Our Lady of Miracles - and Housekeeping

The bro's chauffeur never fails to offer his trademark take on life etc.  Apart from serpent deities, he is also partial to the more commonplace goddesses. One such is Tulja Bhavani, we passed by the derivative temple at Andheri and after many prostrations and genuflections (I have been reading far too much of The Hindu!), he offered an explanation.  His foot had gone bad when I was last here and he had made the rounds of the clinic only for the pain to return. Pig fat had also not helped. Naturally he sought divine intervention.  And it lay with this small temple, the priestess of which I remembered as a lady with a large red dot on her forehead and hair of a thousand knots.  She had immediately proclaimed the presence of numerous bad spirits and gave him a number of lemons (no If Life Gives you Lemons Make Lemonade joke here!).  He consumed these - I can't recollect in what manner. His foot was instantly better and remained so.  A few lemons remained and much later he discarded them in the sea.  Instantly he was gripped by pain. This time the lemon remedy did not come free, he spent 6000/- on the priestess who had meanwhile relocated to a small town. Still, he said, cheaper than the doctor.  The explanation for these bad lemons (way too many awful jokes here but I will desist) lay in them not being properly discarded at the chauraha.  I instantly remembered DD Kosambi's book which deals with the importance of mother goddess cults and the crossroads in Indian culture.  Kosambi's chapter on this begins with an episode in the Mrichchakatikam. Given the persistence of things in India this is a cliched view - yet it felt slightly odd that such an old ritual persisted on modern crossroads.

Our Lady of Housekeeping

Meanwhile my father has a new employee.  The lady who does the housework has a sweet disposition that is laced with an amusing tartness. Her world is different from the chauffeur's in so much that she is a Christian of a non-Catholic denomination that is much given to austerity, simplicity and the near absence of Catholic ritual.  Midway through her work we often sit down to tea and biscuits (Indian chai and biscuits I discover is a very madeleine moment) and I get to hear a fragmented recounting of her life.  One day it is her childhood, her father was a cook who travelled everywhere. Then the daughters only used foreign goods and learnt that white people smell too. Till the father died and they were all pulled out of school because their church "only takes money unlike the  Catholic Church which educates and supports those who fall on hard times".  Another day it is her youngest daughter who in spite of the church upbringing has succumbed to the lure of bad TV and expensive cosmetic makeovers. The other daughters are mentioned, she is off soon to welcome a new grandchild on which she wryly observes that even a grandmother is not welcome without gifts (she in fact will bear the expenses of the first few months of the child and this jolts me a bit, the precise economic allocations inherent in many Indian communities). Or  she may offer an amusing take on the skinflint and eccentric ways of employers - the luxury of talking to an employer is reserved for a few because most housewives she says cannot bear to see the maid idle for even a moment.

The times I see her I realise there is something inherently soothing about her presence. Her work is silent and neat.  And there are affecting and understated touches like the tiny garlands she threads for my mother's portrait.  And though this Mary is no goddess - well perhaps she is a domestic goddess of sorts - there is something a little charming about her quiet navigation of life. And a sense of that old feeling of there being a little divinity in people.