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Mandatory Christmas Visits to Everyone in Mangalore (From my memoir in progress: Up to the Hills)

By Anita Mathias


We dutifully paid our Christmas visits to Ethel, Winifred, Priscilla, Eudora,
 and Fulvia.

Mangalorian names changed with each generation. They were once Portuguese: My great-grandparents included Ligouri and Appolina Coelho, Jao Lobo, Salvador Mathias.  Babies were, unimaginatively, given the name of the Parish Priest or the saint of the day, no matter how outlandish or otherworldly: Thrasius, Pulcheria, Paschalia, Balthazar, Blasius, Callistus, Faustin, Custudio, Seraphine, Boniface, Bonaventure, Cajetan, Clothilda.
With the British Empire entrenched, Portuguese names faded, giving place to starchy Victorian ones; fanciful raids on Shakespeare, Chaucer, Greek mythology and poetry, yielded Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, Leander, Griselda, Nympha, Christabel, Sybil and Nereus, the old man of the sea. 
A set of war siblings were impartially named Adolph (Dolphie), Winston and Joseph.  Some played a single string, Oswald, Oscar, Orville, Odile Domingo; or Denise, Danny, Diane, Douggie, Denzil, and David, children of Dougie and Daphne Diaz.  Or rhymed: the triplets, Asha, Isha, Usha; or the Pintos–Gilbert, Albert, Humbert, Cuthbert, Egbert and Norbert.  Another set of Mathiases named their children alphabetically, like hurricanes, reluctantly stopping at Quentin, their seventeenth. 
Those were the days of prodigious families, mothers and children pregnant together, nephews older than uncles. My father’s neighbors, the P.G. D’Souzas (“the Blind Pig”) had seventeen children, interchangeable with the fourteen Mathias children.  Spotting my uncle Joe at her dining table, Mrs. D’Souza said vaguely, “Joe! You must come and stay with us some time.”  “I’ve been here for the last three days,” he said.  Neither mother had noticed!   
In independent India, Anglicized names, Melroy, Gerson, Flavia were passé.  “Graveyard names!” my father groaned.  Under Hindu hegemony, many families, discovering ancestral memories of being Brahmin before their conversion half a millennium ago, replaced their “prestigious” names, Coelho, Lobo, Saldahna, Gonsalves, Mascarenhas, Rebello with old Brahminical surnames, so that a Mangalorean Kamath or Prabhu, say, probably indicates a Catholic.  (Oddly, an extraordinary number of Catholic families claim descent from Tippu Sultan, the last ruler of the princely state of Mysore, putative progeny of “hanky-panky” in barns while he fled from the British.) 
Hindu first names or nicknames became popular. My sister and cousins are Shalini, Nirmala, Ashok, Malati, Premila, though each has a nickname, originating in parental endearments, so the inner circle knew that Popsy was Premila; Chicky was Malati; Chippy, “a chip off the old block,” was Michael, like his father, and Veronica was Buddie (old woman)–her father Sonny’s teasing nick-name when she was a gawky, gap-toothed six year old had lasted far longer than baby teeth. 
Now, in the emigration generation, children mostly have “international names,” Indian, but transcultural: Tara, Rohan, Sheila, Maya, Neel, Natasha, Anita, and, thanks to the Waste Land, Shanti. 
                                               * * *
So we visited all the family and friends, loved or hated, with whom we were on speaking terms, arriving unannounced, like the Magi–as was considered good manners: calling ahead would put the onus of preparation on the unoffending host, whereas if you just showed up, you took their manger or mansion as you found it. 
Like the Magi, we brought gifts–not frankincense, gold and myrrh, but halwa, pedas, and burfis.  Someone was sure to be in.  The people we visited lived on the income, generous or meager, from stocks, factories, or the ancestral terraced plantations of cashewnuts, pepper and coffee in the green hills around Mangalore on which the fortunes of several “old families” were built. 
All morning, all evening, we ate neurios, coconut-stuffed pasties; chacklees, spicy gram flour deep-fried in bristly snail spirals; parthecums, pungent banana chips; kulkuls, fried sugary dough rolled into shells on the back of a comb, and Christmas fruit cake with marzipan icing as we sat opposite plastic trees, sparkling with neon orbs, wreathed with popcorn or cotton wool snow, celebrating the weather of England rather than Bethlehem. 

 And food, food, always food!

“Is your father Mangalorean?” a wedding hostess asked as I got him refills while he chuckled over the lyrics floating from the house where the bride was bathed in coconut milk for her roce, her wedding shower, while her friends sung the saddest, oddest dirges, until she burst into tears. This was supposed to bring good luck! 
“Oh, you poor thing,” they sang. “That mother-in-law!  When you visit her, she’ll be vegetarian; when she’s visits you, she’ll be “non-vegetarian.”  Her visits will be almost eternal. When she leaves, so will your most precious possessions.” 
 “Good, he’s Mangalorean!” the hostess said, freely loading his plate.  “Then he loves sarpatel,”–Mangalorean signature dish with chunks of pork beneath inches of fat and chewy, rubbery rind, simmered in a sauce of spices, wine and blood.
My near-vegetarian father nearly wailed.  He eschewed pork: free-ranging, gutter-feeding, its tape-worm spreading meningitis, he said; its round worm causing the recent epidemic of encephalitis, he believed. 
                                                 * * *

And we talked of many things.  Of blue chips, prices, politics, people, a great continuing Ring.  Rhinegold: “Your uncle Morris is Director of United Breweries in Singapore now.  Did you see the newspaper article about how that secretive Lee Kuan Yew sends him on private missions to Bombay?”  Valkyries: “Your friend Fran–I remember when her mother eloped with that Protestant, a Soanes, with only the clothes she had on. I even had to give her my blouses and petticoats.” 
And in a conventionally lowered voice.  “Your cousin Bernice’s youngest boy; he doesn’t resemble Hubert, have you noticed?”  “Yeees.”  “Her lover’s from a former princely family, she says.  And poor Hubert’s off in the god-forsaken northeast.” 
But, mostly, Gotterdamerung, crepuscular death, decay, doom.  “I saw Debby, even weirder.” “Debby?”  “Debby Coelho who married her first cousin, and had a breakdown on her honeymoon in Europe, after which she lived secluded on the family coffee estate in Conoor, to which he occasionally returned to get her, once more, pregnant, while she grew stranger, dreamier.” 
“Belita miscarried. So sad, her mother-in-law forced her to scrub the bathroom floors while she was pregnant.”  “S. has never recovered from his wife’s death. On their honeymoon!  Stepped into the elevator, expecting to find it there; fell into the shaft, broke her neck.” “The Fathers have taken that drunken Willie in hand.  Imagine, he beat up his sister after she gave Anita those old classics.” 
“Francis Xavier just had a heart attack.” “Oh no!  I’ll never forget how he passed out at his daughter’s grand engagement party–you know to that jerk from the States who dumped her.  ‘Sugar!’ he called–he’s diabetic–and poured it into his mouth, straight from the bowl.” 
“You know that druggie, Angelo.  Goes to an ashram, declares himself a vegetarian, sits on his bed in some sort of trance; when he visited his aunt, Margaret, she, poor thing, took a plate of kichdi to him with just the tiniest bit of meat.  He flung it on the floor, then continued staring at her with fixed, glassy eyes.”   
Stories, stories, plots, whirring round me. I listened wild-eyed! 
All this, good news, bad news, just news in English.  Konkani–a hybrid of Portuguese and Marathi only spoken in Mangalore and Goa–is the nominal mother-tongue I neither speak nor understand; neither does my father.  Since the nineteenth century, Catholic schools and universities have taught only in English; their students–everyone we visited–spoke it as, or almost as, a first language.

Goals
Start Date—August 27th, 2012
Completion Date—August 31st, 2013
Word Count Goal-120,000
Words per day Goal—515 words a day
Progress (Aiming to write 6 days a week, excluding Sundays)
  
 Day 35—17548 (477 behind)
  


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  1. Anita Mathias says

    October 7, 2012 at 6:11 pm

    LA, thanks so much for reading. I am returning to writing (rather than blogging) and this memoir after a six and a half year break, and it's taking a while for my mind and fingers to get used to it, so to say!!

  2. LA says

    October 7, 2012 at 1:31 pm

    I really enjoyed these memories! Felt like I was there with you…

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anita.mathias

Writer, Blogger, Reader, Mum. Christian. Instaing Oxford, travel, gardens and healthy meals. Oxford English alum. Writing memoir. Lives in Oxford, UK

Images from walks around Oxford. #beauty #oxford # Images from walks around Oxford. #beauty #oxford #walking #tranquility #naturephotography #nature
So we had a lovely holiday in the Southwest. And h So we had a lovely holiday in the Southwest. And here we are at one of the world’s most famous and easily recognisable sites.
#stonehenge #travel #england #prehistoric England #family #druids
And I’ve blogged https://anitamathias.com/2020/09/13/on-not-wasting-a-desert-experience/
So, after Paul the Apostle's lightning bolt encounter with the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus, he went into the desert, he tells us...
And there, he received revelation, visions, and had divine encounters. The same Judean desert, where Jesus fasted for forty days before starting his active ministry. Where Moses encountered God. Where David turned from a shepherd to a leader and a King, and more, a man after God’s own heart.  Where Elijah in the throes of a nervous breakdown hears God in a gentle whisper. 
England, where I live, like most of the world is going through a desert experience of continuing partial lockdowns. Covid-19 spreads through human contact and social life, and so we must refrain from those great pleasures. We are invited to the desert, a harsh place where pruning can occur, and spiritual fruitfulness.
A plague like this has not been known for a hundred years... John Piper, after his cancer diagnosis, exhorted people, “Don’t Waste Your Cancer”—since this was the experience God permitted you to have, and He can bring gold from it. Pandemics and plagues are permitted (though not willed or desired) by a Sovereign God, and he can bring life-change out of them. 
Let us not waste this unwanted, unchosen pandemic, this opportunity for silence, solitude and reflection. Let’s not squander on endless Zoom calls—or on the internet, which, if not used wisely, will only raise anxiety levels. Let’s instead accept the invitation to increased silence and reflection
Let's use the extra free time that many of us have long coveted and which has now been given us by Covid-19 restrictions to seek the face of God. To seek revelation. To pray. 
And to work on those projects of our hearts which have been smothered by noise, busyness, and the tumult of people and parties. To nurture the fragile dreams still alive in our hearts. The long-deferred duty or vocation
So, we are about eight weeks into lockdown, and I So, we are about eight weeks into lockdown, and I have totally sunk into the rhythm of it, and have got quiet, very quiet, the quietest spell of time I have had as an adult.
I like it. I will find going back to the sometimes frenetic merry-go-round of my old life rather hard. Well, I doubt I will go back to it. I will prune some activities, and generally live more intentionally and mindfully.
I have started blocking internet of my phone and laptop for longer periods of time, and that has brought a lot of internal quiet and peace.
Some of the things I have enjoyed during lockdown have been my daily long walks, and gardening. Well, and reading and working on a longer piece of work.
Here are some images from my walks.
And if you missed it, a blog about maintaining peace in the middle of the storm of a global pandemic
https://anitamathias.com/2020/05/04/a-mind-of-life-and-peace/  #walking #contemplating #beauty #oxford #pandemic
A few walks in Oxford in the time of quarantine. A few walks in Oxford in the time of quarantine.  We can maintain a mind of life and peace during this period of lockdown by being mindful of our minds, and regulating them through meditation; being mindful of our bodies and keeping them happy by exercise and yoga; and being mindful of our emotions in this uncertain time, and trusting God who remains in charge. A new blog on maintaining a mind of life and peace during lockdown https://anitamathias.com/2020/05/04/a-mind-of-life-and-peace/
In the days when one could still travel, i.e. Janu In the days when one could still travel, i.e. January 2020, which seems like another life, all four of us spent 10 days in Malta. I unplugged, and logged off social media, so here are some belated iphone photos of a day in Valetta.
Today, of course, there’s a lockdown, and the country’s leader is in intensive care.
When the world is too much with us, and the news stresses us, moving one’s body, as in yoga or walking, calms the mind. I am doing some Yoga with Adriene, and again seeing the similarities between the practice of Yoga and the practice of following Christ.
https://anitamathias.com/2020/04/06/on-yoga-and-following-jesus/
#valleta #valletamalta #travel #travelgram #uncagedbird
Images from some recent walks in Oxford. I am copi Images from some recent walks in Oxford.
I am coping with lockdown by really, really enjoying my daily 4 mile walk. By savouring the peace of wild things. By trusting that God will bring good out of this. With a bit of yoga, and weights. And by working a fair amount in my garden. And reading.
How are you doing?
#oxford #oxfordinlockdown #lockdown #walk #lockdownwalks #peace #beauty #happiness #joy #thepeaceofwildthings
Images of walks in Oxford in this time of social d Images of walks in Oxford in this time of social distancing. The first two are my own garden.  And I’ve https://anitamathias.com/2020/03/28/silver-and-gold-linings-in-the-storm-clouds-of-coronavirus/ #corona #socialdistancing #silverlinings #silence #solitude #peace
Trust: A Message of Christmas He came to earth in Trust: A Message of Christmas  He came to earth in a  splash of energy
And gentleness and humility.
That homeless baby in the barn
Would be the lynchpin on which history would ever after turn
Who would have thought it?
But perhaps those attuned to God’s way of surprises would not be surprised.
He was already at the centre of all things, connecting all things. * * *
Augustus Caesar issued a decree which brought him to Bethlehem,
The oppressions of colonialism and conquest brought the Messiah exactly where he was meant to be, the place prophesied eight hundred years before his birth by the Prophet Micah.
And he was already redeeming all things. The shame of unwed motherhood; the powerlessness of poverty.
He was born among animals in a barn, animals enjoying the sweetness of life, animals he created, animals precious to him.
For he created all things, and in him all things hold together
Including stars in the sky, of which a new one heralded his birth
Drawing astronomers to him.
And drawing him to the attention of an angry King
As angelic song drew shepherds to him.
An Emperor, a King, scholars, shepherds, angels, animals, stars, an unwed mother
All things in heaven and earth connected
By a homeless baby
The still point on which the world still turns. The powerful centre. The only true power.
The One who makes connections. * * *
And there is no end to the wisdom, the crystal glints of the Message that birth brings.
To me, today, it says, “Fear not, trust me, I will make a way.” The baby lay gentle in the barn
And God arranges for new stars, angelic song, wise visitors with needed finances for his sustenance in the swiftly-coming exile, shepherds to underline the anointing and reassure his parents. “Trust me in your dilemmas,” the baby still says, “I will make a way. I will show it to you.” Happy Christmas everyone.  https://anitamathias.com/2019/12/24/trust-a-message-of-christmas/ #christmas #gemalderieberlin #trust #godwillmakeaway
Look, I’ve designed a journal. It’s an omnibus Look, I’ve designed a journal. It’s an omnibus Gratitude journal, habit tracker, food and exercise journal, bullet journal, with time sheets, goal sheets and a Planner. Everything you’d like to track.  Here’s a post about it with ISBNs https://anitamathias.com/2019/12/23/life-changing-journalling/. Check it out. I hope you and your kids like it!
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