Easter, Christmas, India: Those were the Days! Kerala Memoirs: Autobiographies about growing up in the culture of Malayalam

KERALA Journal

Celebrations: A Boy's Easter, And Christmas, too
by Thomas Palakeel
originally published in The Critic (Chicago) and Grand Forks Herald

On the first day of December, my mother woke me up early
in the morning and sent me on to church to start making
my spiritual bouquet for Christmas: a potpourri of
twenty-five days of church attendance, one-hundred good
thoughts, twenty-five rosaries, fifty abstinences,
twelve acts of forgiveness, and twelve good deeds. This
bouquet was to be my gift to Infant Jesus, in gratitude
of all the blessings of the year.
     Every morning, I would spring up from my bed and
start preparing for my journey to the church, imagining
I was a little magi, wearing a jewelled turban and
flowing garments, riding a camel, bringing a great gift
for the holy child. I had heard a rumor that actually
one of the three wise men had gone to Bethlehem from
India where I was born. If it were so, I suspected the
magi might have passed through our Thidanad village.
     "The bouquet is what matters in a Christmas,"
mother said to me, dressing me up in the crisp,
starched, lily white shirt and the shorts that I wore
for my first holy communion the past summer. And I
started off on the first of the 25 trips to the church
that foggy morning.
     Though the stones in the unpaved road bit into my
bare feet, I went on cheerfully, hopping over the stone
fences with the easy leap of a goat, thinking I was
walking on snow. Why not? In those chilly mornings,
the lush foliage of rubber, cocoa, banana, coffee,
coconut, and tapioca appeared like a mass of snow to me.
Green snow, I would tell myself. In my Christmas card
collection, I had preserved many snow covered arctic
scenes of St. Nicolas and the reindeer and boys my age
playing in the snow that looked like a bed of jasmine
flowers.
     How I envied those boys who were fortunate to walk
on such vast expanses of snow! Eventually when I got to
live in Cheney, Washington, and Grand Forks, North
Dakota, the first snow of the winter used to make my
mouth water, remembering my snow fantasies. So potent
and appetizing were those imagined sights and smells of
snow that in those morning treks through the winter
landscape of my mind, I was able to venture out onto the
farther shores with a great sense of abandonment. And I
learned to go a long distance with few resources. Now I
am amused to remember that the light fog of December was
the closest we ever came to the Christmassy winter scene
on our tropical land. In Malayalam the word for fog and
snow are the same.
     As I made the first of the 25 trips to the church,
I remembered all my failures and illnesses of the past.
The Christmas of 1968 was my first one after I had
gotten back on the normal path, my mother reminded me.
     My close friends had sprinted ahead of me into the
daily routines of the life of a typical Roman Catholic
Syrian Christian of Apostle Thomas. They had long
abandoned their paper crowns and the white shirts and
the grimy white canvas shoes they received for their
first holy communion. They looked taller, inaccessible.
     They laughed among themselves, telling each other
that my intelligence was below room temperature, so to
speak. I heard what they said. It did hurt me. And I
decided not to leave my brain lukewarm anymore.
     "We need the Infant's blessings, Thomaskutty,"
mother would tell me, adding a fond suffix to my name
which made me feel like she was constructing more room
in my brain, and of course, more room temperature.
     On my return from the church that morning, I began
dreaming up plans for a grand celebration. In the
spirit of the magi, I planned to transform our mango
tree into a glittering constellation of stars. That
evening itself, I went over to the riverside with a
machete and cut out half a dozen bamboo sticks that
lined the river's edge. I was going to build stars with
my bare hands.
    "Why start so early, my boy? Isn't Christmas a
whole month away?" A man who always sat at the river's
edge with his fishing-rod asked.
    "It takes two weeks to dry. And I want'em to bend
like a beltsword," I said to him.
    The sticks dried up promptly as I worked on
accumulating good thoughts and good deeds. Performing
good deeds proved to be too easy and I did lose interest
in such acts as getting the sugar from the cupboard for
my mother or taking a jug of coffee for the workers in
the field or volunteering to carry lunch for my father
and brother in town. Why would the holy child be
impressed with such boring good deeds?
    I began to yearn for a remarkably good deed, even a
great deed, like jumping into the river to save a
drowning boy. Unfortunately no boy was drowning in
those shallow waters.
     Observing abstinence was not difficult either. I
abstained from meat, fish, eggs, sweets. And I bravely
abstained from indulging in the visual enjoyment of
staring at an occasional car or an elephant that passed
up and down the road. I could just close my eyes to
something beautiful and the deed would qualify as
abstinence in the name of the holy child.
     After the bamboo dried up, I split each of them
into several thin sticks, expending all the arithmetic
in my possession. The first step in making the star was
to build large equilateral triangles out of the sticks,
tying up the corners with rubber bands; two such
triangles made the frame for a six-edged star. I joined
together the two frames at the edges, and surprise, you
got a three-dimensional star which could be decorated
with polyethylene papers in yellow, red, green, blue.
     Inside each star, I lit an oil lamp improvised out
of ink-bottles. The magic of electricity did not arrive
in our deadend corner during my childhood, leaving it up
to me the burden of illuminating the Christmas nights.
I told myself that when Mr.Electricity reached our home,
I would put up a real starry show, illuminating every
tree on our four acres. I did not understand why Cousin
KK would not want electric light in his house, though
the lines passed right by his house.
     That year I felt so inventive, I made a beautiful
five-edged star, and a long-tailed comet, with a
combination of isosceles triangles and equilateral
triangles. By the middle of December I hoisted the
stars, the first of the season in our village. The very
first.
     One huge star hung from the top of the Chinese roof
of our ancient house, another one illuminated from atop
a coconut tree, a third one glimmered at the end of a
bamboo pole at the gate, and the comet glowed right
above the grotto. I knew that everyone who walked past
our house in the night, would marvel at the starry sky
above our house.
     A week before Christmas I started constructing a
manger scene. I transformed the lower branches of the
mango tree into a grotto by bundling it up the with
newspapers blackened with charcoal paste.
     Upon his return home from the store that night,
even my father admitted that the newspapers looked
really like boulders, as if a grotto had sprung up there
out of the earth. However, he was not inspired to
provide me with the much-needed funds to complete the
celebrations in the right Christmas spirit. To purchase
the expensive firecrackers, colorful lamps, spangles,
chocolates and other items for the Christmas tree.
     I kept working on the manger scene inside the
grotto, weaving a cavernous structure out of the famous
Christmas grass, the silky kind that we saw in the
paintings of the manger scene. This grass sprang up all
over our village just around Christmas time.
     My sister Molly pointed out this fact as a proof of
the miracle of Christmas.
     On the first day of the Christmas week, I filled up
the manger with little clay images of the Holy Child,
Joseph and Mary, the shepherds and lambs, the good
donkey eager to smuggle out the Holy Child to Egypt, and
my favorites, the three wise men from the East. I used
a standing coffee plant as my Christmas tree. I snowed
the branches by hanging shreds of white paper and masses
of cotton.
     However, even a day before Christmas Eve, I was way
behind in several of the grand schemes: First, I still
couldn't convince my brothers or my father to give me
money for the pyrotechnical wonder I had been promising
my friends, and second, my mother kept reminding me that
I was lagging behind in filling up the spiritual
bouquet. I had the rosaries and the church attendance
all right, but not enough of quality abstinences, for I
was stubbornly demanding money for firecrackers. And
where were the good deeds? I had none.
     As I reflected on my condition, sitting on the
veranda, leaning my back on one of the three wooden
columns that supported the roof of our house, I heard
mother and her friend talk about the Granny on the hill,
the ninety year old woman whom all the boys feared for
some reason.
     Granny had two sons. They always fought with
Granny, and they had abandoned her and moved away. I
liked her sons; one of them was a great portrait painter
and I used to hang out near his veranda, which he used
as his portrait studio. He was such a painstaking
artist and I thought maybe he was the best in the world.
He could do a portrait better than a camera.
     When my brother Jacob said that somebody won a big
world award for painting a picture called "Crying
Woman", particularly after seeing the winning-picture in
a magazine (an old man named Picasso drew it!), I
thought it was unfair the Granny's son didn't win it; he
could have done it a thousand times better.
     "Will her sons take her away this Christmas?"
Mother asked her friend.
     "No," mother's friend said, chewing betel leaves.
     "It's unheard of in the good old days," Mother
said. "To let an old woman live alone like that."
     "Isn't that so? It's awful. This world." Mother's
friend spat out the red betel juice. She mentioned that
her son own Jose, who did odd jobs around the village,
went up to Granny's hut and fetched water and firewood
for her. The old woman always asked Jose to bring her
wild lentils. That was all she ate, boiled lentils with
a dash of salt; nobody ate that particular variety of
lentils, not even cattle.
     "I will take her some lentils," I volunteered after
mother's friend had left. She was not enthusiastic, for
I would have to walk alone through a bush and then take
a rather deserted trail up the hill to Granny's.
     That night I thought about Granny and her sons as
much as I pined away about my failing dreams about
fireworks and my inability do a good deed. I felt a
deep sadness, the same kind I felt when I walked
barefoot to the church for my first communion. I
remember to the day, that I was the only boy who did not
have the white canvas shoes. Father insisted that such
things were not important. And my mother agreed.
     As I became unusually quiet on the most beautiful
day of the year, my mother prepared a small sack of wild
lentils and sent me to Granny's. The lonely hike
through the trail was not frightening at all, and I got
to see a large untouched patch of the miraculous
Christmas grass, just like it was portrayed in the
paintings by the masters of the art.
     As I reached the top of the hill, I saw a hut
before me. A dog slept in the corner of the veranda.
The poor animal opened its eyes once and went back to
sleep. I stood there with the sack of lentils balanced
on my head, calling out, "Granny, Granny, I'am here with
the lentils."
     A few minutes later, I heard some stirrings inside
the hut. A thin woman drifted out toward the veranda,
rubbing her deep set eyes, her short, white hair flaming
around an oval face untouched by age.
     She looked disoriented, as if awaken from a dream.
     I laid the sack of lentils at her feet and stood
erect, ready to be recognized for my good deed.
     "Who are you?" Granny mumbled.
     "I'm the Palakeel boy!" I said.
     "Oh, my dear child. You've come to see me. I knew
that you'd come for this Christmas."
     It was clear that she was mistaking me for one of
her grandsons. I wanted to run away.
     "Come inside, come inside, my child. Oh, he has
come with lentils," Granny said dragging the little sack
diagonally across the veranda.
     "I've to rush home, Granny," I said aloud, running
down the hill. I ran all the way home.
     That Christmas night, we didn't have firecrackers
exploding over our roof, but on my way back from the
midnight mass, I stood in the middle of the road and
watched my comet glimmering above the grotto. Imagine a
comet made with my own hands. The shreds of white crepe
paper and fluffy cotton on the Christmas tree swayed in
the cold breeze. And I felt it was real snow.
continued

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