Come Christmas every year, I start brushing up my small telephone notebook to fish out my Christian friends to greet them — my practice for many decades. It started when I was in my early middle school in Shivamogga. I along with some friends would go to Shiny’s house during Christmas, not only to wish all in her family but also to enjoy the exquisite and delicious cupcakes made by her mother with icing cartoons.
Shiny had a happy family. Her father worked at the local Church. I remember her taking some of us once to the Church with her father’s permission.
As she was the only daughter, all her six brothers not only doted on her but also welcomed her friends. Whenever her mother baked cupcakes, she would invariably send some extra cupcakes with her tiffin. This was a practice for quite some time till a major tragedy struck her family.
When she suddenly had stopped coming to school, we asked our class teacher who told us she, along with her younger brother Henry (who was also our school student), was hospitalised due to Typhoid which was still deadly those days for lack of scientific advancement. My mother never allowed me to visit them for the fear of contracting the same. Just after that, one day in the school assembly, after the prayer, there was a condolence message read out by the headmaster, conveying the sad demise of both Shiny and her brother and a half-day holiday was declared. We felt very sad but did not know how to react as we were too young to understand the depth and intensity of the situation.
For many years, during every last week of December, we would remember Shiny and her mother’s cupcakes, but none of us visited her house. To move past the dual tragedy, the family had shifted to Madras and her house stood there forlorn and bare in stark contrast to how I had known it. For the first time, Christmas became just a day in my life.
Then, after a few years, I moved to Bhilai (then in Madhya Pradesh) after marriage. As Bhilai is a cosmopolitan township, all of us partook in all festival celebrations. I had quite a good number of Christian colleagues and students. Here once more my tryst with cupcake began. My good friend Paroo, a Coorgi, used to bake exquisite ones which again took me back to Shiny. Now Paroo is no more and we also have moved away from Bhilai to Bengaluru after my husband’s superannuation.
That said, the memories of my friends’ love and kindness towards me during Christmas always glow much brighter than the embers of grief that singe me occasionally.