Rathsaptami

 Remembered my childhood days with ardent love yet again on Saturday. It was the Rathsaptami celebration on Saturday. Aai loved to celebrate it with full fervour. 

Without fail, she used to light up a small little bonfire in our backyard. Around it, she used to draw lovely rangoli patterns celebrating the Sun God. She used to decorate it with lovely flower patterns as well. At about 12 noon, she used to cook a special 'kheer' made of milk, rice, ghee, jaggery and grated coconut in a special utensil she (p)reserved for this very purpose. 

 This Prasad, hardly a spoonful, given the mode of preparing it, used to taste divine. Of course, equally tasty used to be the sesame-jaggery ladoo's she would make. She was excellent at cooking. She could even prepare the halwa with her bare fingers, extremely delicate and difficult art of coating each sesame seed with the sugary liquid. Later, she would weave them in colourful patterns to prepare lovely ornaments which she excelled at. I can manage only the laddoo's which i did prepare in the memory of my parents.

Were they old-fashioned, my parents, because they loved to follow such festivities? I do not think so. They were, to begin with, extremely generous in very many ways that the so-called modern people cannot even think of. Ours was a childhood wherein all that was the best of being a Bramhin household was retained, and all that was dross never even reached us. Honestly, it was a deep (and, for me, difficult) debate during an overnight train journey which made me so acutely aware of the caste cast.

It never mattered to us otherwise. My parents followed such rituals in admiration of the tight knit family togetherness. There was no ritualistic insistence. On the Rathsaptami day, they would talk about the sun's trajectory as well. The simple lovely celebrations basically added a poetic touch to that magic world called childhood. 

Subtly the meaningfulness of existence was, moreover, ingrained in to our very souls. The Pooja was a symbol of the change in the sun's diurnal patterns, while the kheer, the porridge, that Aai would consciously let boil over, signified seasonal abundance as well as generosity for all the creatures, ants to birds, who would partake of the boiled over sweet. 

In tune with the nature around, our childhood was a happy place. Re-vision-ing it in the memory mode is indeed a joyride.

Pratima@As i was green and grew/ along the starlit ways/of the pure love of gentle parents/for whom the home was where the heart won.