An Ode to December
Photo: Karan Madhok
‘All things on earth must return to earth—humans, too.’ From schoolboy cardigans to his muted Christmas merriment, Ronald Tuhin D’Rozario’s personal essay explores frozen memories of the past and lamentations of the present.
I remain watchful about the changing seasons, the dry footpaths, and the fallen leaves. December migrates beneath the skin of the leaf, turning its green into the yellow of daylight. I bring it closer to my nose; my mind recites its odour lingering in my senses: a tanginess of moss and earth. The ribs branching out of the spine resemble the underfed urchins in my city. I feel for this loss. The plant's ownership over its leaf and the leaf of its address, becoming into words: ‘jhwara pata’, a fallen leaf.
All things on earth must return to earth—humans, too.
My uneasiness makes me search between the Sanskrit text in ‘Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa’, for consolation in which queen Madalasa sings a lullaby to her fourth son:
śuddho’si re tāta na te’sti nāma
kṛtaɱ hi tatkalpanayādhunaiva|
paccātmakaɱ dehaɱ idaɱ na te’sti
naivāsya tvaɱ rodiṣi kasya heto||
My Child, you are Ever Pure! You do not have a name. A name is only an imaginary superimposition on you. / This body made of five elements is not you nor do you belong to it. This being so, what can be a reason for your crying?
I begin to realise that a fallen leaf becomes the nature’s relic.
Like humans, plants, and animals, daylight in my city turns fragile on various occasion during this season of fall. It is weak and gloomy. I worry about this brokenness of light and its lost cheer. Winter is yet to arrive.
Evenings are beautiful—they bring around stillness. I wore my Dida's shawl; I want to remember what is important to me. Most of the items I use once belonged to my ancestors; I’m a curator of memories, like dusk preserves a bit of the day's sun for the next morning.
Baba’s bottle of Shalimar coconut oil gradually freezes into stone, and the surface of skin dehydrates with the first hint of a cold breeze of the evening air. And yet, a layer of blanket over the bones in the night can still make the room on the flesh a little too stuffy.
I remember, wearing a cardigan in my school-days. The cardigan, with its intense ability to retain the memories of dust and smell, and fallen hair retained from the previous season. It is possessive. It brings in me a sense of detachment as if from something very own. A relationship with the bygone season of winter.
Most winters I have seen Ma pulling out the balls of wool and keeping them over her lap, constructing a cardigan while helping us in our lessons. I use the word ‘constructing’ because whenever I wear a cardigan, I feel a sense of protectiveness, of home, within it. With her left hand holding a power glass, bent over, counting spirals across the axis of the knitting needles, murmuring some mathematics to herself, there was an understanding between Ma and her instruments. The needles diligently followed her instructions, working briskly between her fingers, as the complex patch of wool kept carving into a new shape.
There’s something honest between the intimacy in the warmth of my body, with that of the hand woven woollen piece. We seem to know each other's identity.
In an old poem, I had written, ‘Your cardigan was your home/ Fencing your heart from the wind.’
The first Sunday in the month of December sanctifies the days ahead as the ‘Agamon Kaal’, the season of Advent before Christmas. When I was in school, I always felt a strange sense of comfort on the day the winter holidays began, as the weight of syllabus seemed temporarily lifted off the shoulders. It was a ritual to have assembly on the last and the first working day of school. There was something innocent and naive in choosing to stand with a favourite friend, forming a line of two’s in the assembly hall. I would imagine rows of trains halted at the platform listening to the station master's (Principal’s) instructions amidst occasional interruptions of a sneeze and cough. The winter breeze would turn the bare part of legs exposed out of my half-pants, cold and stiff.
Each classroom looked like a gift box, decorated in the theme of the holiday season, with colourful paper streamers, stars, balloons, and a Christmas tree cut out of cardboard, with its base buried in the sand collected in a plastic ice cream cup.
My first lesson in sharing began in school. Ma would take me to the market where I searched across a variety of shops looking for the words in the Christmas card that could convey my sentiments to my friends. Now, while l glance across a heap of greeting cards that I have received over the years, emotions run through me. I read the lines written in them. I feel a deep sense of loss with the times that are no longer a part of my borobeyla, the grown-up days. There are cards from school friends and teachers. There’s a card for each occasion: Christmas, well-wishes in times of sickness, Raksha Bandhan, students wishing on Teacher’s Day, Friendship Day, for Birthdays, or for exams.
Photo: Ronald Tuhin D'Rozario
This card which I received from a classmate (with whom I have lost touch) Prithvish, in Class 4B connects me to the boy that I was once. A sense of urgency fills me up to cope with the loss. The poet Sumana Roy lends me her words:
Sometimes you forget that a person has died -- you speak about them as if they were still alive.
Sometimes you feel your older self -- a self that you thought you'd lost -- like that too.
I find in me the little boy, sticking the label of his name, as he put over his books.
Pre-winter coldness deepens amidst the blurry street lights in my city. Evenings are beautiful—they bring around stillness. I wore my Dida's (maternal grandmother) shawl; I want to remember what is important to me. Most of the items I use once belonged to my ancestors; I’m a curator of memories, like dusk preserves a bit of the day's sun for the next morning.
While listening to “Rag Shyam Kalyan” played on the sarod by Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, the cold white plasters of my room create an illusion of the world in my head. The music comforts me, and then. Nearby on my bed lies the news of the other world, between the pages of Baba's Bartaman Bengali newspaper. I don't feel eager to glance through it.
I remember the lines of Neel Mukherjee from The Lives of Others:
There was the news of the outside world occasionally. (Look, look, how odd that I used the words ‘outside world.’ When I used to live at home, I considered the villages, or another part of rural Bengal, the ‘outside world’, or even, the ‘real world’. But away from home, the city and everything elsewhere, even other villages or another part of rural Bengal, became the ‘outside world’. Does that mean that the world is wherever one is? Is that not the most accurate and strictest of all definitions of self-centredness? Does that mean that there is no escape from self? After chanting to ourselves millions of times, Change yourself, change the world, is this the outcome- failure?).
I look at the lines over my palms—they carry the news of the world, too—the movement of planets, the sun, the moon, and the stars around my life. We live in a world that accommodates many worlds within it.
In sleep and in wakefulness I seek the definition of me between. ‘Ghare – Baire’. The Home and The World. I find humans confined to it.
Confinement of any order or to any degree—be it space, ideas, or by the geography of time—is like walking towards death in gradual footsteps. I discover that with age the pattern of my thoughts has changed, and so has their nature. Time now passes making me look deeply beyond festivals and celebrations, something that I have scarcely done before.
I think about jail inmates this Christmas, and the forced structure upon their lives, restricted within a perimeter. I reflect on the architecture of space that we occupy: hunger and the soul in the body. I wonder if they, too, are confined in the universe like atoms, like the planets, stars, and the sky.
I reach out for an answer in the darkness of the night. My desire grows in the existence of confinement and in the essence of liberation. My eyes rehearse a quote by Nelson Mandela: “I found solitary confinement the most forbidding aspect of prison life. There is no end and no beginning; there is only one's mind, which can begin to play tricks. Was that a dream or did it really happen? One begins to question everything.”
My struggle dies a failed battle.
To put my mind at ease I search through YouTube and finally stop at a public domain film from 1902, used for a video for “December Child” by Cyndi Lauper, showcasing the plight of a homeless child in the street. I try to find the relevance of the word, ‘Merry’ to Christmas. What I hear now within myself is a dramatic, restless monologue, as the song continues in the background of this film.
I imagine all those who remain confined this holiday season, to hunger, to sorrow, to the street, in a year where the world has seemed particularly harsh.
I pick my phone to switch it off, and I make arrangements to sleep. I gather confinement again—the phone to its charger.
***
Ronald Tuhin D'Rozario studied at the St. Xavier's College, Kolkata. His articles, book reviews, essays, poems and short stories have been published in many national and international online journals and in print, including Cafe Dissensus Everyday, Narrow Road Literary Journal, Kitaab, The Pangolin Review, The Alipore Post, Alien Buddha Press and 'Zine, Grey Sparrow Press, and more. He writes from Kolkata, India. You can find him on Instagram: @ronaldtuhindrozario and Twitter: @RTDRozario.
