The front page carried a coloured photograph of the illuminated Harrods department store buzzing with Christmas shoppers: ‘‘With a month to go for Christmas, London’s West End shopping area is putting the finishing touches to Christmas decorations’’. I looked up from the newspaper to Madurai’s Dhanappa Mudali Street, bustling with commuters, hawkers, rickshaw-pullers and miscellaneous loudspeakers! Not a tree, let alone a fir, was in sight!As a schoolgirl in a convent nestled in a colonial era hill-station, Christmas was more ‘English’, I suspect, than in England itself! Touring the neighbourhood with amplified renditions of ‘Jingle Bells,’ the same young voices tenderly crooning ‘Silent Night’ at carol service, midnight mass at the serene chapel, the portly school doctor as Santa, dispensing sweets and balloons; the Nativity play with ancient props; the fir tree bedecked with tinsel, fairy lights and liberal lashings of white cotton wool — we Hindus celebrated Christmas with all the verve of our Christian friends.A score of Christmases later, an old school friend came on a visit from England. On Christmas eve, I took Sheila, a devout Christian, to St Mary’s, the oldest and largest of Madurai’s churches. The reassuringly ‘English’ facade resonated with the solemn peal of bells.Once past the gates, every last vestige of ‘Englishness’ melted away like snow under the Indian sun! A rollicking sea of humanity thronged the yard — zari-lined veils and multi-hued glass bangles rubbing shoulders with sober hymn books and Bibles. Hawkers vended candles, ‘holy’ pictures and religious medals, alongside gaily coloured gas balloons, shocking pink cotton-candy and brazier-hot corn on the cob. My puritanical western friend was aghast!A serpentine queue jostled its way towards the tableau of the Nativity — complete with magi, camels, shepherds, lambs. Beside the crib with its life-size ‘baby’ Jesus (blue-eyed, flaxen-curled, rosy-cheeked!), stood a large collection box into which the moving line of Hindus dropped their offering of coins, as into any temple ‘hundial’. The step around the altar railing was a fiery carpet of glowing candle wicks.Sheila, quite forgetting her prayers, stared in horrified fascination. She bestirred herself to kneel in obeisance for a few minutes and then looked around. Her gaze drew up short at the sight of a woman — obviously Hindu — kneeling before the altar. The uplifted face, folded arms, fervent raptness of expression — Sheila’s critical look softened to one of grudging approval. She smiled sheepishly when I caught her eye.We made our way out. The din in the yard was even louder. Sheila looked up at the loudspeakers stationed on the church’s exterior, blaring Christmas carols. She shrugged, then laughed and shouted, ‘‘Merry Christmas!’’
