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Rosaries at the Grotto: The One Holy Catholic Church in Jamshedpur, India, where I grew up (From my memoir “Mind Has Mountains”)

By Anita Mathias

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May was the Month of our Lady, when Father Jesus Calvo, the Spanish parish priest, corralled the entire Catholic community of Jamshedpur to say the rosary standing outside the grotto of St. Mary’s Church, a man-made cave of rocks and mortar, overplanted with vines and flowers–modeled on the grotto at which the Virgin appeared to Bernadette at Lourdes.

“Hail Mary,” “Holy Mary,” the words rose and fell, hypnotic as the sea, 50 repetitions, punctuated by the mini-relief of the Glory Be, and the Memorare at the end, like the promise of better things: “Remember, Oh most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided.”

My mother bowed over her rosary, her long-lashed eyes closed, an image of fervor and devotion. My father prayed rapidly, head down, frowning, as if his own rapidity would hasten the conclusion.

 

Decades later, adults recalled how I slipped away, climbed to the top of the grotto, and squatted there, monkey-like, surveying the crowd. Giggles rose.

My father, hearing them, instantly looked for me. It was a reflex. There I was, on top of the grotto, the eyes of every Catholic in Jamshedpur on me.

“Anita, come down,” he hissed. I remained there, grinning. Behind my bravado was the secret I always remembered too late: I was afraid of heights.

“Anita come down,’ he hissed between clenched lips as children giggled and adults prayed, laughter in their voices. Finally, my dignified father, senior management in that company town, fifty-two years old to my seven, squeezed through the crowd, past the amputee Mrs Watkins, past Mr. D’Costa who owned Boulevard Hotel, and Mrs. D’Cruz who owned a nursery school, and crawled up the grotto, and then inched down, half-carrying me, while around us the laughter-speckled rosary rose and fell, “Hail Mary, full of grace.”

* * *

Catholic social life in Jamshedpur revolved around the Parish Church of St. Mary’s, the Catholic Family Movement, and the Mangalorian-Goan Association.

Goa and Mangalore were both colonized by the Portuguese, and four hundred years later, traces endure in the names–Mathias, Coelho, Mascarenhas, Gonsalves, Rebello, Pinto, Saldanha; the imported religion, Catholicism; and the language, Konkani, only spoken only by Goans and Mangaloreans, a patois of Portuguese and the Kannada and Marathi spoken by the indigenous communities before colonization. Konkani was officially my mother-tongue, but I have never learned it; neither did my father, who as the son of an upwardly mobile surgeon, was only taught English.

Mangalorian-Goan food too was distinctive–sarpatel, a pork curry, thickened by added pig’s blood, eaten with sannas, fluffy steamed rice cakes, fermented in toddy. Kube, a curry of clams or cockles, was breakfast at my grandmother’s house. Fish cooked in coconut milk was ubiquitous, while at teatime, people ate patolio and patrade, dumplings or pancakes stuffed with fresh grated coconut and jaggery, unrefined brown sugar, and steamed in plaintain leaves,

At the Mangalorian-Goan Association dinners, people danced the waltz, one-two together, one-two together, the fox trot, or the polka to Joan Baez, Elvis Presley, or Jerry Lewis. I flung myself between my parents in shock and a fury of jealousy the first time I saw them waltz, trying to separate them. They continued waltzing, laughing.

* * *

 Mangaloreans and Goans of all social classes met at Mangalorian-Goan Association meetings. Though they were mainly professionals, there were a few Goans drawn to town as laborerers in the factory, whose children through industry and the good education provided by the Jesuit-run Loyola School—and the fair-mindedness of the Parsee-run Tata Iron and Steel company, started as manual labourers or clerks and ended as managers in a classic arc of upward mobility

I held the hand of a child of the large Andrade family who all moved to Jamshedpur from Goa, drawn by the jobs in TISCO. “Why is your hand so rough?” I asked. “Because I help my mother wash clothes,” she said. My mother had an ayah to do the washing, as I supposed everyone’s mother did. It never occurred to me that children might do the washing. “You help your mother wash clothes?” I said, genuinely shocked. Sabina, embarrassed, avoided me for the rest of our childhoods; her mother never forgave me, and neither did mine.

* * *

 An American Jesuit, appropriately called Father Love, founded the Catholic Family Movement in Jamshedpur, which brought together Catholics of the same socio-economic class, an insular tight-knit group.

There were the Saldanhas, the Fernandezes, the Diases who had six children, all of whose names started with D, Denise, Danielle, Douggie, Diane, Denzil, and David. There was an Anglo-Indian family, the Thompsons, whose daughter Paula my sister Shalini adored down to her freckles and long, brown ringlets. My father claimed Shalini’s Litany of the Virgin went “Paula most pure, Paula most amiable, Paula most admirable,” and whenever I misbehaved, my father would say of Paula’s handsome brother, “Anita, if you’re so naughty, Jeff will never marry you, but he’ll marry Shalini without hesitation.”

 

The adults gathered together for spiritual instruction about which we felt no curiosity; we played together in the host child’s bedroom, until everyone crowded around the potluck, an innovation of the American priests. The Indian way would have been for the host to say “Oh, please don’t worry. I’ll just prepare a little something,” and then spend a week commandeering a lavish banquet.

Everyone competed to produce the most delectable dishes; we tasted, we begged the recipe. Unless it was brought by Blanche, wife of the local Mangalorian doctor, Bert Lasrado, British-trained as my father was. Blanche was the first woman in town with a self-contained freezer; its potential exhilarated her. While others brought freshly-cooked aromatic dishes, she announced the provenance of her offering–prawn balchow: three months old; chicken indad: six months old; lamb vindaloo: eight months old, to general consternation and withering of appetites.

We served what we called “western food”; rather to my surprise, when I immigrated to England, I found nothing like the delicious “English” food I had grown up with–“pan rolls,” crepes, fried in egg and bread crumbs, filled with spicy ground beef we called minced meat. “Potato chops,” mashed potato patties with the same spicy minced beef filling, pan-fried in a batter of egg and bread crumbs. “Cutlets,” like hamburgers, except that they were cooked with onions, green chilis, coriander and mint. “Meat puffs,” crisp hot pastry stuffed with curried minced lamb and onions.

After dinner, Dougie Diaz or Benny Fernandez produced guitars and led us in “Jamaica Farewell,” “Old Man River,” or “Banana Boat Song,” the blues being particularly popular, or “Clementine,” “Silver Dollar,” “Country Roads” or “Una Paloma Blanca.”

The lyrics were mysterious, but we sang along

Met her on the mountain,
Swore she’d be my wife,

But the gal refused me

So I stabbed her with a knife.

 

Hang down your head Tom Dooley

Hang your head and cry,
Hang down you head Tom Dooley

Poor boy you’re gonna die.

      We similarly sung along to the Beatles song,

                 Desmond has a barrow in the marketplace

Molly is a singer in the band,

Oh bloodee, oh blood-dah,

the chorus striking us as deliciously naughty.

My father had been to America, but most of us hadn’t. Still we sung the nonsense rhyme knowledgeably,

I’ve come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee,

I’m going to Louisiana, my true love for to see

It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry

The sun so hot, I froze to death, Susannah, don’t you cry.

 What did all the lyrics mean? Who knows? But it all felt magical…Daylight come and I wanna go home.

~~~~

We rented a beach house in Puri, Orissa, with the Diases, Thompsons, and other CFMers, one of whom brought his gun, and shot doves, pigeons and even sparrows, which we roasted over an improvised fire of bricks and sticks–delicious. Their son was allowed to handle the gun, and I, aged seven, seeing it left unattended, picked it up, looked through the sights and pulled the trigger. The safety catch was off; bang!! I was terrified and exhilarated, though I did not shoot a bird (or myself). The father ran out and cuffed his son, and I felt ashamed and guilty for it had all been my fault.

 

Many Catholic families began to emigrate in the early seventies; the Diazes, the Thompsons and D’Costas to Canada; the Gomes to Australia, and the Fernandezes to America. We implored my father to emigrate too, but he refused. He had been an immigrant in London in his twenties and thirties; there was no way he was going through that in his fifties, and there was no budging him. With the emigrations, the C.F.M changed, and we stopped going.

* * *

The Catholic Diocese of Jamshedpur was a missionary project of the Jesuit Maryland Province in Baltimore; it was run by hearty, good-hearted Irish-American priests: Father McGauley, Father MacFarland, Father Guidera, and Father O’Leary, the Parish Priest. There was a scattering of other priests from the world-wide fraternity of the Jesuits–Father Durt, a Belgian, who built St. Mary’s Hindi School for underprivileged children, and, on loan from the Spanish Gujarat Mission in Ahmedabad, Father Calvo, a kindly Spanish priest, who helped me develop a magnificent stamp collection, by asking everyone to send me stamps from the 1968 Olympics in Mexico.

 

The Jesuits were respected, even loved, by Jamshedpurians, Catholic and non-Catholic, for they also ran Loyola School which turned out well-educated, achieving boys, and the local Business School, Xavier Labor Relations Institute (at which my father was a Financial Controller and Professor for eight years) whose very competitive course in Business Management and Industrial Relation drew students from all over India, as well as Iran, Malaysia and Nigeria.

We had the American Jesuits over for meals and parties, and ate at the Jesuit residence, particularly when my father’s brother, Father Theo Mathias, was Director of XLRI. My father could not get over the fact that, unlike Indian Jesuits who, at that time, came from upper or upper-middle class educated families, among American Irish Catholics, one son became a priest, one became a cop, and one a crook, or so the priests told us! When Father O’Brien told us of his father, the butcher, who distilled and sold moonshine in Baltimore during Prohibition, my father marveled. “Can you imagine, Anita? Father O’Brien is a butcher’s son! And his father, though a pious Catholic, had no compunction about breaking the law!”

* * *

The priests returned from furlough with coveted American brand names–Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, Smarties, Jello, Betty Crocker cake mixes, Danish Butter Cookies, cans of Spam, squeezable tubes of icing, everything foreign having cachet. These they gave to their favourite Catholic housewives who compared their loot, apparently carelessly, “Oh Father MacFarland is so sweet; he got me lovely Devil’s Food Cake mix,” happy if their loot was the most and best, and secretly cross about Lola or Deidre’s Angel’s Food cake.

From America too came boxes of lightly used clothes that had been collected for the poor in India; these were given to favourite parishioners, or sold at jumble sales to middle class Catholics, the proceeds used for the poor. Some of my loved clothes came via America—my fuchsia winter coat for my Himalayan boarding school, a red plaid coat with a fur collar; an shimmering silk blouse with mother of pearl buttons that I passed off as school uniform; a pale blue silk dress, red galoshes.

From boxes of donated books shipped from America, I acquired precious, influential books: Catherine Marshall’s “Beyond Ourselves,” and “Something More,” “The Cross and the Switchblade,” and “Run, Baby Run.” Boxes of old magazines arrived: Chatelaine, McCalls, Family Home Circle, and Good Housekeeping, in which we found the recipe for walnut brownies, adding a new much-imitated item on the party circuit. I leafed through the glossy pages, craving dolls that walked and talked, doll houses, walkie-talkie radios one could receive by sending in a postcard; glossy magazines of dreams, never gratified in my childhood, though my Uncle Theo did buy me a Barbie doll on his annual trip to the States even after I entered my teens and was more interested in make-up than dolls.

The more radical Jesuits’ sympathy with the Adivasis, oppressed tribal peoples, was in advance of the political sensibilities both of the government, who were suspicious of the priests and hassled them at visa renewal time, and of other Indian Catholics, who wondered what the fuss was about. “Damn histrionics,” the men muttered at our parties. I wonder if they were disappointed to be sent to India and end up educating the children of the upper classes and aspirant middle classes.

* * *

 The Catholics from Mangalore, Goa and Bombay (all converted by the Portuguese) traditionally visited each other between Christmas Day and the 6th of January, the feast of the Epiphany, when the Magi visited Jesus.

Weeks before Christmas, my mother began creating the distinctive Christmas food, kushwar in Konkani, offered to visitors, and given in little boxes to my father’s colleagues, and to nuns, teachers, priest, and friends, Hindu or Christian. And at Diwali (with much jubilation), we got little boxes of Indian sweets from our Hindu friends.

We made Christmas cake, of course, crammed with candied peel, cherries, raisins and nuts; chocolate nankatis, like Danish butter cookies, soft, buttery, sugary; light, crisp, “meringues”; crunchy coconut macaroons; fudges, halwas and barfis, made of milk, sugar, clarified butter, and coconut, carrots, beetroots or pumpkin.

Kulkuls were another Mangalorean specialty, dough curled on a fork into shells, deep-fried, then dipped into a thick, simmering sugar syrup, until they were lumpily, unevenly, deliciously coated.

We hand-crafted the sweets, sitting together around the dining table, pouring ‘milk toffee,” made from condensed milk, into our buttered red rubber seashell mould to create cockles, mussel, wentletrap, shrimp, seahorse, oyster, shrimp and snails.

The piece de resistance was home-made marzipan we handcrafted into exquisite cherries, apricots, oranges and pears, painting a blush on the peaches, shading the apples in red, denting the strawberries with toothpicks, completing the verisimilitude with a little wooden stem, and a cloth leaf, bought from a confectioner in Calcutta, and reused each year.

* * *

How foreign Christmas was when I was a child, how imported. We lopped the top off one of the two scraggly fir trees in our garden, hauling it indoors to deck it with cotton wool or popcorn snow. We sent each other Christmas cards of robins in snowy fields and sleighs in an entranced Snow Queen landscape, though the sun blazed all December as it might have done in Bethlehem. We carolled outside all the Catholic houses, singing Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer; Freddy, the Little Fir Tree, and Jingle Bells–a Nordic Christmas transplanted to the tropics.

Congregations that barely knew English sung Gloria in Excelsius Deo in Latin at midnight mass. And then we returned home to eat Christmas fruit cake, and drink the very sweet homemade wine made from raisins or jamun and mulberries from our garden that we never considered alcoholic, so much so that, decades later, I was amazed to see people smile when I sat at a party, a glass of wine in my hands, and declared I was a teetotaler!

And what did all this have to do with the sweet, humble birth in a manger? Generations of westerners had successfully transported the husk of Christmas to Indian homes, while the kernel lay forgotten, in India, as elsewhere, as elsewhere. Still, glor-ooo-ooo-reeaa in ex-cel-sius Deo, we sung, though many would have been nonplussed if asked to translate.

* * *

This is a slow-growing memoir, but here are the chapters I’ve written

In the Beginning: Rosaries and Steel

Jamshedpur: The Steel City where I was Born

I Saw the Moon Rock: The Clubs of my Childhood

Visiting: When People were Entertainment

The Parks and Restaurants of my Childhood in Jamshedpur, when All was Magical

Polyphemus the Cyclops: A Memoir of My Father, Noel Joseph Mathias. Part 1, My father as an immigrant in England, At Play with my Father, The Things my Father Said, The Eccentricities of my Father

Palaces of Peace and Dreaming: The Libraries of my Childhood

Brutus: The Honourable Dog

My Grandmother, Small Nana, Molly Coelho; My Grandfather who lived by the sea and taught me to love poetry; My Uncle Eustace, The Maharaja; My Uncle Mervyn; My Maiden Aunt, Joyce; Youpee or UP, my Grandparents’ Formidable Landlady; Decembers in Gay Bombay

Travels with my Father; Mangalore: My Ancestral Hometown, Dreaded Family Evening Prayers at my Grandmother’s House; My Great-Uncle Norbert, a Pious Crook, My Grandmother, Josephine, and My Grandfather, Dr. Piedade Felician Mathias, My Father’s Sisters: Ethel the Grand Duchess, and Winnie, the Duchess; Christmas in Mangalore, and Mandatory Visits to All our Nun Relatives; And Mandatory Visits to Everyone Else, My saintly great-aunt Rosie, and her rebel daughter Marie; Arranged Marriages and the Consequences of Small Town Inbreeding.

 

Filed Under: My Memoir: Mind has Mountains Tagged With: Catholic Family Movement, Catholicism in India, CFM, Christmas in India, Jamshedpur, Jamshedpur Jesuits, Mangaloreans, Maryland Jesuits, XLRI

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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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