Mom's Last Christmas

It is almost midnight. The fairy lights on my Christmas tree wink naughtily at me as if to assure me company as I rest awhile on the living room couch, snug with my treasure trove of memories.

It is that time of the year when a bright paper star lights up my porch, a carol infuses nostalgia into the winter air and the warm fragrance of the fruit cake I am baking envelopes every nook of my home. The third batch of cake is rising happy and brown in my oven and it will be two more before I call it a day or shall I say night?

There is something so special about baking Christmas cakes through the night. It is something beyond the uninterrupted convenience that I cherish about these moonlit hours, the chores of the day being done and the children tucked off in bed. It is about the nip in the late night winter air as it mingles with vanilla, an aroma I know so well, a magical whiff from the past, for it filled our tiny suburban apartment  that Christmas eve twenty years ago. 

Mother lay on her rocking chair pale after her punishing medication for cancer. She was in pain .The cold had played havoc on her weak constitution and she had caught a nagging cough.

Somewhere deep within our hearts we knew that there wasn't much time. Over the past weeks, she spoke very little and seemed to involuntarily descend into the depths of a calmer state of relatively pain free semi consciousness.  We shuddered to think of the day when she would recede further into a comatose lull never to recognise us. After all, what else is mortality but to be dead and forgotten in the mind of your loved one?

December is a special month in Chennai .It is when the merry Carol singers of the church to the East of our suburban colony and the luminous lamp bearing maidens from the Lord Iyappa temple on the west cheer the neighbourhood with a harmonious medley of drums and cymbals.

It was also the month when mom baked cakes, not just for family and friends but even the cheery eyed Ghurkha boy and the young sweeper girl. But that year saw all of us spent in spirit. Oh to catch a momentary glimpse of our mother beneath the pale shadow she had come to be!

Those were the days when we spoke to her endlessly about the smallest details of our day and played her favourite songs, all in the hope of awakening a fond memory, which would bring a smile on her face and in turn light up our lives. Eager to fill her with more happy memories of busy December days, we decided to bake a cake, just the way mom had done unfailing done all the years of our childhood. After all, it was a ritual too sacred to be broken.

 Mom sat on her rocking chair at the entrance of our small kitchen instructing us in her feeble voice as the three of us sisters got down to the task.

The ingredients were precisely measured and mom’s baking ware ceremoniously brought out to commence the annual event. We burnt the sugar to a dark glossy caramel and took turns to beat up the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon to air like lightness. The dry fruits were floured so that they wouldn't sink and the mixture folded in to the perfect ‘dripping’, not ‘dropping’ consistency, just as mother insisted.

Soon the scents of Christmas rose from mom’s ancient sand oven while the cake baked to bonny richness. And as we flipped that flawless cake into the wire rack after many, many impatient minutes, we hugged each other ecstatically with our still floury hands.

That night tears glistened in my mother’s smiling eyes as she watched her daughters celebrate the perfection of their first cake. It was Christmas in spite of everything.

Three months later mother passed away. But, not without knowing, that she had passed on the baton to her three little girls, sisters, who would work on each other’s lives, to multiply the joys and willingly share the pain, and still remember to reflect on the true spirit of Christmas, in spite of everything.

That Christmas we woke up to the wisdom that we will one day pass on to our children – that it takes but love and togetherness to dispel the clouds of the dreariest days, like that splendid little cake we baked for mother’s last Christmas twenty years ago. 

My Mom Lives Forever

There is a secret place in my heart,

Wrapped in memories of sunshine days,

Where I am forever child,

And love means my mother’s face.

In there are walls where I scrawled,

Emotions in early innocence,

And guard a chest full of sepia moments,

Held captive in mind’s lens.

The teary tantrums of my first day at school,

Where my trusting hand mom you let go,

Then rushing with rage and relief into your arms,

As you kissed away every woe.

Those buttermilk summer times when we,

Relived tales of your girlhood days,

Many plum cake, December nights swathed,

In the mellow glow of your grace.

In weary times when cornered with care,

I just need to curl up and be still,

I set out for my sweet refuge to,

Let my soul drink to nostalgic fill.

And suddenly it seems so true,

 You manifest in the ones you love,

In faith and strife, in your children’s smiles,

In quirks and fetishes forever somehow,

But the fondest glimpses of you I see,

In father’s old eyes misty in memory,

Of spring memoirs turned autumn gold,

Some told yet many left untold.

        Asha Mathew 

In Celebration of Childhood

 In Chennai, January is like the white foam on the Pongal pot, February, the vividness of azure. March comes stained with pink watermelon flesh followed by blazing yellow months of Gulmohar blossoms, mangoes and many sunshine and Dog Star days. Then, there are the obscure medley months of heat and shower before November arrives clothed in grey.

November Diwalis are rarely dry in Chennai. Yet it takes more than a couple of dank evenings to douse the sparkler of a festive spirit out of the Chennaiite, I realise, driving through the restless T.Nagar roads. Oh the annual struggle and wriggle in and out of the several ‘storied’ Saravana’s and Pothy’s fulfilled with the joy of possessing a wallet’s worth of vanity...life is good, crazily though!

A little beyond the cloying glitter of firework shops and sweet stalls, I halt at the red lights, when he appears from nowhere, hastily knocking at my car window, with a flute on his lips, playing a rustically corrupted version of a Bollywood number. I will call him Krishna, my urban Indian street child, thin, hungry and dishevelled, bearing resemblance to the beloved Child God only in the darkness of his little form and the flute he plays. He moves on...

Somewhere in the narrow streets of Sivakasi, it is Krishna again slogging in a cramped room reeking of phosphorous and glue. His deft little fingers magically rolling out crackers and fireworks that warns in mocking irony, against the dangers of unassisted use by children. The child worker whose denied childhood seems too trivial a reason to affect the grandeur of celebration of good over evil, year after year.

Krishna, the child labourer who launches firework rockets that will deceptively surge heavenward only to plunge, Krishna, the impoverished Indian child at the signal selling happy books he can never read and heart shaped balloons to a loveless world.

His face smeared with the grime of the city, he prophetically reveals the truths of his world as he toils through the festival of lights that falls on the 13^th of November and a day dedicated to the child that falls on the 14^th. Strangely reminiscent of when his cherubic namesake the little Lord Krishna revealed the mystique of the cosmos the day he playfully consumed the soil of Gokul.

This poem is for you, child that knocked at my car window and my conscience. We owe you an answer.

Twilight

When dusk begins its drowsy descent

Clothed in surreal hues

A million lamps startle awake

This city, so worn, sleep shorn

There clad in incongruous rags,

A tattered school uniform

He wanders in that joyless twilight

Irony in the eye of that traffic storm

Strings of jasmine around his tiny wrist

And eager balloons, a hearty bunch,

He leaps ahead as the signal glows red

Beckoning blind car windows for rare mercy-little wretch

Now destiny blinks green in life’s random game.

He recedes to the wings in brief submission

To watch a while the world dazzle past

Light streaked mazes –night’s frenzied vision

Bound by the eccentric whims of a pole,

He flits in and out of a ceaseless chase

Measuring his worth in a fistful of coins

Ignorant of childhood lost to toil ridden haze

Soon weary darkness drags through its last lap

And life lulls a languorous while

Asleep between the shadows of fatigue and fate

His dreams surface in a half smile

Fragmented flashes of reclaimed innocence?

Or a strange slide show of denied deliverance?

Of gingerbread houses or an enchanted castle

Or just the elusive warmth of a hearth to nestle.

                                                                Asha Mathew

The Mahatma And I

There was a time when my ‘creative pursuits’ included scribbling little Haikus at the kitchen table because watched pots never boil and writing fond memoirs of an uncomplicated childhood while staying up late with my children on school project nights.

As a homemaker, my attempts to write with method and purpose were often blown aside in the frenzied rush of weekdays and buried deep under weekend piles of laundry. And so, prey to procrastination, they remained, isolated nuggets of creativity, sadly scattered over pages of diaries, unknown, unread, anonymous.

To start a blog was part of my New Year resolution. But for some strange reason, New Year resolutions overwhelm people like me into a state of jinxed inaction.

When I was a child my father once narrated the story of how he quit smoking. A young smoker, he stumbled miserably through failed New Year resolutions until that second of October fifty years ago, when he broke his enslaving addiction for good. I draw inspiration from his magnificent victory to break my sin of procrastination.

This blog is my little virtual space where my voice is heard for who I am for

‘I am the mother and the daughter,

Companion, sibling and spouse,

Everywoman in intuition,

Indian, in my instinct.’

A poetic tribute to the father of the nation

We live in times when the ‘Gandhian path’ has lost its direction from being a way of life to a political compulsion to acquire the Mahatma’s meagre belongings at international auctions.

I wonder if our very own saint of simplicity would have foreseen the day when his spectacles and a drop of his blood would be valued in millions rather than his deep vision and the spirit of sacrifice his simple life symbolised.

The Mahatma and I

One night as I tossed in bed,

Caught in the tempests of fitful sleep

I saw an old man troubled,

His chest bore wounds so deep.

He held in his hands a cloth,

So faded and stained as old

With such love and tender care,

As a father his child would hold

Curious for a closer glance

Of that form so familiar and bent,

I walked some unsure steps

To unravel what this strange scene meant.

Bapu! I gasped shaken

Deep in delirious confusion

He looked up at me for a moment

My frail, tear stained apparition.

He bade me to sit by his side

And stroked my little head awhile

And picked up with trembling hands

The tricolour, with a sad smile.

Many long years ago,

When the bullets rent my chest

Clothed in these colours I bid

Adieu to claim my rest.

But they tore open my scars

Into bleeding wounds once more

When they robbed my flag of the virtues

Dyed into the colours it bore.

Saffron so rare and precious

Holy hue of sacrifice and courage

But heed not my beloved nation

To the jaundiced beckoning of the savage

White is for ‘satya’, so pure

In thought and speech to be harboured

White fire that purged my soul

While with experiments in truth I laboured

The swaying fields of green

The smile on a farmers face

The freshness of life and faith

Green is for growth and gain

But where hunger consumes the tiller

Where he ploughs not but digs his grave

And the earth cracks deep heartbroken

None can this motherland save.

The wheels of the eight fold path

Lie trapped in the mire of corruption

The chakra of progress ceaseless

Spins in vain, in the ditch of no salvation.

The white man’s chains long broken

I still weep over India’s plight,

Abused in the hands of her sons,

While in blinded greed they fight.

And he sighed and wiped a tear

And took my little hands in his,

Looking deep into my eyes

While whispering this

This is the land that bears

The blood of a million selfless sons

Of lifetimes spent in toil

For a swaraj without guns.

I draw solace from the pride that beams

From a heart that adores his land

As he greets the fluttering flag

With a true, saluting, hand.

So saying he faded away

Into an unreal cloud of mist

But it cleared my mind of its fog

This once in a lifetime tryst

 Two golden threads to treasure

Of truth and tolerance divine

He wove into the fabric

Of freedom, yours and mine

Riches limitless to share

With one another in eternal kindness

To usher the whole of mankind

Into that sublime sea of deliverance.

Asha Mathew