Festive cheer

I went to the temple this morning. No, it was not a visit to do any praying, since that doesn’t do the trick for me, but it was to make sure that the traditional rituals of this time of year in the South Indian home – ours, actually, which is modified in every which way – are not neglected or ignored or forgotten. I did this last year as well, but far more successfully. This morning, it was a bit of a scramble, linguistically and time-wise, since I had little control over schedule, procedure and, unfortunately, it seemed my own tongue.

Next week it will be Pongal, the harvest festival. We have no fields to harvest, and do no harvesting, except perhaps from the pots of wheat grass grown outside the kitchen window for the edification (literally) of Small Cat. But we make sure that we follow the festival calendar, at least gastronomically, since that has always been the norm in our home. For Pongal, food means two kinds of the eponymous pongal – the ven-pongal, or savoury, ghee-laced blend of dal and rice punctuated with cracked pepper, mustard seeds and cashewnuts, and the sakkarai-pongal, the same dal and rice mixture cooked with milk and jaggery, aromatics like cardamom and saffron and lots of cashewnuts and raisins. I can make the former with little effort; the latter tends to daunt me somewhat, which means that I have never tried to do it myself at home because the labour-intensiveness makes me rather nervous.

So Father suggested last year that we get the sweet stuff that we both relish from the temple in central Mumbai known for its prasadam of sakkarai-pongal. I called around, got the number, managed to battle my own linguistic deficiencies and ordered enough to keep us happy and nicely rounded. It all worked out fine, everyone was happy and my spiritual conscience was assuaged, since I did a small prayer for Mother in the process of getting it all done.

But this time I was defeated. I called the temple yesterday, well in time I thought, since the festival is only mid-next week. A rather gruff gentleman who refused to speak anything but Tamil answered and demanded to know what I wanted and who I was. All this during a very long day at the paper, page-making interrupted by constant phone calls and queries and a tummy that wanted me to commandeer the dreadful offerings of junk food that drift past in the corridors after 5 o’clock in the evening. My Tamil completely and ignominiously failed. I was left stuttering incoherently, wondering how to get past the subject of who I was to what I wanted. I felt, in fact, a little like Oliver Twist, asking for more of something that I knew was a commodity that could be easily bought.

That is where Father came to the rescue. While his Tamil is perhaps only fractionally better than mine, he had the leisure and the mindspace to think about what he was saying and how to phrase it. He was also rather more compos mentis, less hassled and frazzled by the world at large and the sounds, sights and stresses of production time at a newspaper. So he made the appropriate arrangements, told me what to do and left me to it. This morning, I drove up to the temple in air-conditioned comfort, said my set-piece in Tamil that was decent and comprehensible, if not completely accurate and classical, and collected my prasadam after paying in my money and stating what my birth-star was. There seemed to be some kind of ceremony in progress, which had me running a little scared, so I did a quick round of the shrines, sent a thought up to Mother and fled.

My duty is done for the year. It is not likely that I will be at another temple again until that time comes around for me to start having menageries about tradition and ritual. And, in that hiatus, I could learn to relax and practice my language skills.