Christmas In My 40s: Navigating Yuletide In A Desi Identity

Christmas is complex for me. Growing up in a Christian neighbourhood and attending a Catholic school, the last week of December was a kaleidoscope of brightness and festivity. Our population numbered thousands and most of those people had a star in their window, wreaths on doors and lights all through the month. There was a vacation named for this festival. And unlike the previous school vacation also named for a festival, this one happened after the term was over. No homework, no dreaded report cards awaited. The weather is pretty nice in Mumbai too at this time of the year.

Christmas in the Marol air

The advantages of a cosmopolitan upbringing number many. Diversity, yes and a smorgasbord of life experiences for a child. But belonging? That is one of life’s hardest questions and it’s made harder by the uneasy friction between my multiple cultural influences. As a linguistic, regional, and religious minority, I found it challenging to relate to the rituals observed at home. I didn’t understand the language of the gods my family worshipped. It was a struggle to see myself in the characters in the mythologies. I couldn’t relate to the clothing, habits and behaviours espoused in ‘our’ practices.

Christmas mass, on the other hand, happened in English. I could comprehend the songs, and even sing along. Festive dressing was dresses & trousers, not dreaded salwar kameezes censured by long-forgotten ancestors. Food was fun because it was a novelty and because it came from shops, neighbours, and friends. A hand-painted ceramic plate would arrive at our door first thing in the morning, covered with an equally crafted lace doily. Under it, there would be such rare treasures like guava cheese and other goodies that I only ever saw at my next-door neighbour’s home. I never saw the sweaty brows leaning over steaming pots, the arthritic fingers working crochet needles, the oil & noise of a kitchen that produced such delights.

The cheer would begin much in advance, only the prettiest sights in view. Decorations would go up. The word ‘Bandra‘ would be heard often in exchanges about buttons from Cheap Jack’s and the best recipes from Millie aunty. Come nightfall on Christmas Eve, our lane would be unusually abuzz. The procession would start at around 10:30 pm.

I’d stand at the window and identify classmates, friends, playground rivals, somebody’s mummy, that boy’s dadda, a school prefect’s useless brother as they all walked by in the year’s latest Yuletide fashions. On their way to midnight mass. I was content to watch. However, amidst the joy, a constant undercurrent made me feel like I didn’t truly belong. It seemed as though Christmas wasn’t entirely ‘for me’. Why did it feel like Christmas wasn’t ‘mine’?

Only for Christians

It wasn’t till I was over ten that I started noticing the divide I wasn’t allowed to bridge. My classmates with surnames like D’souza, Pinto, D’silva, Bose, Fernandes and D’costa would proudly march off in secret whispers carrying red notebooks on their way to ‘Religion’ class. While I’d be left behind with a boring textbook in the snooze-worthy ‘Moral Science’ class.

After one such division, when my friends returned for our next period, one announced to me,

“I don’t believe in your God. Do you believe in my God? We’re Catholic. We don’t believe in anybody else’s God.”

Then she smiled at the girl next to her who nodded as she put away her red notebook. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I had a choice in belief. Or that I was supposed to make that choice.

The years to come would bring conversations about body hair, boys, bras and periods, about dressing and music and books. But come December, subtle shifts in our friendship would happen. I would become a sidekick on shopping excursions for the Christmas ball. Our phone calls would tilt disproportionately in the direction of their love lives and who was going to ask who out. I’d be audience to their practising dance moves, never once asking me to join. I’d keep them company as they rolled out dough for the marzipan. Finally one year, I was told not to come over the week before since the Christmas recipes were a ‘family secret’.

I got asked to a fair number of balls and dances. I didn’t know how to answer. Nobody in my family went on dances or dates. I’d stammer,

“I won’t be allowed.”

The boy would look at me curiously until a gleeful female voice would chime in,

“Oh, she’s not Christian.”

“Really? But you look just like one of us!”

I did get invited to a few Christmas parties. This was by a family where a Christian woman had married a Hindu man. I was asked to dance, I helped serve the food, I laughed and talked like I would in any other social gathering. And in the grand finale, the aunty who had invited me whispered,

“You don’t join in this. This is for family and friends only.”

I sat down like someone had slapped me. In the whirlabout, their younger son grabbed my hand and yanked me into the circle. “But I’m not supposed to…” I protested. He ignored it and whirled me around. I just had a few seconds to catch the expression on his mother’s face. She didn’t invite me the next year.

Seeking belonging in a ravaged subcontinent

Adulthood has brought its understanding of colonialism and exploitation. Christianity colonised my ancestors just as much as the Mughals, Portuguese, Dutch, French & English did. I’ve been reading stories & poetry of the subcontinent and it brought me shared belonging with someone I’ve never met. We’re both brown girls from island cities who grew up knowing the language as well as the religion of our colonisers.

I battled with my politics for years. I’ve seen how much religion devastates humanity. From the Babri masjid demolition which permanently scarred me right down to the current Israeli genocide of Palestinians. It’s hard for me, really hard to imagine the name of God and not see it written in the blood of many innocent lives. How can I celebrate the birthday of the world’s most famous Jew while in his birthplace, hundreds of Palestinian babies are being slaughtered?

Then I read Jane Borges’ sublime portrait of a Christian community in Independence Era Bombay. It felt so familiar. These were the people I knew. The ones I lived next door to. The people I grew up with. The folks whose lives overlapped with mine. I hated them, I loved them. Finally, I understood them. Indian Christianity has a painful legacy of the colonised and the struggle to belong. Who can understand that better than I?

Bombay Balchao by Jane Borges
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is my second Mumbai book in a short while after Milk Teeth. And it didn’t feel repetitive at all. Of course, I am of the city and I love it. Even so, this book feels like a warm hug even to a stranger. And I’m not a stranger to the Bombay catlick community, having grown up in Marol (which gets a mention, yayy!).

Bosco Mansion is an ancient building in South Bombay. A different South Bombay from how it is seen today. This is at the start of the twentieth century, a little before even Indian independence when SoBo comprised pretty much what the city was. And the real city was English-adjacent, given Bombay was a favoured spot by the British colonisers. Thus, the city is seen through the lens of Indian Christianity, a microcosm of whom lives within the insular community in and around that building.

While most of India sees its Christian citizens as a homogenous group, in this book we see the various hues of people’s identities through their varied histories. It’s a useful reminder of how being colonised and occupied by many different influences for centuries makes us all very different people. In Bombay, the diverse journeys all come to clash and eventually settle in a fractious truce. For this reason, that truce never settles into a steady balance. Every newcomer turns the city in a different direction. Every newborn spells a different churn in the entire community’s identity as they grow up to question histories they don’t recognise.

East Indians, Goans, Mangaloreans form the rich tapestry of characters in this book. It proceeds as a collection of short stories but you see the intricate journeys of each life and how it adds to a broader tapestry. The crimes, the dreams, the scandals, the miracles, the transactions, the revelations – every story leads to another.

I particularly liked the rambling style of each story and the way it bled into the next. It felt exactly like an older person reminiscing about the many lives they had seen. The language too, felt acutely familiar in its references to confirmation & sorpotel, the use of ‘men’ as punctuation and the descriptions of people’s days.

This book is an unmissable capsule for anyone interested in the history of this very country. Bombay is so many things beyond Bollywood & financial capital. It was a delight to experience it through this insular but very important slice of society.

Recently, I met someone who is of many places. Of Punjabi ancestry but growing up in a South Indian city, studying in Delhi, now shuttling between Mumbai and Pune. We spoke about the quest for tribes of our own. We have been stringing together connections on the fragile lilypads of movies & books. We have so little in common.

Even the language we communicate in is unique to each of us. I hear a distinctive North Indian tilt when he says “here” and it sounds like “hair”. I taste the grind of Southern inflection when I crush consonants under my tongue like “ddrryiii” masala. In our jokes there is a grasping for understanding, for someone to witness and see me as me.

“I don’t have that sense of belonging that you do to Bombay,” he says. Yet, I understand that yearning. Jo kahin ke nahin hote hain, unki Mumbai hoti hain, I replied. For those who belong nowhere, Mumbai is home. We are a city of immigrants, after all. Everyone here is originally from elsewhere.

And for us, first generation (whenever our lives here began) Mumbaikers, our only sense of belonging can come from people. Like the islands we all stand on, our grip on our identity is as tenuous as terra firma. And yet, the Mumbai of my memories is no more. Even that Mumbai was but a slice of something much larger.

Reclaiming Christmas

I tried to incorporate the past I had known into the world I was growing into. At first, I found myself having to explain to the people in my now-world. Right-wing fanatics in my country call themselves ‘the oppressed majority’ and consider my ilk traitors. Even to my friends, it was confusing. They’d heard my long diatribes about the atrocities propagated by organised religion. Some people made an effort. Usually, it would be a romantic partner. But how could I even start to explain the world of Christianity to an outsider when I had barely belonged?

I found some commiseration with people who didn’t grow up in Christian families but studied in Christian schools. “You can take the kid out of Christian school but you can’t exorcise the Catholic guilt out of the kid.” I’d joke. We’d swap stories about the religious iconography displayed prominently in every classroom. Statues, paintings of a sad-eyed Christ, remarkably crafted crosses with a lean figure on the cross. “Right at the level your eyes would hit if you were distracted during lessons”. Jesus died for your sins runs deep in every one of us, regardless of the pujas and azaans we’d heard.

We had much in common in our memories of teachers with names like Mary teacher and John sir, yelling at us about our classrooms being fish markets, have some shame, men, God is watching. But is shared nostalgia enough to build shared futures? Especially when that nostalgia comes from disparate experiences and diverse backgrounds? It’s flimsy.

The Old Church

But the nostalgia well runs deep. I reconciled with my emotions and began attending Christmas mass in my old neighbourhood alone. I called it nostalgia and designated it self-care. It was an attempt to reclaim practices that had emotional significance for me without the burden of other people’s definitions. This solo pilgrimage, however, brought unexpected encounters.

I ran into the ex frenemy who would had judged my life choices and first showed me that I didn’t get to have Christmas. It was jarring to experience that in the middle of sermons on love. But Christmas is about people and was looking for belonging in history after geography has failed me.

Soldiering on, I went to a wake of someone else I’d known. And there in church I was set upon by a former classmate. I remembered him as being nice until he called me a monkey face. Then he sniggered asking why I wasn’t married before shaking his head saying “Good thing, marriage sucks” & ambling off drunk. It shook me.

Cut to another nostalgia frame. A different funeral at that same church. Getting attacked by gossip about the white saree I had worn. A rape threat. A former bully fighting with a friend who called it out, saying “If she was being killed in front of me, I wouldn’t lift a finger to help.” So much hatred. This was the Christian spirit I experienced.

Looking for Jesus

And yet in my lonely bullied childhood, I had sought shelter in the same places. The tree is gone and in its place stands a basketball hoop. But the statue is still there. Even as a child, I saw compassion in the stone eyes. I had found solace in the stories of Jesus asking the judgemental, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” I wonder how things would be if he’d said “Let he who is without pain”. Hurt people hurt people after all.

I try and think about “Forgive them Lord for they know not what they do.” But I find myself unable to. They do know what they do. They treat me like I’m stupid & unworthy of kindness. I know they are not good Christians. And I’ve been deemed not one of them. So why should I forgive?

Yet, @topher1kenobe keeps my life constantly warm & candlelit. His unwavering belief troubles me. It also comforts me. Christmas is his. And in his world, I always feel I belong, like it makes room for me.

An Anxious Reunion

The People Who Brought Me Christmas Back

When I returned home, I looked for my old school photographs. I couldn’t find them, a fact that upset my family more than it did me. I found myself saying, “It doesn’t matter.” I’ve carried albums full of pictures of people I don’t care for. Is this me? Able to walk away from the chains of what I’ve lived through?

I sent my dear home of Christmas a picture of my family and he sent me one of his. Here are the DeRosias bringing me into their Christmas – Topher, Sophia, Graham, Ema and Cate. And below that, their Christmas feast.

Season’s Greetings