Kezha
(A corner of) Gujarat
As a boy Christmas was the best time of the year – all the good things of the year added and multiplied upon these days. To state it in a more timely connotation, it was ‘simply rocking’. I could write through this whole newspaper edition about my boyhood Xmases. Without satisfaction. Then you grow up and things all around you change. You change. But one thing didn’t. Christmas IS still the best time of the year. Provided you are at the right place when the Yuletide arrives (?).
Celebrating Xmas amidst garlands made of the pungent Marigold (a flower that reminds me of the Durga Puja more than anything else), tabla taps with you-hardly-know-what tunes, bonfire-less nights seemed no celebration at all! Add to that a “vegetarian” Christmas with musicians who desperately need music lessons, out-of-tune carols in a language you can only guess at, senior Church Choirs that our Sunday School choir would easily embarrass, strumming your guitar all alone in your room singing ‘Silent Night, Lonely Night’ (did I get that right?) and ‘celebration’ is out of your dictionary!! And there’s more.
From a hillstation that these nights would look like a ripen plum tree, (only with a thousand more fruits) to a city that’s simply dead to Christmas… a different Christmas, indeed. Starless homes, festoon-less streets, truck tires screeching all night instead of Xmas music blasting away, campfires – a rarity comparable to finding penguins in African Sahara, cakes – a near forbidden stuff. What worse could one imagine for Xmas. A place where Christmas is just another day, another (BIG) festival for the Christians, that’s all. If you happen to know a Christian friend, lucky you, you might save a meal. Card shops with half a dozen different varieties of Xmas cards to sell. And probably less people to buy them. If there’s a land where the meaning of Xmas has simply disappeared (or has never appeared, perhaps) its here. And to sort of round up the story you are right there.
And then to start off The Day you get up at (forbidden) five, not to prepare yourself and dress your best for the occasion but dress yourself as drab as permitted and wait for the shift jeep to blare its horn. You wish you were waiting for Santa Claus to arrive on his gift-laden reindeer trailer and announce his coming by a blow of his trumpet. Not that I believe in Santa, least that he uses a trumpet. I would have missed him all the same. For, the jeep beat Santa and co.
But I am fighting to believe I actually got on that jeep and obediently went where it took me – to a 30m high iron mast that’s helping humans to dig down for black gold. Ah! If only I was the rig master the 30m mast would have made a perfect pole to hang my Xmas star. But that was beyond imagination in this age and time. And my job was ‘below’ not above, anyway. But not to be totally outdone I go to the site computer and put up a screen saver that said MERRY CHRISTMAS! Since then it must have caught someone’s attention because a couple of days later the screen saver was gone. That’s Christmas here. In short.
One of the memories of last Christmas will be the music that flowed through my friend’s hand set into my ears as we had a long-distance Xmas-eve conversation. They were having the time of their lives for sure. And of course the endless SMS’s. Some long, some short. One that would have made you cry if only you were one by one hundred thousand million million times less phlegmatic. But they were almost all of them from home and I know, straight from the heart. Thank God for mobile phones and Short Message Service!
People go home for Christmas. As a boy I’d wonder why people went away (from Kohima) during Christmas. Kohima was the best place to be, wasn’t it? At least during Yuletide, surely!? But now I know why people go home for Christmas. And being away from home during Xmas, being with these few pathetic merry makers, being in the midst of people who God has blessed so much in terms of money and wealth though they’d not known His Son (let alone remember His birthday), being desperate for home…. All these give you an idea of what God’s LOVE – His perfectly philanthropic love – is all about. IT is too big. And it really doesn’t matter if there were no campfires this time, no ‘beautiful’ carols (they were all beautiful, anyway), no pork (oops, can’t afford to miss that one!), no friends. It really doesn’t matter because one day when we all get to Heaven (read Home), there we shall have the perfect Christmas. Think of the best Christmas you could ever have and Heaven will better it by a zillion. Believe me that will truly be! A Different Christmas.
Meanwhile Happy New Year!
