Home Thoughts From Abroad

The choir is the final place to aspire to if you want your takeaway from this exercise to be nice clothes. The choristers are going to wear matching pink frocks with velvet sashes and bows in their hair. I am so excited by the outfit, it’s straight out of the books I like to read. But as is the nature of such things, only those who sing well are taken into the choir. So, after a whole week of panicking wildly that I am going to be nothing at all, not even a cow in the manager, and it’s going to be supremely difficult to explain this to my mother who doesn’t know how awkward and quiet I am in school and who is already planning to attend the concert with my great-grandmother, I finally get cast. I am a shepherd.

I don’t really know what a shepherd is. But the word sounds so exotic, so soft and dense on my tongue, like a piece of sticky toffee, that the first flush of relief I feel at having been cast at last morphs into excitement after all; a shepherd with a real lantern, that’s what I am, a shepherd! Later, when I realise the shepherds must wear brown, sack-like shifts (of poplin, another beautiful, deceptive word that had sounded as fancy as satin and velvet to me but turns out to be all cottony and plain), I roll on the floor and cry. But by then, it’s too late. I decide I shall act my heart out in my minor scene: when Gabriel comes, the shepherds are scared. Breaking out of my shell, in order to affect genuine fear, I end up making friends with the other shepherds. It is turning out to be a breakthrough concert for me.

I don’t know if anyone spots the genuine horror on my face on the final day of the performance (or the large amounts of rouge on my cheeks) — everyone is busy falling in love with the gentle Mary — but the show is a hit. Afterward, just before we are yanked out of the green room by our mothers, my shepherd friends and I trade vacation plans. A few are going away on holidays; a few are looking forward to the Christmas lights on Park Street; and me? I am, of course, looking forward to the Christmas tree at home. It’s, in fact, been taken out today. Tomorrow, it’ll be lit.

“Don’t lie,” one of the shepherds tells me bossily, “You’re not Christians. You’re not going to get a Christmas tree.”

“We might not be Christians,” I tell them witheringly, “But my Aunty-Nani and Uncle-Nana are. And they have a huge Christmas tree. With coloured lights and tiny Santa Clauses and reindeer-heads hanging from it. And —” my voice catches at my personal favourite — “A really cute baby Jesus in a box-manger.”

But, by now, the shepherds have transformed back into little girls in skirts and pigtails, hard as nails, utterly disbelieving of my stories. I don’t care though.

Now that school is over, I can focus wholeheartedly on Christmas at home. We live in a third-floor apartment on a big noisy street, and now I can spend whole afternoons in the verandah of my room, reading Enid Blyton’s, imagining what Santa Claus will get me on Christmas Eve, fantasizing about the kind of a cake my mother will bake for my father’s birthday which is on Christmas Day and rushing through Mental Maths, which my mother insists I solve daily, waiting, waiting, waiting for evening to come. Evening comes all smoky-orange and cold. The moment it gets dark, I am allowed to rush up to Aunty- Nani’s.

One floor up. The stairs melt away under the pounding of my feet. Christmas lights are twinkling outside the door. There’s a bright green Christmas tree in the corner, under the canopy of the money plant. The hallway inside is festooned with dark-green wreaths and colourful stockings. A profusion of glittery stars and silver-golden bells and colourful candy canes have created a wonderland out of that familiar drawing room. The second-most familiar place to me in all the world after my own, Aunty-Nani’s house has been suddenly made new and strange. I love the transformation.

In the days leading up to Christmas, there are always plates of rose cookies and kalkals on the table, both of which I devour in large quantities, preferring them to the plummy, rum-infused slabs of Christmas cake.

On Christmas Day, there’s an open house at Aunty-Nani’s and millions of people come and go — their relatives and friends, my parents and grandparents, our other relatives who have come over to wish my father a happy birthday. And, of course, my uncle and his friends who are also friends with Aunty-Nani and Uncle-Nana’s four grown-up children. It’s a gigantic party. While technically, we eat my father’s birthday lunch at home, downstairs, a certain amount of cross-pollination happens in the food department too. Aunty-Nani always makes biryani or a zarda pulao for Christmas lunch.

As the day progresses, the grown-ups drink copious quantities of the wine that Uncle Nana has brewed through the year and talk loudly, sometimes singing and shouting and laughing wildly. But I, blending into the corner, allowing the sounds and stories to seep into me, care only for the rose cookies and the kalkals and the atmosphere of magic where the house, our familiar beloved old building, has become a place where anything seems possible as long as the twinkly lights are up.

One of the many slices of Calcutta’s composite culture — that includes, in addition to the cultures of East Bengal and West Bengal and Bihar and Orissa, discrete Parsi, Jewish and Armenian components — is the Anglo-Indian one. And so, it is only as an adult, that I realise the true bounties of my own Calcutta Christmases in that fourth-floor walk-up in Calcutta where Mr and Mrs Ireland lived for so many years. Later, when I wrote my second novel, which had an Anglo-Indian protagonist, a lot of what I had unconsciously inhaled magically transmuted itself into fiction.

When my parents moved into that house in the early Eighties, the Irelands quickly became their kin in the city, their first port of call, “Aunty” and “Uncle”. When I was born, they were promoted to the dubious double-barrelled distinction: Aunty-Nani and Uncle-Nana. At the time, all four of their children were still at home. And, while Brenda and Cheryl became my mashis, and Ivan, the youngest, the one full of jokes and crazy stories, became mama (clearly my mother was claiming most of the family), Henry, who was called Raju at home, was the lone renegade on my father’s side. He insisted on being my chacha.

Over the years, the mashis got married and moved away, and Raju chacha and his wife went to the Middle East. Eventually, Ivan mama, too, got married and before they moved out, I remember that every single evening, for a whole year, his young bride Amrita and I played Uno on the roof.

When my grandparents moved to Calcutta permanently and began to live with us, it quickly became apparent that my refined Calcutta-bred grandmother and the refined Lucknow-bred Aunty-Nani would embark on an unforgettable friendship, forged over the paan-daan. Every evening, they would convene on the roof, for chai and conversation, and, as evening fell, they would delicately take their conversation indoors, in front of the television set where Neena Gupta was single-handedly revolutionising TV, with shows like Saans and Dard.

The pleasant Calcutta springs waxed into insufferable summers and, then, slowly turned into autumns and winters of discontent. There were crises, minor and major, and through it all — accidents, exams, broken engagements and illnesses — the exchange of food and news between the two floors continued unabated. I grew up. We moved away to a different house. I left Calcutta after college.

It was only years later, after the high drama of college and early youth subsided, one Christmas eve far away in Paris, when the lights and crowds of Champs-Élysées had fatigued me incessantly and worry about my dying grandmother was wound like a skein through my bones, that I woke up in the middle of the night, hungry for Aunty-Nani’s rose cookies.

Uncle-Nana’s Home-brewed Wine

Wine.

Ingredients

2.5 kg black grapes, ripe
1.5 kg sugar
8-10 limes
50g fresh yeast

Method

You are going to need a large steel container to brew the wine, and large glass jars to store it during the fermentation. You will also need glass bottles to store the wine after it’s ready and wooden spoons to stir the concoction. Everything has to be sterilised first.

Wash the grapes thoroughly and then let them dry off. Make grape juice. Remember, the seeds should not get blended into the juice but stay whole in the pulp. Otherwise, the wine might be bitter. Next, measure the volume of grape juice. Take an equal amount of warm purified water and dissolve the sugar in it. In another container, take lukewarm water, add 2-3 spoons of sugar and the fresh yeast. Add the juice of 2-3 limes. Cover and let it rise.

In the large steel container, add the grape juice and pulp, the sweetened water, the yeast which has now risen fully, and the juice of the remaining limes. Mix well with a wooden spoon. Now, tightly cover the container with a clean cotton cloth. As it ferments, bubbles will rise and a peculiar scent is going to emanate from it. Do not be deterred.

Over the next four or five days, the concoction in the steel container has to be stirred twice every day with a wooden spoon. When the fermentation is complete, the concoction is now divided up into sterilised glass jars, leaving empty space above. Seal the glass jars tightly. They now have to be kept in a cool dark place for a few months, and, ideally, left completely undisturbed. After a period of at least six months, you can decant the wine into glass bottles, leaving the pulp sediment at the bottom of the jar.

(From my mother’s notebooks)