment — properly clean, the way my mom would (she'd still find it inadequate, but I try). I call home while my family is doing puja. I do a small puja myself — nothing elaborate, just a diya, some flowers from the grocery store, a quick prayer. Then I start cooking. I've gotten better over the years. I can do a decent halwa, passable gulab jamun (the shortcut kind, from the mix, don't judge me), and one main dish that rotates each year.

In the evening, friends come over. Indian friends, non-Indian friends, whoever wants to celebrate. Everyone brings something. Last year, my Korean-American friend brought homemade japchae "because you need noodles for a party," and my Mexican colleague brought tres leches cake, and my college friend from Jaipur brought a box of ghewar that his mom had actually shipped from India and that was, no exaggeration, the highlight of my entire year. We eat too much, we light diyas along the windowsill, we do sparklers on the balcony (I've upgraded from New Jersey), and someone always puts on a Bollywood playlist that starts with "Kal Ho Na Ho" and ends, inevitably, at 1 AM, with everyone singing "Chaiyya Chaiyya."

It's not the same as home. It will never be the same as home. But it's become its own thing — a Diwali that belongs to this chapter of my life, with people who've become family in their own way.

For Holi, we go to one of the community events or, in years where there isn't one nearby, we buy colors from the Indian store and make a mess in someone's backyard. It's always smaller than Holi back home. No processions, no DJ on a truck, no entire neighborhoods drenched in color from morning to night. But there's thandai and there are colors on people's faces and there's laughing and for an hour or two the homesickness retreats.

Navratri, I go to garba if there's one nearby. The organized garba events in the US are actually incredible — some of them fly in musicians from India, the venues are decorated beautifully, and seeing hundreds of people in chaniya choli doing garba in a convention center in, like, Dallas, is wild and wonderful and a little surreal. If there's no garba nearby, I at least fast and cook special food and play garba music in the apartment and do a few steps alone in my kitchen, which sounds pathetic but actually feels sacred in its own small way.

When November Comes and It's Not Diwali

The hardest thing about festivals abroad is the calendar mismatch. Diwali falls somewhere in October or November, which is when America is ramping up for Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas. You're in the minority celebration. The stores are full of pumpkins and turkeys, not diyas and rangoli. The energy of the country is pointing toward a different set of traditions, and you're swimming against the current.

Some years, Diwali falls during a particularly busy work period and you feel the pressure not to take the day off. Some years, you're so exhausted from work that you don't have the energy to cook or clean or organize anything. Some years, you just... let it pass. You light a diya, make a quick call home, and go to bed. And then feel guilty about it for weeks.

I want to say that's okay, and I think it is, intellectually. But emotionally, every festival you let slip feels like a tiny erosion. A piece of you that thins out. And you wonder, if you skip enough of them, at what point do you stop being the person who celebrates them? At what point does the festival become just a date on a calendar, a thing you used to do, a story you tell your kids about your childhood instead of a living tradition you share with them?

This is why I push myself to celebrate even when I don't feel like it. Even when it's just me and a diya and a phone call. Because the act of celebrating — imperfectly, incompletely, alone in an apartment in a country that doesn't know it's a special day — is an act of insistence. I'm insisting that this part of me still exists, that I'm still connected, that I haven't been fully absorbed into a culture that isn't mine.

I think about home a lot during festivals. Not in a dramatic, weeping way (most of the time). More in a background hum way. Like there's a frequency playing that only you can hear, a signal from across the ocean that gets stronger around Diwali and Holi and Navratri. And you can't always tune into it fully because you're busy with work and groceries and laundry and life. But it's there. It's always there.

My roommate from 2018, the one who said "it gets different" — he moved back to India last year. Got a good job in Bangalore. I called him on Diwali and he was at his parents' house and I could hear the crackers and the music and his mom yelling at him to get off the phone and come eat. He sounded happy. Not different-happy. Just happy. The real kind, the uncomplicated kind, the kind that comes from being where you belong on a night when belonging matters most.

I'm still here. Lighting my diyas on the windowsill, cooking halwa in my now slightly-bigger kitchen, calling home, gathering friends, creating traditions that are mine. And every year I wonder — is this home now? Is this where I —