It is the first day of May, and no doubt, this evening my mother will call me from Bandra and give me the news I already know, that today is the first day of an entire month of special rosaries to be said "down" in the building ("down" being a famous place of many to-ings and fro-ings, as it is for all residents of sociable buildings in Bombay). May is Our Lady's month, they say, but now I have forgotten why October also gets dedicated to her and another month of special community rosaries. At any rate, Bandra has reasons that reason cannot understand, most of these reasons having something to do with being Catholic, so we say rosaries.
We got into good training for community rosaries at home, since we had a grandmother, Nana, who was educated by Irish nuns in Mhow who said the rosary militantly, every day, or so she reported. It was compulsory to sit around with the family every evening and get out the requisite number of Our Fathers and Hail Marys, commemorating the set of Mysteries of the Rosary applicable for that day of the week. There was no way to escape this; games had to stop, studies had to be postponed, and if surprise visitors were Catholic, they had to join in. One of my first memories of rosary-saying comes from the evening on which we first got a walker home for Nana, who had broken her hip and had to use one. Everyone else prayed away stoutly, ignoring the fact that I was very busy; the plastic cover the walker had been delivered in was coming loose and I was intent on tucking it neatly around the frame, occasionally interrupting my labours to pipe up with a cheerful "Holy Mary, Mother of God..."
Of course, if we all got bored and caught up in honest manual labour as five year olds, later on, we got caught up in rosary fashions. No countesses ever cherished their diamonds the way we cherished the fake-crystal rosary beads that the lucky ones got from Don Bosco's Shrine, Matunga. I don't think anything really tore us away from the delights of those beads as they caught the light, not even the glow-in-the-dark rosaries or the rosary rings, with ten little nubs and a protruding cross on which to count our prayers, or even the blessed rosaries from Rome or Jerusalem. Not surprisingly, the pleasures of these accessories only led us to miscount and say alarming decades of two Our Fathers, six Hail Marys, and no Glory Be at all, or even one Our Father, thirteen Hail Marys, and two Glory Bes, and be glared at by those of our elders and betters who cared.
But perhaps the most impressive when it came to the rosary fad was Papa, my grandfather, who took it one step further; he was so devoted to Mary that he presented Mount Mary's Basilica, up on the hill down the road from where he lives, with a set of enormous rosaries to be hung up in the church building, where they swung overhead from the choir-loft until a few years ago. The beads weren't crystal, or wood, or even glow-in-the-dark; they were actually painted ping-pong balls. Our knowledge of these secret antecedents made them that much more exciting. It's not as though any of us had gotten away with taking ping-pong balls to church, and the fact that Papa had succeeded gave us all a share in an aura both religious and sportive!
Even later, we got into another rosary fad: Mystery booklets, with pictures showing each of those Mysteries (significant events in the lives of Mary and Jesus). We quite fancied ourselves to be ahead of the trends, especially since we had one benefit that few of our peers did--a family friend who lived in Portugal and was apt to dole out religious goodies when she visited us in Bombay. Other than the candles with the Sacred Heart on them, and the rosaries of wood and imitation pearls, Alda brought us glossy posters with little pictures showing all the Mysteries, which we dutifully cut out and pasted onto chart paper to make concertina-folding booklets by which to remember the Mysteries. There were often bonus pictures of Our Lady of Fatima, a hot favorite because of the Portuguese connection, and sometimes Our Lady of Lourdes, who presumably was grudgingly accepted only because she was related to Our Lady of Fatima. Once, Alda brought us the ultimate in rosary merchandise -- a videotape of a movie about the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima to Jacinta, Francisco, and Lucia, three Portuguese children. The movie met with much approval on our part because it showed these blessed and delinquint infants hurrying up their rosary-saying by simply saying "Our Father," "Hail Mary" and "Holy Mary" instead of the prayers in their entirety and rushing off instead to take care of their sheep. Sheep we had none, but this seemed like an intelligent, time-saving idea. I never could understand why my grandmother frowned so on this innovation or why my parents giggled when I argued the case for it.
Still later, I moved on to being a Litany-junkie. The litany being, in essence, name-calling of a polite nature, giving Mary all her titles, it held much scope for imagination. For years, I thought that "Mother inviolate" meant that she was wearing a particularly fetching lavendar frock and wondered why the hell anyone would call her the Tower of Babel, or, for that matter, a Tower of Ivory or the Ark of Covenant, these and a few others being quite inexplicable alongside the rest of the titles, which were variations on the Mother-Virgin-Queen themes. The Litany had a pleasant rhythm too, being made up of mostly 4-6 syllable invocations, responded to with "Pray for us" in a two-syllable condensed version that sounded remarkably like "Wafers". Towards the end, it slowed down with the invocation, "Queen conceived without original sin," which was amazingly difficult to fit into the rhythm of the rest of the litany; made sure everyone kept tripping over their tongues with the next three invocations, also longish ones; and finished up most satisfyingly with the very tight "Queen of peace." I firmly believe the author of the litany put the last few tongue-twisters in only to make sure that nobody could fall off to sleep repeatedly muttering "Pray for us" at appropriate intervals and actually get away with it. It certainly worked at home with us, where someone or the other, most often my father, would get caught out by the difference in rhythm and be embarrassed.
Perhaps the greatest sense of how the rosary was so much a part of family life came when we visited other friends and relations and came to the last bit of the rosary, the random prayers tacked on as per individual taste and the sets of Our Fathers, Hail Marys, and Glory Bes said for family specific reasons, such as dear departed ancestors and relations. I was always stumped by this bit; it was impossible to figure out which prayer was being said in time to actually say it and on several occasions, force of habit made me say the paryers my mother always said, unmindful of the fact that everyone else was muttering something entirely different. The day my parents suddenly added a prayer to the Scared Heart to this list, after years of not changing anything, I was as shocked as if I'd gone out and come home to find they'd shifted all the furniture in the house around and put the piano in the kitchen. And the day my mother added a set of Our Fathers for Nana, who had died the night before, I cried unabashedly. I had lost all belief in "as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end."
Community rosaries were a different matter. Here, crystal rosaries were of no consequence and family prayer structures were easily forgotten. The only important thing was getting to blow out the candles. Getting the community rosary started was a long process, involving fetching a plaster statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, two candlestands with glass covers, and a tablecloth, and setting up an altar on an old wooden table. Lighting the candles was possible only through divine intervention, considering the strong breezes that blew in our building. Eventually, I guess Mary would beam upon someone's efforts, the candles would be lit, and we'd all arrange ourselves for the fifteen-minute session.
If the adults were busy praying that any litigation the building was involved in would be sorted out soon, we children were all watching the candles. On occasion, we'd be distracted by something else -- such as my three year old neighbour singing "Song Sung Blue" in a piercing baby lisp, while everyone else tried to keep from giggling -- but we knew where our attention had to be. The truly intelligent would stand exactly opposite the candles, at the shortest distance from the table that was possible, and inch forward carefully while the prayers went on, moving a bare millimeter at a time to gain the advantage. As the last "Amen" was proclaimed, these intelligent ones would race forward, pull off the glass candle-shades, and blow the candles out. Every once in a while, someone else would run in from the side, and a fight would start, or some unfeeling adult would stride up and blow while we were still running. Those were terrible days.
Almost as important was the boiled channa and cold drink served on the last days of May and October, in celebration of the end of the community rosary event for the month. While everyone else chatted amicably, we trawled the auntie line up, taking handfuls of channa, noting who had added the most coconut, pulling faces at any lack of sugar in the cold drink, and eventually deciding which auntie was to be looked upon most favourably for the rest of the year because of her generosity and culinary talents. This, however, remained secondary, probably because it was a thrill of just two days, whereas we got 60 days a year to fight over the candles.
We got into good training for community rosaries at home, since we had a grandmother, Nana, who was educated by Irish nuns in Mhow who said the rosary militantly, every day, or so she reported. It was compulsory to sit around with the family every evening and get out the requisite number of Our Fathers and Hail Marys, commemorating the set of Mysteries of the Rosary applicable for that day of the week. There was no way to escape this; games had to stop, studies had to be postponed, and if surprise visitors were Catholic, they had to join in. One of my first memories of rosary-saying comes from the evening on which we first got a walker home for Nana, who had broken her hip and had to use one. Everyone else prayed away stoutly, ignoring the fact that I was very busy; the plastic cover the walker had been delivered in was coming loose and I was intent on tucking it neatly around the frame, occasionally interrupting my labours to pipe up with a cheerful "Holy Mary, Mother of God..."
Of course, if we all got bored and caught up in honest manual labour as five year olds, later on, we got caught up in rosary fashions. No countesses ever cherished their diamonds the way we cherished the fake-crystal rosary beads that the lucky ones got from Don Bosco's Shrine, Matunga. I don't think anything really tore us away from the delights of those beads as they caught the light, not even the glow-in-the-dark rosaries or the rosary rings, with ten little nubs and a protruding cross on which to count our prayers, or even the blessed rosaries from Rome or Jerusalem. Not surprisingly, the pleasures of these accessories only led us to miscount and say alarming decades of two Our Fathers, six Hail Marys, and no Glory Be at all, or even one Our Father, thirteen Hail Marys, and two Glory Bes, and be glared at by those of our elders and betters who cared.
But perhaps the most impressive when it came to the rosary fad was Papa, my grandfather, who took it one step further; he was so devoted to Mary that he presented Mount Mary's Basilica, up on the hill down the road from where he lives, with a set of enormous rosaries to be hung up in the church building, where they swung overhead from the choir-loft until a few years ago. The beads weren't crystal, or wood, or even glow-in-the-dark; they were actually painted ping-pong balls. Our knowledge of these secret antecedents made them that much more exciting. It's not as though any of us had gotten away with taking ping-pong balls to church, and the fact that Papa had succeeded gave us all a share in an aura both religious and sportive!
Even later, we got into another rosary fad: Mystery booklets, with pictures showing each of those Mysteries (significant events in the lives of Mary and Jesus). We quite fancied ourselves to be ahead of the trends, especially since we had one benefit that few of our peers did--a family friend who lived in Portugal and was apt to dole out religious goodies when she visited us in Bombay. Other than the candles with the Sacred Heart on them, and the rosaries of wood and imitation pearls, Alda brought us glossy posters with little pictures showing all the Mysteries, which we dutifully cut out and pasted onto chart paper to make concertina-folding booklets by which to remember the Mysteries. There were often bonus pictures of Our Lady of Fatima, a hot favorite because of the Portuguese connection, and sometimes Our Lady of Lourdes, who presumably was grudgingly accepted only because she was related to Our Lady of Fatima. Once, Alda brought us the ultimate in rosary merchandise -- a videotape of a movie about the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima to Jacinta, Francisco, and Lucia, three Portuguese children. The movie met with much approval on our part because it showed these blessed and delinquint infants hurrying up their rosary-saying by simply saying "Our Father," "Hail Mary" and "Holy Mary" instead of the prayers in their entirety and rushing off instead to take care of their sheep. Sheep we had none, but this seemed like an intelligent, time-saving idea. I never could understand why my grandmother frowned so on this innovation or why my parents giggled when I argued the case for it.
Still later, I moved on to being a Litany-junkie. The litany being, in essence, name-calling of a polite nature, giving Mary all her titles, it held much scope for imagination. For years, I thought that "Mother inviolate" meant that she was wearing a particularly fetching lavendar frock and wondered why the hell anyone would call her the Tower of Babel, or, for that matter, a Tower of Ivory or the Ark of Covenant, these and a few others being quite inexplicable alongside the rest of the titles, which were variations on the Mother-Virgin-Queen themes. The Litany had a pleasant rhythm too, being made up of mostly 4-6 syllable invocations, responded to with "Pray for us" in a two-syllable condensed version that sounded remarkably like "Wafers". Towards the end, it slowed down with the invocation, "Queen conceived without original sin," which was amazingly difficult to fit into the rhythm of the rest of the litany; made sure everyone kept tripping over their tongues with the next three invocations, also longish ones; and finished up most satisfyingly with the very tight "Queen of peace." I firmly believe the author of the litany put the last few tongue-twisters in only to make sure that nobody could fall off to sleep repeatedly muttering "Pray for us" at appropriate intervals and actually get away with it. It certainly worked at home with us, where someone or the other, most often my father, would get caught out by the difference in rhythm and be embarrassed.
Perhaps the greatest sense of how the rosary was so much a part of family life came when we visited other friends and relations and came to the last bit of the rosary, the random prayers tacked on as per individual taste and the sets of Our Fathers, Hail Marys, and Glory Bes said for family specific reasons, such as dear departed ancestors and relations. I was always stumped by this bit; it was impossible to figure out which prayer was being said in time to actually say it and on several occasions, force of habit made me say the paryers my mother always said, unmindful of the fact that everyone else was muttering something entirely different. The day my parents suddenly added a prayer to the Scared Heart to this list, after years of not changing anything, I was as shocked as if I'd gone out and come home to find they'd shifted all the furniture in the house around and put the piano in the kitchen. And the day my mother added a set of Our Fathers for Nana, who had died the night before, I cried unabashedly. I had lost all belief in "as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end."
Community rosaries were a different matter. Here, crystal rosaries were of no consequence and family prayer structures were easily forgotten. The only important thing was getting to blow out the candles. Getting the community rosary started was a long process, involving fetching a plaster statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, two candlestands with glass covers, and a tablecloth, and setting up an altar on an old wooden table. Lighting the candles was possible only through divine intervention, considering the strong breezes that blew in our building. Eventually, I guess Mary would beam upon someone's efforts, the candles would be lit, and we'd all arrange ourselves for the fifteen-minute session.
If the adults were busy praying that any litigation the building was involved in would be sorted out soon, we children were all watching the candles. On occasion, we'd be distracted by something else -- such as my three year old neighbour singing "Song Sung Blue" in a piercing baby lisp, while everyone else tried to keep from giggling -- but we knew where our attention had to be. The truly intelligent would stand exactly opposite the candles, at the shortest distance from the table that was possible, and inch forward carefully while the prayers went on, moving a bare millimeter at a time to gain the advantage. As the last "Amen" was proclaimed, these intelligent ones would race forward, pull off the glass candle-shades, and blow the candles out. Every once in a while, someone else would run in from the side, and a fight would start, or some unfeeling adult would stride up and blow while we were still running. Those were terrible days.
Almost as important was the boiled channa and cold drink served on the last days of May and October, in celebration of the end of the community rosary event for the month. While everyone else chatted amicably, we trawled the auntie line up, taking handfuls of channa, noting who had added the most coconut, pulling faces at any lack of sugar in the cold drink, and eventually deciding which auntie was to be looked upon most favourably for the rest of the year because of her generosity and culinary talents. This, however, remained secondary, probably because it was a thrill of just two days, whereas we got 60 days a year to fight over the candles.
Now, my building has become fancy; there are no candles to fight over at the community rosary and the small statue of Our Lady of Lourdes has been replaced by a permanent grotto with an almost life-sized statue of Mary holding the dead Jesus in her arms. For that matter, the number of people going down to say the rosary has dwindled considerably; few people have the time any more and not many parents insist that their children should go. There is still channa and cold drink at the end of May and then again at the end of October, but they have lost their charm for a generation brought up on more exotic delicacies. As usual, I am caught in ambivalance about this situation; on the one hand, as a professed agnostic, I really don't care if people stop saying their prayers, while on the other hand, as someone whose only culture is so caught up in Catholicism, I'm sorry that each time I revisit it with a sense of nostalgia, it has lost more and more of its community feeling.
I can still go home to Bandra and sit down with my grandparents and say the rosary, thankfully. I don't have to say it with my parents, who are still confused about whether I'm an agnostic or an atheist, but I haven't the courage to startle my grandparents by not joining in. We all sit down together, Grana, Papa, my mother, my father, my sister C, and me. Grana and Papa get the treat of saying a rosary with the family, as they always used to, instead of with the rosary as said on the Eternal Word Television Network, a Catholic TV channel.
Right from the start, it is evident that we are hopelessly out of sync with each other. I've never heard such a mismatch of rosary-saying styles all trying to reach some sort of harmony and failing miserably. My mother says it calmly and at a measured pace, sounding just like the schoolteacher she was with years of experience of dictating notes in class. My father starts out with a sonorous boom and then gets gradually softer until you can't hear his Amens. Grana says her prayers with a peculiar diction that makes it difficult to tell if she is speaking a garbled Konkani or Latin or Swahili or actually saying the rosary. My sister C charges through her prayers furiously, as though she can't wait for them to be answered. Me, well, for someone who is saying them for the sake of saying them, I am remarkably slow at my prayers. I listen to everyone else as I say them and listen to the words and appreciate the language--and still wonder why the hell anyone would call Mary the Tower of Babel.
Perhaps the only one of us who still says the rosary as though he's part of a community is Papa. His rosary goes at the pace of a solemn procession, and if I close my eyes, I see him walking along, holding a long candlestand, with a large crowd shuffling along before and after him. All of them say their prayers at that pregnant pace. We're the ones who lurch along, each of us alone, while Papa has company. We seem like nothing so much as a set of horses with varying running abilities. My sister C comes in first every race, Grana, Dad, and Mummy all get in soon after, I meander along, and Papa comes in last. One of these days, a string of ping-pong balls will pull him along and he'll catch up, and we'll add another mystery to the mysteries of our family rosary.
Wafers, O Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
-------------------------------------
When my mother read this, she promptly ran off with her rosary to do some research, saying the entire litany a couple of times to check what she was doubtful of. Eventually, she called me up and informed me that there was no invocation that went 'Tower of Babel," but there IS one that goes, "Tower of David." Still -- why the hell would you call anyone the Tower of David, that's what I'd like to know.
7 comments:
O Sanchia, queen of hilarity. Wafers, indeed.
Can't help picturing you scorning upon a hypothetical Sister Violet when you were emptily enunciating the "Mother Inviolate" prayer ;)
Brings me back... that splintery, wooden table that the 'boys' would drag out, the channa fights, Mrs. C giving directions, running upstairs to the house of whoever was entrusted with the cross and candles that week... I still think Mrs. N on the 2nd floor made the best channa, with little chunks of fresh, tender coconut in it. She timed it well too - out of the cooker just in time to be hot when served.
It was a strange thing too (a Mystery perhaps?), but you couldn't haul us back home at 9pm, after a looong day of running around; make us stand still for the rosary and hallelujah, Virgin of Virgins, what a chore!
Awesome... you have a wonderful style. I wandered over from the Bandra Bugges's Blog and am now adding your Blog to my MUST READS.
rohit, now that I've spent time in South India, it's all I can do to stop myself from saying "hot chips" instead of wafers. :P
j nonymouse, you're right -- Mrs N did make the best channa. I gather Mrs R on the floor below her has taken over now, but I don't know how good the channa is.
Come to think of it, I don't know if Mrs C is actually going for the rosary this year.
Time passes, no?
Anonymous, thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
I remeber the time your table cloth flew up and caught fire on the candle. We all watched totally paralyzed until Miss C strode up, swatted out the flames, patted down the cloth - and not missing a beat of the rosary the entire time!
I think Nana mended that table cloth with a pink satin patch.
Pixy: Ah, you remember that! I wonder if my mum still has the tablecloth (which was mended with a pink satin patch and used after that for sundry birthday parties). She goes through such fits of "clearing the house"!
Wow. where have they put the giant rosaries. I didnt even notice they were gone. Loving it.
Post a Comment