George Menezes

I cry a lot. And I must say I’m not ashamed of it. In fact I believe it is one of my very few strengths. Good poetry, a sad movie, injustice done to helpless people about whom I can do nothing except write, brings tears to my eyes.

I weep sometimes at Christmas and New Year time remembering my really wonderful parents and my siblings and the heartwarming and very simple sharing of home-made sweets and home-concocted stories and a peep into faded albums and disintegrating letters written within the family in previous years.
Part of the sharing always included a host of other people. Especially “tongawallas” and their old and emaciated horses that was our main transportation in the “not-just one-horse town” of Dharwad where we lived in a huge Professors bungalow.

Ten rooms that easily accommodated two parents, seven children, two Dalit students whom we had adopted and a retinue of domestic help not to mention peons and sweepers from the college whose “sponging” habits at all kinds of festivals were initiated and encouraged by my mother.

In a way the spirit of Christmas was a daily affair which culminated with putting up a branch of a jack-fruit tree in our sitting-room strung up with the earrings and bangles belonging to my two sisters and an angel dressed in the christening robe that was being passed down in our family. People who knew us said that the only “angel” who wore the family christening robe was the stuffed one standing next to the Christmas tree.

Even today the family believes that “sharing” and the ability to reduce oneself to a child in the manger and to laugh at oneself is the essence of Christmas. My need to cry is therefore strongly welded to my need for uncontrollable laughter.

I laugh at the Christmases and New Years we celebrated when we lived in Chembur in the highly polluted Eastern part of Mumbai where even the Church choir coughed in different voices.

Playing the role of Santa Claus was crucial to my integration into the parish, the club and the smog. Sharing my gifts and charisms as it were.

On the two occasions that I played the role the children and parents had the time of their lives although, on both occasions, it was disastrous for me.

One-time, promising a job for the local Fire Officer’s son, I came riding in my resplendent red costume on the matching red fire truck. Unfortunately the Fire Station got an emergency call and I had to drop the toys on the football ground in the middle of the function and rush, still standing on the fire truck, to answer the emergency call.

It was a miracle that my cap and beard were not engulfed in flames but they definitely were wetter than a baby’s nappy.

Shameless as I am, the next year I volunteered to play Santa again and to come down on to the school ground from the second floor of the school with the aid of some complex set of chains, gears and pulleys designed by a parishioner who was teaching at IIT Pawai.

I later realized that he had a grudge against me for not employing his cross-eyed daughter as a receptionist.

Coming down with my bag of toys over my shoulder the chain got stuck and all efforts to get the gears functioning and bring me to the ground failed.

I was stuck in mid-air for an hour, the bag of toys falling to the ground and creating a major stampede.

I was finally rescued by none other than the Fire Brigade of the previous Christmas but the howls of the laughter of the parents and children still ring in my ear. Being humiliated, almost Biblically, has been a pattern of many of my Christmases.

The worst memory is of the New Year at Dharwad when I came home late from visiting a girl friend to find that my siblings had set fire to the “Old Man” dressed up in my Air Force uniform !

Our recent family Christmas-New Year time has transcended rituals. Short-circuiting an obsession for new clothes, gift-giving competitions, faceless and unsigned greeting cards and heavily laden dining tables that Bernard Shaw would have said are “illegal, almost immoral and definitely fattening”.

There are now over 60 members of our extended family. The most beautiful people I’ve ever known in my life. And what we do when we manage to meet is really the theme of this piece.

The last time there were 40 of us. More like the shepherds than the wise king’s, crossing from wherever we had arrived from, across the ferry on the Mandovi River in Goa, to our ancestral home on the island of Divar.

A motley crowd if you ever saw one. Moth-eaten brothers and sisters with some spouses from distant lands, marriages miraculously intact, followed by another generation now moving, with total grace and confidence beyond countries, to breaking barriers of caste and creed.

After a satisfying meal and several hours at the bar, we sat, some with babies in their laps, in the “balcao” of the home of our ancestors and talked, each one in turn, late into the night and the early morning hours when the Goan piggies came home to do their Municipal jobs.

We shared our achievements of the previous years. Big ones, small ones, pride in our voices, calling for another round at the bar. We shared our failures, our hurts and our resentments and anger. We shared the tensions in our relationships and we confronted each other with caring, “care-fronting” as I like to call it in my training sessions.

Sometimes the sarcasm was corrosive, the bitterness both difficult to share and to understand. But we dealt with it in the midst of tears always bringing back warmth into the discussion by calling up the memory of our parents and their faith in us, reminding ourselves that the Lord was always present when we gathered in his name and especially at Christmas time.

Finally we shared our dreams practical ones; impossible ones, dreams so beautiful, so childish, so boastful and so self-fulfilling that we hugged each other and cried some more.

And when it became unbearable we recalled funny stories, some ribald, about our parents and about ourselves and the uncontrollable laughter made us “whole”.