Midnight Mass and memories of Mother Theresa
All of us, have in our veins, the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. - John F Kennedy
PROFESSOR ASHWIN DESAI
EVERY photograph. Pulling at her sari, holding her hand, like my life depended on it. My mother. Theresa. In early December 2017 her health spiralled my mother into hospital. Then after care. Then hospital again. Blood drained from her body. Her skin thinned into the finest paper. Those arms that once swept me up were reduced to blood clots and brittle bone.
I so wanted her to mend and live. To take her in my arms and give her back the life she gave me. Was she suffering? Was she beyond pain? And then, one day, my mother was no more.
Watching a parent die is one of the great trials of life; the only thing to be said for it is that it is unrepeatable. (Sebastian Faulks).
What Faulks does not add, cannot add, is the effect of the ministrations after death. To go through the experience of cremation in a little room, furnace beckoning, sears the mind. As the only son, to put a light to the camphor and the wood that would turn my mother into ash. Ash on 27th December.
A week ago. I strode along the beach. Thinking of her. She loved the sound of the waves. I was bandy legged as a kid. Every weekend she took me to the beach. Legs covered in sea-sand. Interminable hours. She was convinced that it would straighten them out. A plastic bucket was placed at a suitable angle so I could pee without moving.
When she was old, I took her to walk on the promenade. She held on to me. We fought. Bitter battles as only family can fight. We gave no quarter. No bell was rung to signal an end to round one. Just an exhausted parting of the ways. Followed by periods of avoidance. After my father died, my mother’s slide steepened. We hung on to each other. She took to sleeping on the couch in the lounge. Her eyesight went. When she could hear me coming up the driveway and she would shout, “Ashy boy is here, Ashy boy is here”.
Towards the end, she could not see. Could not walk. But she would offer me a cup of tea. And then she fell. And fell again. The ambulance came. She was put on a stretcher. She would see her beloved home.
Now, without her, I dread Christmas’s cheerful approach. Memories swirl together like ingredients in a Bombay Crush. Just before I sleep, our time together in the Casbah springs to life. It’s like an 8mm movie. The lights dazzle up and down Grey Street (now Dr Dadoo). She pushes through the throng with me coming along. We would the lights into West Street. Stopping at ths shop and then that, pressing our noses to windows and shopping with our eyes.
Her eyes had seen me as an infant and a child; when she died she would take with her all that I had been in those years before my mind was formed… my head limp against her chest in sleep; the first words, learning how to walk, the bleeding knees….all those sensations and events which to her were daily trials but which for me were defining and all-but holy…these would be lost in the abyss of time’ (Sebastian Faulks).
In our first floor flat in Kismet Arcade, a pudding fermented on Christmas Eve. The last of the shoppers hurried through the arcades. They made for the very last buses to the outer boundaries of the city. For us, the families left behind in the city, as day turned to evening, an intense expectation built. This was crowned by the solemn joy of midnight mass at St. Emmanuel’s cathedral, full to the rafters, my mother resplendent in her best sari.
We passed by my granny Flo’s flat. Before we left her ground floor flat, Flo blessed me with holy water brought from her pilgrimage to Lourdes. I thought the good man had turned water into wine I wanted to say. But my granny was not wont to indulge jokes about the man who was due to come back. Soon.
Roman Catholics of Indian origin have a long history in Port Natal. Catholic priest Father Jean-Baptiste Sabon’s first impression of indentured Christians is recorded on 25 November 1860.
Among the Indians who lately arrived there are about fifty Catholic. In coming from Maritz-burg I went there immediately to visit them. The agents of the government were very kind to me and gave me full permission for my ministry amongst them. The Indians are somewhat black… Eight or nine speak Portuguese and about twelve can speak English. I had a long conversation with them; they appear very intelligent and they are much respectful towards a priest. Before leaving the place they knelt before me, asked for my blessing…They are desirous of obtaining medals and crosses; some had these objects of piety already, hung around their necks. They also say the Rosary. Among the 350 immigrants, fifty are Catholics, five or six Protestants. Before they leave (Durban) I will try to get the names of all the Catholics and the names of their masters.
The Tamil-speaking Father Sabon was in Maritzburg when the Truro arrived, but visited the port in Durban a few days later and was pleasantly surprised by what he found. All the major Christian churches were established in Natal when the Truro docked. The Natal Courier, in its December, 1860, issue, reported that there were 87 Christians on board the Truro.
In 1968, I was happily sandwiched between these two women in my life; mother and granny. I felt as powerful as John Wayne. There were Indians lurking in every street corner, but I knew I could take them out with six shooters on either hip. Mother and grandmother always sat in the first few rows at church. The closer to the altar, the closer to God was their adage. I stood with many others of my sex (just a note: I was not an altar boy) outside the mighty doors, peering in while a service unfolded.
Catholicism, Alain de Botton tells us, “starts to create a sense of community with a setting. It marks off a piece of earth, puts walls around it and declares that within the parameters there will reign values utterly unlike those that hold sway in the world beyond”. What a setting The Cathedral was. A place of history old as the city itself and whose traditions stretched back to a time when the world was flat.
I may not have had the best vantage point at Midnight Mass but I remember candles lighting up the darkened recesses of the church. Denis Hurley standing tall. The light reflected back from the stained-glass windows onto his face. Archbishop Hurley was a beautiful, revered man of both God and His people.
On Christmas Day, the pudding had well and truly festered in its brandy. Folded somewhere within it, a tickey waited for the blessed to find. As an insurance policy, I took to pilfering a tickey every month from my father’s stash under his janoi (the holy thread of the Brahmin’s). He was convinced that tickey’s, as they were taken out of circulation, would become valuable. I shudder to remember how mystified he was as the fate of an incredibly valuable 1939 one. His son traded it for a popsicle.
Christmas lunch was enough for unannounced family from far and wide. I felt such power surrounded by my uncles, all colourful figures who drank from the fountain of life and bet on its outcomes. They told me tales, tousled my hair, praised my cheekiness. Little did I realise that this was the Last Lunch.
Change was coming. Apartheid had its own voracious geography. Slowly it stalked, then pounced and then bled the old neighbourhood of its people and traditions. People who knew each other for decades left separately and quietly after the first notices came. Many never realised that the hushed Yuletide goodbyes they said would be the last time they spoke again.
My granny left to Tongaat, leaving behind a precious world and decades’ worth of neighbours. No more would the family come into town and make her small flat a rendezvous. No longer would she make the sign of the cross at the doors of her church.
My inner-city life was coming was also coming to an end. The city gave me freedom. I could step out of the flat and immediately enter a swirling milieu of movie houses, gangsters, shops with mannequins and ne’er do well alleys that made mothers grasp their children and quicken their step. But mothers cannot grasp children forever. They gradually let go of our hands. Or is it other indulgences that snatch our hands away?
I was on the edge of youthfulness. But I was being propelled out of city by forces I scarcely understood. My childhood set like a sun through trees. I would embrace another form of Catholicism, in the 1980s, Marxist-Leninism. We were part of a hierarchial, ecclesiastical order, crusaders, chosen to show the masses “the way, the truth, the light”.
After my granny left and apartheid’s bulldozers got to work, we never had another family Christmas.
As I enter the winter of my life, I miss the sense of community. As the 22nd of December looms do I make a turn at the vault at St Anthony’s Church where my mother’s ashes lie locked up? Maybe take them out and release them into the ocean. She would like that. But am I ready to let go of her hand? Are we ever?
We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea…we are going back to whence we came from. John F Kennedy
P.S. Did I mention that JFK was the first Catholic president of the United States?
Desai is the SARChI Chair in Social Change.