Christmas Past.
In 1961, I led a team of cousins in our ancestral house in Kachehri Road, Lucknow, in making a full-fledged Christmas set-up. With a tree at the centre, the room had mistletoe and holly hanging from the ceiling and ivy around the walls. There were boxes of gifts under the tree, mostly empty or with our own recycled junk. The tree had wads of cotton snow on its leaves, and balls, baubles, and candles balanced on and from its branches.
Of course the cotton caught fire which then rushed across the twine criss-crossing the ceiling to devour the cardboard and paper decorations.
The grown-ups were livid but we cousins bonded around that accident. I remember uproarious laughter with Ramji, Sadhana, Dhira, and Anil dada as we played and re-played the event among ourselves.
I knew well that our generation had grown up taking Christmas for granted as one of our own festivals. Why was I surprised and amused, then, to watch my cousin Kamlu, in 1995, call up our siblings and cousins on 25th December and say, “Merry Christmas!” to each of them?
Because sometime between 1970-1980, between the ages of 20 and 30, I became cynical about everything that felt, looked, sounded, smelt, and tasted like colonialism.
On visits to Kerala at Christmas 1976 and Sri Lanka at Christmas 1992, I observed the pathos of a native population in a thinly coated costume of their colonial masters, radiant with the soft power of Europe. I made sure to voice my historical critique in The Hindustan Times.
In 1990, in the Asian Age, I wrote of how I despised the Christmas celebrations at Mohammad Bagh Club, Lucknow, with their false tree and shallow festivities, their pathetic Santa Claus, their weak carols and their presents, each secretly given by the family of the child called up to get—worst mistake of all—”a prize.”
In 1993, I wrote “Christmas in Connecticut” for The Telegraph. Some twenty years before, I had celebrated Christmas in Connecticut. All of 22 years old, I was swayed with nostalgia, books mingling with reality. I already loved the New England snow, the turkeys and hams, the apple, pumpkin, and pecan pies, my Polish family’s warmth. To add a dollop of Christmas cheer seemed only correct.
Miraculously, I marked Christmas again in Connecticut in 1998, this time with two daughters in High School and Middle School, a very Indian husband (in turn discovering Christmas in Connecticut for the first time) and an ambitious Fulbright project about the construction of American identity in the classroom and in the home. We visited with our old Polish friends, one generation larger, like us. The very closed-world insularity of it all turned everything I witnessed into research material.
Christmas Present.
From 1990 on, we set up the most beautiful tree “in the Eastern Hemisphere” as I put it, in our school Vidyashram—the Southpoint, in Nagwa, south Banaras. It is a lanky, sturdy, bare branch, the gold, silver and vivid colours of its trimming standing out against its brown. It displays everything that children could make, and under it is a Nativity scene. This is part of our largely unstated project to globalize everyone on campus and to become irreversibly tolerant and accepting of the other by knowing all Others intimately.
Children are not resistant. They sing “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” “Silent Night,” “The Little Drummer Boy” and “Jingle Bells” with aplomb.
I am invited at Christmas to speak on “Gender in Banaras” to European expatriates in the city who are there, they say, to escape the incessant caterwauling of carols in their countries. Meanwhile, the growing ethnocentrism of Indians promises to match and outdo the old ethnocentrism of Europe. I growl as I insist all the more on having children and faculty acknowledge and celebrate the Other. I publish on the reverse oppression of a liberal like me by those in Banaras who are ignorant and dictatorial. I publish on the necessity of interference, the urgency of education.
I make trips to London, Washington DC, and Helsinki for conferences and write in blogs and dailies on England as the Original Nation of Shopkeepers (especially at Christmas,) and the Non-Integration of the DC area (especially at the Time of Love.)
Last week I was in Austin, Texas, with Nandini and insisted on going to the carol singing at the Public Library. Through the 80’s while at the University of Chicago it was my secret pleasure to attend the sing-alongs at the huge tree in Ida Noyes.
It has always been my pride that I am a Participant who knows dozens of Christmas Carols. Also that I am a Consumer who has seen scores of versions of The Nutcracker, not just on the screen as you may think, but on the stage, including in Moscow and St Petersburg.
Today I am in Toronto with 6 year-old Samira and 2 year old Abir. Samira says with delight as we string up glittering balls and stars, “What a lovely festival! I love Christmas!” Her sheer originality with the gingerbread icing, the making of stars and crystals, and the conducting of games, washes over one like a gigantic wave and cleanses one of the debris of Christmases over the decades.
Christmas Future.
They say, as they smile at me fondly, “She travelled, loved, and published, and still she perished.”
Imagination, Pain, Anger, and Love. 