A single diya flickers in warm homes in Mississauga, Brampton, Scarborough, and throughout our GTA. Its small flame is welcoming family members arriving from the autumn chill outside for Diwali celebrations within.

This tiny diya travelled across continents and centuries, from the Port of Calcutta in India across the Atlantic with our Indentured ancestors. Still a humble clay vessel, it is prominent in the bamboo-arched splendour of the Divali Nagar in Trinidad, at the Grand Deep Jale Diwali celebration at the Kitty Seawall Roundabout in Georgetown; and, today, in our diaspora homes from Queen Street, Toronto, to Queens, New York.

Diwali continues to mark our renewal, resilience, and moral clarity. For our ancestors uprooted from India and replanted in the Caribbean’s cane fields, Diwali’s light continued to shine in their homes and lives, where it transformed memory into ritual, and loss into celebration.

In our ancestors’ nurturing hands, Diwali became not only a symbol of faith, but an act of reclamation, an assertion that culture, despite being uprooted, could still take root and thrive inside hardship.

Today, as our Indo-Caribbean community lights diyas here in the GTA, Diwali again affirms its larger truth: that even in displacement, humanity carries within it the spark of home. Our diaspora’s celebration is more than remembrance: it is a continuity of spirit, proof that light endures through displacement, and that heritage, shared across oceans, can illuminate the multicultural fabric of nations like Canada.

Yet even as our diyas glow across our cities, the world trembles under gathering dark clouds. In the Caribbean, anxieties rise over militarisation and the border dispute with Guyana being incited by Venezuela, reviving colonial echoes of power and possession. Caricom nations warn that regional peace, and livelihoods bound to tourism and trade, are being put in danger.

Globally, the Israel-Hamas war continues to devastate, with Gaza suffering from tremendous loss of lives, facing the horrors of famine, its cities leveled by inexorable bombardment.

Meanwhile, the attack on the Ukraine by Russia grinds on into its fourth year; alliances are fluid, and another winter of war and hardship lies ahead for the millions of displaced lives.

Each of these crises marks a different form of darkness: political, moral, spiritual. They remind us that the age of reason still stumbles before the primal shadow of conquest and revenge. And yet, even here, the message of Diwali persists: light must not retreat merely because darkness multiplies in our turbulent world.

Against such a backdrop, Diwali’s meaning feels newly urgent. The diya, humble and enduring, asks not only that we banish darkness from our homes, but that we confront it within ourselves: belligerence, envy, anger, apathy. Its glow is both private meditation and public call; that we act with kindness, generosity, and reconciliation in restoring balance; that we hold compassion as our highest offering.

We should not dismiss such symbolism as gentle sentiment in what is becoming more and more a materialist world of hard power, acquisition, and appropriation. Let us not forget that history shows moral imagination often lights the first path toward change. Our past evidences that empires do fall, not always by force, but by the slow illumination of conscience.

For our Indo-Caribbean diaspora, Diwali invites reflection on how inherited resilience can guide us through today’s uncertainty. The same light that steadied our forebears through storms of history now calls us to illuminate our fractured present in building community, bridging divides, and being the first to extend a hand in darkness.

In a time when the world’s map is being set ablaze with weapons’ fire, Diwali reminds us that each diya lit in sincerity diminishes despair. Let the millions of diyas, lit in Trinidad, Guyana, New York, and the GTA, become not merely symbols but a constellation of hope guiding us toward a gentler, more luminous, and peaceful world.