Dreaming of a Brown Christmas

Our Christmas celebration last year at my in-laws’ place. Pic/Rosalyn D’Mello

Mid-December has become synonymous with homesickness. I begin to miss my mother's anxiety about the sweet spread. I start to romanticise my childhood memories of her returning from her 12-hour day shift as a private nurse to orchestrate the making of kuswar. When we were very young, this was a time we were allowed to sleep late, and it had its own thrills. It was also exhilarating to be included in the process, to watch my mother's fingers roll a kulkul off one of the red combs we would have borrowed from a neighbour and try to mimic those movements. We listened to Christmas carols and the house always had a special fragrance. On some days you could trace it to the guavas that had been boiled for perad, on others it was the rich ricey scent of dodol, or the deep-fried caramelised goodness of nevris.

Yesterday my youngest niece sent a video of one of my brothers folding the semi-circular edges of a nevri. He was seated at the wooden kitchen table that has been a witness to all our childhoods, my mother nearby, closely supervising. I had instant flashbacks of being part of this inner circle, feeling so proficient with my fingers, and participating in the feeling of pride on Christmas day when we finally laid out all the sweets we had so lovingly and collectively made to offer our non-Christian neighbours and visitors.

Christmas is so intricately bound to my childhood and adolescence; it is impossible for me to isolate it to a specific gesture or ritual or memory. Since my sister and I joined the children's choir when we were barely eight or nine, so much of our influential years were spent rehearsing carols, practising the duets we were tasked with performing, besides helping out at home and in the colony. It was a moment of intense collectiveness. We spent so much time in the church compound even as we grew older and graduated to singing in the grown-up choir and were part of the youth group. I suspect, sometimes, that this is why no other church has ever felt as inviting to me or has ever been able to replicate that feeling of community.

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This contributes to the dislocation I have begun to experience every December since I moved to Tramin. I am, unarguably, in the ‘homeland' of Christmas, here in the Alps, where all the trees are Tannenbaums, fir trees grown especially for the season, and all the decorations from the wreaths to the mistletoe are real, not plastic. Every evening there is a vigil in the church that features different musicians. A week ago, there was a harpist and a flautist. Projected on the façade are alternating excerpts from the bible. Advent wreaths are a serious game here. Every year volunteers are enlisted to make them so they can be sold, so that the proceeds go to charity. There's a lovely Christmas market every December 8 in an old farm courtyard in an area of Tramin called Bethlehem. From the beginning of Advent until the end there is a little canopied booth in the town square that serves Glühwein (mulled wine); a spot for conviviality and warmth (they have gas heaters). The choir that sings for the Christmas mass is phenomenal. We may have practised every day for hours back in Kurla, but we never sounded this magical (of course, the church acoustics contributes significantly).

When I sing carols to our child during naptime, I feel alerted to the dislocated nature of each one. "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know": I sang to him just half an hour ago, and I had to laugh, because I never knew white Christmases, only tufts of cotton that we would spread out so it was gauzy thin on the tree and evoked the idea of condensation. I never witnessed chestnuts roasting as a child either, and yet the song, especially the Nat King Cole version, was an anthem my sister and I sang together, frequently, and it held for us the immensity of all the moods that Christmas represented. For us, it was never about gifts, because gifts were usually last-minute affairs. My parents would go a day before Christmas Eve (sometimes even hours before the mass) to Ghatkopar and pick up things for us so the space below our plastic tree was not empty. Our anticipation was fuelled by other things - would the wheat we sowed in mud grow tall enough to form the grass for the home crib or would the colony's star be hung up on time, or who would host the afterparty after mass. As we grew older, the nature of our anxieties changed. We would discuss for hours the particulars of our lunch menu and go to the Kalina market joyously looking for exotic salad ingredients.

This evening it is scheduled to snow, and our child will experience his first white Christmas. I already wonder if he will ever know what a Brown Christmas is like, or if it will be the stuff of fantasy because of all the stories I will tell him about my childhood in Kurla. For the third year in a row, I am refraining from making sweets. I have decided to wait until he is old enough to be able to make them with me. By then our bounty will perhaps be a fusion of Bombay Goan kuswar and Traminer kekse; likely a first for South Tyrol.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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