Celebrating Festivals

The many festivals during these seasons also helped. Our observance of festivals was mostly in eating the special preparations that were part of the traditions around each festival. We also lit lamps for Diwali, and bought a cake for X'mas. I had grown up with the tradition of new clothes for the major festivals – Shankar Jayanti [mid-January], Ugadi [March/April] and Deepavali [October/November]. Try as I did to inculcate this practice after marriage in my new household, it just did not click. Ramu only laughed and offered to get himself underwear! So I had to content myself with just getting my new clothes around these festival times and wore new clothes that day.

When Adit was about three or four, a classmate of mine had invited me for Dasara 'Golu' or 'Gombe' [the doll display that is common in the south [except in Kerala] for nine days -friends and acquaintances are invited over to view this display in many homes. When we were kids, we used to love going from one house to another, especially the ones famed for their grand or innovative and beautiful arrangements on improvised steps covered with white sheets. Some also created scenes, often extending all over a large room with special effects - lighting, miniature fountains and some toys that moved ever so realistically]! As we came back from my friend's place, Adit asked why we did not have such a display; could we not have one?
i immediately rejoined, 'Why not?' and that very day we started a small one. this became a regular practice and used to be quite elaborate, with ragi sown on the toy gardens and hills [its young shoots mimic grass], and Adit contributing with his lego and mechano toys to complete a particular scene.
When we moved from India, we turned this into a social afternoon when our friends and colleagues, with their families, would gather and marvel at our displays and the stories around the various figures. Sometimes, due to my frequent tours, I had to celebrate this festival along with Deepavalli [as Diwali is termed in the South – it probably is more authentic than the shorter form] almost a full month late.
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It was again Adit who started us on celebrating X'mas [apart from being ready to eat that delicious plum cake either on that occasion or on New Year's Eve]. He asked why we did not have a Christmas tree upon seeing one somewhere, and so that first year, we chopped off a branch from our very own fir bush from the front lawn, and decorated it. That became a tradition with us, sometimes with bought trees and later a fake one [horror!] in the USA!
Adit also asked us why we did not celebrate any Muslim festival. I had to say I knew very little of how Muslim festivals were celebrated, other than through public prayers, feasts and camraderie. Truth to say, all our knowledge of Indian Muslim culture was through books, films or newspaper reports! I had no Muslim colleague, let alone friend, barring the Khalakadina children, but they were not typical Muslims and did not celebrate those Eids in any noticeable way. [Their Muslim father had married Margaret, who was on a consultancy to UNICEF Delhi when we became friends; she was a Christian with one ancestor a Bangalore Jew and another a convert from Hinduism – quite an eccletic mix!].
Later, in Addis Ababa, Dr. Salim, who was then the ILO representative there, once chided me for not greeting him and his family on an Eid. I realised then that in North India, among those who were in the same social circle, that was a practice, but I had not even thought of it! Even when in UNICEF, I made a large number of Muslim friends from different countries, their celebration of their festivals seemed never to be public like Diwali or X'mas.
The other festivals we used to observe were Sankaranthi, the day the sun is said to turn back from its end point in the southern horizon [or more scientifically, when the earth rotates to start facing the sun in the northern hemisphere]. The actual day is based on astronomical calculations, but it comes a few weeks after the winter solstice, about the middle of January. Observed all over India, it is one of the most important festivals in a major part of the South – this is due to the winter harvest after the north-east monsoons there. In Karnataka, apart from eating the dishes made of the fresh harvest produce, a snack made of toasted sesame and peanuts, to which is added split roasted garbanzo peas [channa], bits of jaggery and copra, is exchanged among friends and family to 'bind' one another in eternal friendship. It is mainly as a social festival like Dasara and Diwali that I liked to celebrate it.
We also observed Ugadi, the Kannada New Year that falls between the end of March and the middle of April [depending on the moon] and Varsha Porappu [the Tamil New Year] generally centring around the middle of April [ following the solar calendar] – all in the eating rather than any puja. One special feature of these two new years is combining neem with jaggery to anticipate the bitterness and sweetnes of the new year. In Karnataka one chews a bit of jaggery along with a bit of neem [a teeny weeny bit – even that bitterness can be too much!]. In Tamilnadu, one makes a pachadi [a thick liquid side-dish] with roasted neem flower and jaggery.