My greetings to friends who grew up together in the defence services always is, ‘Meri Kishmish’. It is a joke only we understand for our fathers inherited a lot of stuff from the British officers and one particular khansama would turn out the most beautiful and crisply iced delicious cakes and bring it in to us, happily sing-songing, “Meri Kishmish Sahib, Memsahib!”Those khansamas have disappeared along with their wonderful culinary skills (roasts, bakes, special custards, desserts, ginger men etc) but the Meri Kishmish greeting is a tradition that has endured.But no longer, as I discovered to my sheer horror. When I greeted my friend, she bit my head off with a very angry, ‘Don’t you dare wish me a merry Christmas. It is not my festival or tradition. I am born a Hindu and will die a Hindu. I celebrate only Holi and Diwali.”I could have told her Holi is a festival that was also celebrated in Moghul palaces and that there are many exquisite miniature paintings from that era standing testimony to that fact. As for Diwali, my friend loves her patakas and has been grumbling about the government ban on firecrackers- she thinks it is an anti-Hindu move rather than in the interest of environment.I have tried to reason that gunpowder was a Chinese invention and that patakas were first burst in Moghul palaces to celebrate births and coronations but to no avail.As for Diwali lighting, it is a concept borrowed from the British and Christmas. We did have earthen lamps but that’s about all. I remember VS Naipaul stating that he had lost his cool when he came to India in the 1960s and found almost all Indian homes lit up their homes with candles and electric bulbs whereas his mother, who followed the traditions of indentured labourers taken to the Caribbean by the British in an earlier century spent hours preparing and lighting earthen lamps during Diwali.I switched to earthen lamps after that but my friend does not realise that irony of her convenient waxen lamps that are less messy. In the absence of electricity, the British had lit up their homes with hundreds of beeswax candles and flaming torches at Christmas. And our Diwali lanterns or stars are a straight lift from the star atop their Christmas trees, which in turn comes straight from the one that led the three wise men to Bethlehem at the birth of Christ. The irony is that my friend’s Diwali lighting, star and all, is better than any Christmas lights in the society.So I would like to leave historical resentments where they belong in the dustbin and take my final pledge in the interest of my nation.India is my country and all Indians are my brothers and sisters, I love my country and am proud of its rich and varied heritage and shall always strive to be worthy of it…Meri Kishmish, everyone!(Sujata Anandan is Consulting Editor, National Herald. Views expressed are personal)
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