Halloween is not something I grew up with. It wasn’t part of my childhood in India—no plastic pumpkins, no ghosts in gauze, no kids running door to door in capes. The only ghosts we spoke of were the ones in our grandmother’s stories, and they didn’t hand out chocolate. It entered my life only after I moved to the United States, one of the many small rituals of assimilation I adopted to feel rooted in this new soil. Over the years, though, Halloween has grown on me—not just as a holiday, but as a marker of belonging.
At first, I watched from a distance, puzzled by the enthusiasm that surrounded cobwebbed front porches and candy corn. But parenthood has a way of drawing you in. My children were the bridge. I still remember their first Halloween costumes—one a reluctant pumpkin, the other a determined superhero. Somewhere between one lopsided jack-o-lantern and another, I realized I had crossed over. Halloween had found me.
It’s funny how a borrowed tradition can end up feeling like home. For me, Diwali and Halloween now share the same season—and oddly, the same spirit. Both are festivals of light. One celebrates the victory of good over evil, the other celebrates the victory of imagination over adulthood. Both involve candles and costumes, sweets and stories, and both remind me that joy wears many disguises.
In India, our festivals are tied to harvests and gods, to the rhythms of the moon and the weight of ancestry. Halloween, by contrast, felt untethered—playful, even rebellious. And maybe that’s what I came to love about it. It’s a night when everyone gets to be someone—or something—else. A night that celebrates transformation, imagination, and the sweet, shared absurdity of it all.
Now, as an empty nester, Halloween feels different. There are no costumes strewn across the floor, no last-minute scrambles for glue or glitter. But when the doorbell rings and a crowd of children shouts, “Trick or treat!” I feel a quiet joy. I see the little faces of my own children from years ago—and maybe a glimpse of the young woman I once was, learning how to belong in a new world.
My front door…ready to greet trick-or-treaters
Sometimes, I still carve a pumpkin, even if just one. It sits on the porch, its grin lopsided, candle flickering through the fall dusk. It’s a small ritual now, a nod to all the versions of myself that have lived here—the outsider, the mother, the writer, the woman who found her place between cultures. To the ghosts of homes left behind, and to the new traditions that sneak up on us until they, too, feel like ours.
