Jamshedpur | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

“Rosaries at the Grotto” A Chapter from my newly-published memoir, “Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India.”

My First Holy Communion

Rosaries at the Grotto

During May, “The Month of our Lady,” Father Jesus Calvo, the Spanish parish priest, corralled the entire Catholic community of Jamshedpur at the grotto of St. Mary’s Church: a cave constructed of rocks and mortar, overplanted with rambling roses, built because the Virgin appeared to Bernadette at a grotto in Lourdes. There we recited the rosary.

“Hail Mary,” “Holy Mary,” the words rose and fell, hypnotic as the sea, fifty repetitions of Hail Marys punctuated by the mini-relief of the Glory Be, and, at last, the Memorare, signalling the glorious end: “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 fervour. My father prayed rapidly, head down, frowning, as if his rapidity would hasten the conclusion. I suspected he disliked saying the rosary as much as I did.

Decades later, adults reminded me of when I slipped away, climbed to the top of the grotto, and squatted there, like a wise monkey, surveying the crowd. Giggles rose.

On hearing the giggles, my father looked for me. It was a reflex. And there I was, on top of the grotto, the eyes of every Catholic in Jamshedpur on me.

“Anita, come down,” my father hissed. I remained there, grinning. Despite my bravado, I was terrified of heights.

“Anita come down,’ he stage-whispered between clenched teeth as children giggled and adults chanted, laughter in their voices. Finally, my dignified father, senior management in that company town, fifty-two years old to my six, 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, scaled the grotto, then inched down, half-carrying me, while around us the chuckle-flecked rosary rose and fell, “Hail Mary, full of grace.”

* * *

My Uncle Father Theo Mathias, S. J., my sister Shalini, me and my father

Catholic social life in Jamshedpur revolved around the Parish Church of St. Mary’s, the Mangalorean-Goan Association, and the Catholic Family Movement, introduced to Jamshedpur by an American Jesuit, appropriately called Father Love. It brought together Catholics of the same socio-economic class, an insular tight-knit group.

There were the Fernandezes, the Saldanhas, and the Diases, who had six children whose names all started with D—Denise, Dany, Diane, Dougie, Denzil, and David. There was an Anglo-Indian family, the Thompsons, whose green-eyed daughter, Paula, my sister Shalini adored down to her freckles, lily-white skin, and long, brown ringlets. My father claimed Shalini’s private litany went “Paula most pure, Paula most amiable, Paula most admirable!” (And when I misbehaved, my father would say of Paula’s handsome brother (who later became a priest), “Anita, Anita, if you’re so naughty, Jeff will never marry you, but he would marry Shalini instantly.”)

The adults gathered for spiritual instruction, about which we felt no curiosity, while the children played in the host child’s bedroom until everyone clustered around the potluck, an innovation of the American priests. The Indian way would have been for the hostess to say, “Oh, please don’t worry about bringing food. I’ll just prepare a little something,” and then spend a week planning, shopping for, and magicking a lavish near-banquet; most women prided themselves on their generosity, hospitality, and culinary repertoire.

Everyone competed to produce the most delectable dishes, savoured the offerings, and then asked for the recipe, ultimate compliment. Unless the dish was brought by Blanche, wife of the local Mangalorean doctor, Bert Lasrado, who, like my father, had been to England for his professional education. Blanche was the first woman in town with a free-standing freezer; its potential exhilarated her. While other women brought freshly cooked aromatic dishes, she gleefully announced the provenance of her offerings–prawn balchow: three months old; chicken indad: six months old; pork vindaloo: eight months old. And appetites withered.

The adults had Bloody Marys, while we had “Virgin Marys”–tomato juice, after which what we considered “western food” was served. As a student in England, to my surprise, I rarely found the supposedly Western food I had grown up with: “potato chops,” mashed potato croquettes stuffed with spicy minced beef, pan-fried in a batter of egg and breadcrumbs, or “cutlets,” large, flat burgers, cooked with onions, green chillis, coriander and mint; or “meat puffs,” crisp hot filo pastry stuffed with spicy curried minced lamb.

After dinner, Dougie Dias or Benny Fernandez produced guitars and led us in “Jamaica Farewell,” “Old Man River,” “Banana Boat Song,” or “Polly-Wolly-Doodle.” How we loved them–“Oh my darling Clementine,” “Silver Dollar,” “Country Roads”, or “Una Paloma Blanca.” The lyrics were mysterious, but we sang along, Hang down your head, Tom Dooley,/ Poor boy you’re gonna die; John Brown’s body is a-mouldering in the grave, or with greater gusto, Oh bloodee, oh blood-dah, that chorus striking us as deliciously naughty. The sun so hot, I froze to death; Susannah, don’t you cry. What did the lyrics mean? Who knew? But it all felt magical…Daylight come, and I wanna go home.

* * *

We once 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; the deliciousness lingers in memory. Their young son was allowed to use the shotgun, and I, aged six, seeing it left unattended, picked it up, looked through the sight, and, inspired by books and movies, pulled the trigger. The safety catch was off: Bang! I was startled and thrilled, though I did not shoot a bird (or myself). The father ran out and cuffed his son, and I felt scared, sad, and guilty, for it had all been my fault.

* * *

Shalini and me with our Easter Eggs

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, Fr. MacFarland, Fr. Guidera, Fr. Keogh, Fr. Moran, and Fr. O’Leary. There were other priests from the worldwide 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 Arroyo and Father Jesus Calvo, a kindly Spanish priest, who helped me develop a magnificent stamp collection by asking all the Europeans he knew to send me stamps.

The Jesuits were respected, even loved, by Jamshedpurians, both Catholic and non-Catholic, for they ran Loyola School, which turned out achieving boys, as well as the prestigious local Business School, Xavier Labour Relations Institute, XLRI, at which my father later taught, which had sought-after courses in Business Management and Industrial Relations which drew students from all over India, Asia, and the Middle East.

We had the American Jesuits over for meals and parties and were invited to dinners at the Jesuit residence. My father was amused to be told that, among Irish-American Catholics, one son became a priest, one became a cop, and one a criminal! My father marvelled when Father O’Brien told us of his father, the butcher, who distilled and sold moonshine in Baltimore during Prohibition. “Can you imagine, Anita? Father O’Brien is a butcher’s son!” (Indian Jesuits were, then, largely upper-middle or middle-class). “And his father, though a pious Catholic, had no compunction about breaking the law and making bootleg liquor!”

* * *

The priests returned from furlough with American brands—packets of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup, Smarties, Betty Crocker cake mixes, Danish Butter Cookies, squeezable tubes of icing sugar, or flavoured Primula cheese, coveted because foreign. These they gave their favourite Catholic housewives who compared their bounty, apparently carelessly, “Oh Father MacFarland is so sweet; he got me lovely Devil’s Food Cake mix,”–happy if their loot was the most bountiful and secretly cross about Lola or Deidre’s Angel Food Cake.

From America, too, came boxes of lightly used clothes collected for “the poor in India.” These the priests sold at jumble sales to middle-class Catholics, using the proceeds for the poor. Some of my favourite clothes came via America—my fuchsia winter coat and a red plaid coat with a fur collar for my Himalayan boarding school; a shimmering white silk blouse with pearl buttons that I passed off as boarding school uniform; a pale blue silk dress, and red goloshes.

From boxes of donated books shipped from America, I acquired books which, in my late teens, changed the course of my faith–and life: Catherine Marshall’s Beyond Ourselves and Something More, David Wilkerson’s The Cross and the Switchblade, and Nicky Cruz’s Run, Baby Run. The American priests, inexplicably, gave us boxes of old American magazines: Chatelaine, McCall’s, Family Home Circle, and Good Housekeeping, in which we found the recipe for brownies, chewy, cocoa-laden, and bursting with walnuts, adding a new much-imitated item on the party circuit. I leafed through the glossy pages, coveting dolls that walked and talked, dollhouses, and walkie-talkie radios that one could receive by just sending in a postcard–glossy magazines of dreams, never gratified, though my Jesuit Uncle, Father Theo Mathias, always bought me a Barbie doll on his annual trip to the States even into my early teens, when makeup was more exciting than dolls!

* * *

Goa and Mangalore, seacoast communities, were colonised by the Portuguese. Four hundred years later, traces endure–in the names: Mathias, Coelho, Lobo, Rebello, Pinto, Saldanha, Mascarenhas; the imported religion: Catholicism; and the language, Konkani: only spoken by Goans and Mangaloreans, a patois of Portuguese and the Kannada and Marathi spoken by the indigenous communities before colonisation. (I have never learnt Konkani, nor did my father who, as the son of an upwardly mobile surgeon in British India, was only taught English.)

Goan-Mangalorean food is distinctive–sarpatel, archetypal Mangalorean delicacy, small pieces of pork beneath inches of fat and chewy, rubbery rind, simmered in a sauce of spices, wine and the pig’s own blood and liver, eaten with sannas: fluffy steamed rice cakes, fermented in toddy. Kube, a curry of clams or cockles, was breakfast at my paternal grandmother’s house. Fish cooked in coconut milk was ubiquitous while, at afternoon tea, people ate patolio and patrade, dumplings and pancakes stuffed with fresh grated coconut and jaggery, unrefined brown sugar, and steamed in plantain leaves.

At the Mangalorean-Goan Association dinners, people danced the waltz, one-two together, one-two together, we murmured under our breaths, or the foxtrot and polka to Engelbert Humperdinck, Elvis Presley, or Jerry Lewis. If I spotted my parents waltzing together, I flung myself between them in a frenzy of jealousy, trying to drag my father away. They continued waltzing…laughing.

* * *

The Catholics from Mangalore, Goa, and Bombay traditionally visited all their Catholic friends during the twelve days between Christmas Day and the sixth of January, the feast of the Epiphany, the official end of the season.

Weeks before Christmas, my mother began creating traditional Christmas treats, kushwar in Konkani, offered to visitors, and given in little boxes to my father’s colleagues, nuns, teachers, priests, and friends. We made chocolate nankatis, mouth-meltingly soft, buttery, sugary cookies; light, crisp meringues; and crunchy coconut, chocolate, or cashew nut macaroons. Kulkuls were another Mangalorean speciality, dough curled on the tines of a comb into shells, deep-fried, then dropped into a thick, simmering sugar syrup, which lumpily congealed around them. Sitting together around the dining table, we hand-crafted marzipan fruits and moulded “milk toffee,” made from condensed milk, sugar, and butter in our buttered red rubber seashell mould to create wentletrap, shrimp, cockles, mussels, seahorses, oysters, and snails.

* * *

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, topped with a little pinecone angel with a wooden mothball face, flaxen hair, a gold wire halo, and little gold paper wings that I brought back from boarding school in Nainital, in the Himalayas. (And each year, my mother said of this durable angel, “I can’t believe you paid five rupees at the Fun Fair for that rubbish some child made.”) We sent each other Christmas cards of robins in snowy fields and sleighs in an entranced Snow Queen landscape, though the wintry sun shone all December, as it might have done in Bethlehem. We carolled outside all Catholic homes: “Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer;” “Freddy, the Little Fir Tree;” “Little Drummer Boy,” and “Jingle Bells”—a Nordic Christmas transplanted to the tropics.

At midnight mass, congregations, not all of whom spoke fluent English, sang a full-bodied Gloria in Excelsis Deo in Latin. I shivered with pleasure. And then we returned home to eat Christmas fruit cake, crammed with crystallised cherries, candied peel, raisins, and nuts, and to drink the very sweet homemade wine made from Jamun berries and mulberries from our garden that we never considered alcoholic.

And what did all this have to do with the sweet, humble birth in a manger? Generations of Europeans had transported the husk of Christmas to Indian homes while its glory lay obscured here as elsewhere. Still, Glor-ooo-ooo-ooo-reeaa in ex-cel-sis Deo, we sang lustily, though we might have been nonplussed if asked to translate.

Rosaries, Reading, Secrets is available on Amazon.co.uk and on Amazon.com and wherever Amazon sells books, as well as in most online retailers.

Thoughts on Writing my Just-published Memoir, & the Prologue to “Rosaries, Reading, Secrets”

By Anita Mathias

Writing a memoir awakens fierce memories of the past. For the past is not dead; it’s not even past, as William Faulkner observed. So what does one do with this undead past? Forgive. Forgive, huh? Forgive. Let it go. Again and again. For, after all, this world is one of insistent goodness, insistent abundance. Flowers bloom in the desert and, now, even in Antarctica. Plough a field in the English countryside, leave it fallow, and lo, it’s populated–the purple of thistles, belladonna and morning glories, the gold of buttercups and dandelions. Royal colours.

Little is wasted. We are recycled from exploded stars. Seeds look like unpromising things, hard and black. But they bring forth sunflowers and mighty mango trees; they sustain life itself. So I drop the past into the hands of God and trust him to bring from it something different and better as seeds bring forth surprises–roses perhaps, or pomegranates, forming the stuff of humans and elephants, of all this mighty world. Scientists germinated a thirty-two-thousand-year-old ice age seed in Siberia which flowered. So forgiveness is also this: to drop past pain into a greater hand, again and again, and ask him to make it bloom, even now, decades later.

Here’s the memoir, friends. Available at amazon.com and amazon.co.uk

Prologue to Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India

In the Beginning:
You Woke and Heard the Birds Cough

I was made in India, in Jamshedpur, in Bihar then, (Jharkhand now), where the great Gangetic plains lope up to the foothills of the Himalayas.

The Buddha achieved enlightenment there in Bihar, six centuries before Christ; Mahavira, founder of Jainism, was born there. But I was an accidental pilgrim in this birthplace of religions. I was born in Jamshedpur because of steel.

The soil was red-ochre, flecked with tiny balls of murram, iron ore, visible signs of the hidden lodes which, in 1907, drew Zoroastrian industrialist, Jamshedji Nusserjani Tata, to Bihar to found Jamshedpur, The Steel City.

In Jamshedpur, blast furnaces belched grimness into the bleared skies as iron ore was refined to shining steel by The Tata Iron and Steel Company, one of the world’s largest steel companies, which, in 1952, lured my father, a Chartered Accountant, from still-racist London. (“Our accountant is Indian; is that a problem?” his boss had to ask. Sometimes it was.) Now he was the Controller of Accounts at Tata’s—and after he visited Pittsburgh in the sixties and introduced the first computers to TISCO, monsters which hogged a wall, he also became Manager of Data Processing, as I told everyone proudly. And “What is that?” they asked.

My father married late, aged thirty-eight. I was born after seven years of infertility and the death of their infant first-born son, Gerard, three days old. My mother never overcame her disappointment that I, born the year after Gerard, was a mere girl, while my father, who’d mournfully say that girls were a terrible thing, expected me to be every bit as extraordinary as the boy who never lived would undoubtedly have been.

Within hours of my birth, I fell ill with dysentery, which had killed my elder brother. My father vowed he would go to Mass every Friday for ten years if I lived. I did; he did. And so, in an emergency baptism with hastily-blessed hospital water, in Jamshedpur, at the heart of the Hindu heartland, I was christened Anita Mary Mathias, daughter of Noel Joseph Mathias and Celine Mary Mathias, the European surname given to our family when the Portuguese occupied my ancestral town of Mangalore on the coast of the Arabian Sea in 1510, converting the population to Roman Catholicism with the carrot of government jobs, and the stick of the Inquisition—Counter-Reformation fires reaching the tropics.

Which explains why a child born in the Hindu heartland had grandparents called Piedade Felician Mathias and Josephine Euphrosyne Lobo, Stanislaus Coelho and Molly Rebello, and great-grandmothers called Gracia Lasrado Mathias, Julianna Saldanha Lobo, Alice Coelho Rebello and Apolina Saldanha Coelho, though, on my mother’s side, everyone was a Coelho, for Coelhos, as the thirteen branches of that family observe proudly, Coelhos, whenever possible, only marry Coelhos.

Thanks for reading, friends. I’d be grateful for your support. Available at amazon.com and amazon.co.uk

Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India. My new memoir

By Anita Mathias

Friends, I have written a new memoir. I would be so grateful for your support. It is available wherever Amazon sells books, Amazon.com, of course, as well as Amazon.co.uk.

Here are some reviews from distinguished writers

A beautifully written account of a childhood. The textures, colours and, above all, the tastes of a particular world are lyrically but also precisely evoked. But, although Mathias rightly celebrates the richness of that world, she weaves through this magical remembrance of things past a skein of sadness that makes it haunting. It’s lovely!

Francesca Kay, An Equal Stillness

Mathias invites us into a totally absorbing world of past and present marvels, generously laced with poetic and literary references and Dickensian levels of observation and detail. A beautifully written, important, and addictive book.

Jenny Lewis, Gilgamesh Retold

A dazzling, vibrant tale of the childhood of “the naughtiest girl in school” whose sweet tooth is exceeded only by her insatiable appetite for language and stories. Mathias conjures 1960s India, and her extended family in uproarious and heartbreaking detail.

Erin Hart, Haunted Ground

Joining intelligent winsomeness with an engaging style, Anita Mathias writes with keen observation, lively insight and hard-earned wisdom about navigating the life of thoughtful faith in a world of cultural complexities. Her story bears witness to how God wastes nothing and redeems all. Her words sing of a spirit strong in courage, compassion and a pervasive dedication to the adventure of life. As a reader, I have been challenged and changed by her beautifully told and powerful story – so will you.

Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford

Anita Mathias’s memoir is a remarkable account of a Catholic childhood in India. A treasure chest of sights, sounds and scents, it is full of food (always food), books (always books), a family with all its alliances and divisions, and many glimpses of a world which is at once exotic and familiar. A feat of memory and remembrance of a moment in Indian culture, still tinged by the English presence, which yet has universal qualities.

Philip Gooden, The Story of English

Anita Mathias’s beautiful childhood memoir reflects the rich complexities of India’s myriad minorities – in her case the Catholics of Jamshedpur, built by the Tata family, the first planned industrial city in India. The Church figures prominently; one of her childhood tortures is family rosary-saying. Secondly, this is a book about “food, always food,” described in mouth-watering detail. Anita’s reading is hugely wide-ranging (from the Panchatantra and Shakespeare to Dickens) and whenever there is trouble with her parents she plunges into her book. Gossip and social scandals run throughout the book, while at school, she indulges in characteristic naughtiness (locking her class into their classroom, for example). India’s wretched wealth-poverty polarisation forms a backdrop to her story. Tormented, passionate and often sad, this book is immensely readable.

Trevor Mostyn, Coming of Age in The Middle East

Rosaries takes us into the psyche of place, from an insider who has lived and breathed India yet stands at a distance from it, both as a constantly alert observer of the human condition, and as a Catholic negotiating a Hindu culture. This subtle balance of insider and outsider means we are treated to fascinating insights and angles on life in India – its tastes and smells, its quirks and eccentricities, preoccupations and prejudices, told with glorious detail, precision and humour. Mathias reveals her evolution from naughty girl to writer: how she is shaped by inner and outer worlds to become the independent spirit and artist of language so deliciously demonstrated in this memoir.

Professor Jane Spiro, Testimony of Flight

Born of extraordinary parents and raised in an Indian steel town, Anita Mathias was blessed with no shortage of brains. She spent her first nine years putting them to endless, delightful mischief, but not without making room for some very advanced learning. With an unprecedented appetite for reading, Anita tore through libraries and every volume she could lay her tiny hands on before leaving for boarding school at nine – which incidentally she adored. Her middle class homelife was a rich array of experiences: the copious quantities of gastronomic delicacies – oh the food! – a strict and strong creative mother, a learned and caring father, a close younger sister, and the large hinterland of an impressively accomplished family. Anita was undoubtedly a dazzling star in the red earth firmament of the industrial landscape of Jamshedpur, and her pluck and charm shine through every page of this beautifully crafted, comprehensive, and erudite memoir.

We wait impatiently for the next episode – which will cover her continued rebellions at a Catholic boarding school before her own religious conversion and entry into Mother Teresa’s convent as a novice.

Ray Foulk, Picasso’s Revenge

Mathias’s prose is lively and evocative. An enjoyable and accessible book.

Sylvia Vetta, Sculpting the Elephant

A fascinating description of Mathias’s parents, education, and religious bringing. She is an accomplished writer. Merryn Williams, Six Women Novelists

And here is a longish description of the book

Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India is a lyrical account of Anita Mathias’s rebellious Roman Catholic childhood in India. A vivid recreation of a vanished world.

Mathias was born Roman Catholic through historical accident: Portuguese missionaries converted her ancestral South Indian coastal town of Mangalore in the sixteenth century. However, she grew up in Jamshedpur, North India, “The Steel City,” site of India’s largest steel company, a company town benevolently run by the Zoroastrians of Tata Steel.

There the Catholic church run by American Jesuits provided an all-encompassing universe–Mass, communal rosary at the grotto, the small groups of the Catholic Family Movement and a tightly-knit social life. In a pre-TV world, visiting friends was entertainment, juicy gossip flowed with homemade wine, and children sang, danced, and recited for guests. The private clubs were the other nexus of small-town life–screening open-air Hindi, Hollywood, and European movies almost daily; hosting one-act play competitions, as well as the quiz competitions and flower, fruit and vegetable competitions her mother often won. The club libraries were a jumble of well-thumbed books and ubiquitous Enid Blyton.

Reading was a way of escape from volatile fights with her mother–Grimm and Andersen read repeatedly, Greek myths, Norse myths, and Indian epics in tattered editions and, always, British children’s classics. Her father, a Chartered Accountant, who had returned to India after eight years in England to become head of accounts at Tata Steel, read her beloved stories and poems, acting out Shakespeare plays during midnight feasts, from which she recited speeches at school, aged six, earning a “double promotion,” skipping a school year.

Though you woke and heard the birds croak in Jamshedpur, with its jagged industrial skyline and roaring blast furnaces, it was also a city of parks, gardens, rivers, restaurants rendered magical by childhood’s appetite, and sprawling open-air markets with ducks, chicken and crab sold live for the slaughter; the ecstatic neon geometry of Indian sweets; mandatory browsing in jewellery shops, and the Mecca of a second-hand bookstore where she steadily traded books to build up an aspirational library of classics.

The dreamy one-acre garden which surrounded the house, with trees to climb with a book, was a paradise to escape to with her pet dogs, ducks and chickens–a jumble of bright flowers, rock gardens, thirty fruit trees, and vegetable gardens. To a child, the large bright, airy sixteen-roomed house, originally built for British executives and filled with eccentric books, like a repository of the British Raj, was a formative universe of random reading.

Food was almost a character, everything homemade–sweets, pickles, ham, ketchup, wines, liqueurs, squash, and our version of Coca-Cola–an enterprise which required a full-time live-in cook, as the daily battle with dust and laundry needed a full-time live-in housekeeper. Meals–five a day–were events, the day’s scaffolding, and local women best known for their recipes.

With her father’s post-retirement academic job, the family moved into faculty housing on the campus of Xavier Labour Relations Institute, an American Jesuit-run business school in Jamshedpur, whose library, well-stocked with classic American literature and contemporary international drama and poetry, provided an intellectual explosion.

Mathias, irrepressible and rebellious, known as the naughtiest girl in the school, was finally expelled from school, aged nine, for disrupting classes with mischief and continual attempts at running away, and went to a boarding school, St Mary’s Convent, Nainital, run by German nuns in the Himalayas. The virtual end of childhood–and a new adventure.

I’d be so honoured if you would buy a copy. Thank you

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