Hindu religious festival

My first weekend in Chennai, I've had a multitude of experiences unlike anything I've ever seen before, but I'll focus on one for now. Last night, my roommate and I were wandering out looking for something to eat (not Indian food, for once). On the way, we passed an interesting-looking gathering of a bunch of people in front of a Hindu temple building three large fires. Some kids told us that someone was going to walk across the fire. That kind of hooked us, so we decided to stay around and see what would happen.

I'm glad we did, because we ended up being sort of taken in by one of the priests' families. They had us come inside the temple -- I had never seen the inside of one, and it wasn't what I expected, relatively small, with no seating that I could see and a shrine in the back. I was impressed by the kindness of these people and how willing they were to have us as guests -- no one wanted money from us for sitting there, or for taking pictures. It's terrible to expect they would, but I guess I'm already used to being seen as the white foreigner who had enough money to buy a plane ticket to India, and must have 50 extra rupees to spend on an overpriced autorickshaw ride. It was just nice to not be on my guard for once, to feel like someone was being genuine. One thing I do regret is that I never caught what the festival's meaning was; Indian English can be tough to understand, especially above the din of music coming from loudspeakers. I got the impression that the ceremony was the end of a three-day festival that comes in the middle of a 10-week fasting period, but I could definitely be wrong. We did actually end up seeing a youngish man (and a few others) walk -- actually, hop -- across the coals, after much preparation and pomp and circumstance.

Later that night, or rather the next morning, I heard extremely loud drums that I actually thought was a thunderstorm at first, but it could have been part of the same festival. The drumming and light music continued in the street for a few hours, until about 6am. This is one of the lessons I'm learning: some things just don't make that much sense here on first impression, and you can't really question them or try to apply logic to them.