My New Years

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Each New Year of mine was invariably overshadowed by the preceding Christmas. My entire childhood was lived out in a remote and nondescript village of central Kerala where electricity arrived when I was in high school. New Year meant nothing more to the villagers than the replacement of the old wall calendar with a new one. Just like the earth which went on revolving around the sun without ever knowing the human markers of time, the villagers continued their routine life on the first of January too in their farms. The Christmas hangover would linger, however.

The crib was still there waiting to be removed. The star made of bamboo strips and mist-resistant paper was already brought down in all probability. Most people couldn’t afford to maintain, beyond a week, the oil lamps or the paraffin wax candles which were lit inside those stars with much care and caution. The crepe paper decorations in the crib would have begun to sag. There was no plastic in those days, the late 1960s. So our New Years were not polluted with the debris of the cribs and other Christmas decorations.

Later, when I moved to college and lived in the city of Kochi, the New Year celebrations acquired a lot of grandeur and glitter. Kochi has its own version of New Year carnival whose history goes back to the Portuguese New Year celebrations that took place in the city during the colonial era. The Portuguese ruled over the area from 1503 to 1663.

Papanji is a dominant figure of Kochi’s New Year carnival. Interestingly, Papanji is also the Malayalam name of Santa Claus. But the New Year carnival’s Papanji is the effigy of an old man who remotely resembles Santa Claus but is not Santa Claus, and it is burnt as the midnight ushers in the New Year, to symbolise the passing of the old year. Christmas and New Year merge in the figure of Kochi’s Papanji. It’s only in my old age that I learnt that the name Papanji is derived from Portuguese Papai Noel, Christmas Father, another name of Santa Claus.

Christmas has overshadowed New Year in the Christian-dominated areas of Kerala, though celebrations like the Kochi Carnival have been secularised eventually. This year, the celebration has been toned down due to the demise of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

I’m typing this post sitting in my small library in my small house in my small village in the small state of Kerala. The evening is still and quiet outside my window except for the sound of an occasional vehicle on the road. The city of Kochi will be very different right now with a lot of lights and sounds, including the sounds of fire-crackers. And music.

I’m glad to be away from the glare and the sound. Glad to be a small, minute, insignificant micro-dot on the planet earth that sways in her orbit gracefully, quietly, without realising that the species called humans is making all the noise in honour of her revolution. Let me feel the planet’s eternal rhythm in my pulses, measured not in fleeting resolutions but in tides and seasons. Let me celebrate the New Year lying in the cradle of the earth that moves on and on in spite of all the fleeting sparks and brilliance and explosions in distant cities.

A view of the road outside my gate just as I'm posting this at 8.08 pm

PS. This post is a part of ‘Celebrate and Reflect Blog Hop’ hosted by Manali Desai and Sukaina Majeed under #EveryConversationMatters