The school courtyard is filled with children, sitting in lines like little shrimps, there is a murmuring silence as the place is chiming with Christmas carols playing from tape recorder in the Principals office. There is the nativity scene recreated on the stage, the stable, Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus, the three wise men and the star hanging from the ceiling of the small verandah. The cattle are lowing too!
I am wide eyed, all of 8 years old and most impressed by mother Mary sitting on the stage with a doll. She is in a blue saree (I have seen pictures of mother Mary in blue saree and it fits into my imagination like a piece of jigsaw puzzle) and I long to be in that role someday. I even go home and ask my mother for a blue saree in preparation for the next year’s Christmas pageant and she smiles at me and gives me one. Anyway, on the stage the three wise men bring their offers of Gold, Frankincense, Myrrh and the carol “we three kings of orient are….” is playing. Finally, the curtains come down with the cows mooing, the sheep shaking their heads and the angels and shepherds all smiling and rejoining. Mother Mary sits there with a beatific smile.
There is loud clapping and we are all waiting for Christmas Father to come and by then we are restless, whispered chats can be heard and over the din we can hear the “shhhhh” from the teachers. Winter vacation starts in 2 days and there is a lot of excitement. My winter uniform of a cots-wool skirt and cotton shirt with a sweater, all part of the school uniform, is new and itchy and its irritating me. Suddenly there is a roar of a scooter and it goes “vrrrmmm, vrrrmmm,… and we all loop up to see where the sound if coming from…..to the sides of the curtain and behind us and up above. Nothing. Suddenly the scooter appears on stage and there is Christmas father on the scooter with his big tummy and white flowing beard and white hair and ringing a bell with his hand and shouting “ho, ho, ho!! He has got a bag full of goodies and he throws chocolates and candy to the children. The pageant over we walk into our classrooms dreaming……I was dreaming to be Mother Mary the next year.
Many Christmas pageants came and went, I hoped every year to become Mother Mary with that doll swaddled in white cloth. As I grew up I auditioned for the Christmas play every year and soon I realized that mine was to become a sheep, or an angel, or at best one of the wise men. I would be on the stage with a cut out of a sheet on my face, or an angel in a white saree petticoat (would be my mother’s best) holding wand with a star at the end of it or a wise man standing on stage in a grand shimmering Indian dress with a grander saree and the trail tied to my shoulder. But never ever Mother Mary.
I soon grew up went on to do my graduation and post graduation, started working and becoming mother Mary was just a dream which I would remember every Christmas for a few moments and forget about it. But my moment did come, it came the day when I held my darling little girl, Veda, in my hands!! My moment of Mother Mary had come…….God does help realize our dreams.
Little Drops of Memories 