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