After Diwali, Before Halloween: How We Can Learn to Live With the Dark

By Prasad Kaipa

Last week, my South Bay neighborhood glowed with rows of clay lamps for Diwali. This week, carved pumpkins have taken their place on the same porches. One greets darkness with flame; the other, with laughter.

At first they seem opposite — one sacred, one playful — but both arise from the same human instinct: when the nights grow long, we look for ways not to escape the dark but to live with it.

I’ve lived in the Bay Area since 1987, when I moved from Salt Lake City to join Apple after several years teaching physics at the University of Utah. My son was born in Salt Lake City, my daughter in California, and I’ve watched both them and this region grow more diverse, complex, and luminous in their own ways.

Diwali holds many meanings in India. For some, it marks the return of Rama after defeating the demon Ravana. In the South, it celebrates the goddess Lakshmi and Satya Bhama’s victory over Narakasura — a continuation of the “women’s power” honored during the preceding festival of Dasara. For merchants it is the new year, for families a time of renewal. Whether celebrated as victory, prosperity, or feminine strength, Diwali always circles back to one question: how do we bring light into our lives without denying the dark?

This year, that question feels especially alive. Across the world, wars rage and loneliness deepens. Our screens glow brighter than ever, yet our inner light feels dim.

These twin festivals — Diwali and Halloween — arriving within days of each other, offer a shared wisdom: we cannot banish darkness; we can only learn to see within it.

The Boy Who Asked Death About Light

An Upanishadic Indian story tells of a boy named Nachiketa. When his father, in a moment of anger, sent him to the realm of death, the boy waited three nights before Yama, the god of death, appeared. Yama offered him anything — wealth, long life, pleasure — but Nachiketa refused. “What remains,” he asked, “when everything ends?”

Finally, Yama revealed that the true self — the ātman — is not what dies but the light that sees through death itself.

That is what Diwali celebrates: not decoration, but discernment. The courage to face fear rather than flee it. To choose what the Upanishads call śreyas, the good, over preyas, the merely pleasant.

When I first heard this story as a child, I thought it was about bravery. Now I hear in it something gentler: fear does not disappear; it transforms when held with awareness.

The Night of Masks

Halloween carries the same lesson, though it wears a grin. Long before candy and costumes, it was Samhain, the Celtic festival marking the year’s dark half. People lit bonfires and wore masks to make peace with unseen spirits. Today, children knock on strangers’ doors, playing with fear rather than denying it.

The psychologist Carl Jung might have called it “befriending the shadow.” We laugh at what haunts us so it won’t control us. That laughter is not trivial — it is spiritual. For one night, the neighborhood becomes a commons of courage.

Halloween teaches what Diwali remembers: that light and darkness are partners, not enemies.

A Family of Lights

My own family in the South Bay reflects that mingling of light and shadow. My daughter, born here, moved to Austin for a few years but returned to the Bay Area to rediscover its diversity and sense of belonging. My son is a special education teacher in Mountain View and lives in Boulder Creek, surrounded by redwoods and students who remind him daily that learning requires patience and grace.

My daughter-in-law is Salvadoran American, and our two little granddaughters — who call Diwali “the sparkle festival” — already love both costumes and clay lamps. When they light diyas with us, I see in their faces what the future of California looks like: playful, plural, and radiant.

Their laughter reminds me that joy, too, is a form of courage — a way of saying to the world, we belong to each other.

Relearning How to Shine

Our relationship with light has grown distorted. We equate brightness with goodness, visibility with worth, constant optimism with wisdom. But relentless brightness blinds. It leaves no room for reflection.

The lamp, by contrast, burns because darkness surrounds it. Its glow has meaning precisely because the night exists. The point of Diwali is not to erase the dark but to restore balance — to remind us that even the smallest flame changes the nature of the room.

Perhaps that is what the world needs now: not more brilliance, but braver light — light that acknowledges its shadow.

A Shared Invitation

So this week, whether you light a lamp or open your door to a ghost, pause for a moment. Feel the darkness around you — not as threat, but as teacher.

Ask yourself: What fear have I been running from? What truth waits inside it?

You don’t need grand rituals to answer. A single candle on a quiet evening will do. Light it not to chase shadows away but to welcome them home.

Because the real festival is not outside. It begins in the heart that refuses to be hardened, in the mind that can hold both shadow and flame.

The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, one of the world’s oldest prayers, ends with a simple plea:

From untruth, lead me to truth.

From darkness, lead me to light.

From death, lead me to immortality.

That prayer still fits our times.

Diwali and Halloween may look nothing alike, but both remind us of the same ancient wisdom: we don’t outshine the dark — we befriend it.

And when we do, the light we kindle is no longer fragile. It belongs to everyone.