This is a story about stories and dolls, and this is the
perfect season to narrate this story. Yes it is Navratri– the festival of nine
nights which is also the doll festival called Golu in my native Chennai.
Growing up I had very mixed feelings about this festival that when I emigrated,
I chose to keep it under lock in the cultural corner of my brain and throw away
the key.
What did I have against Navratri you ask? Well for starters
I had to dress up in clothes that I hated, and for the one hour that my mom
left me in charge when she was out visiting the neighbors I had to deal with
women visiting ours, and I felt like Scout did when she was surrounded by her
aunt’s friends in The Mockingbird. Instead of the starched walls of pink penitentiary, I felt cornered by the 6 yards of ornate, elaborate, yet sweaty
silk sarees which adorned and draped these wardens of culture. How I envied the
men who would gladly escape the ordeal and sought refuge in the inner chambers
of the home for the nine evenings refusing to come out. And to add fuel to the
fire, I was expected to play my veena and show off my talents, and if food was
the epitome of the Indian festival, this one was dealt a bad card – just “sundal”
for 9 nights! How can these lifeless dolls hold so much power and sway over my
life? Do you blame me for stretching my hands out like Andy Dufresne in Shawashank Redemption when I
crawled through the airport lines and touched down in America and proclaimed my
freedom!
And then I had a daughter and boy (or should I say “girl”)
did that change everything! Suddenly words like "legacy, culture, heritage" came
back into my language and started to make sense, as though I was a teenager in
love and all the previously discarded meaningless lyrics of love songs suddenly
start to make sense. So when she turned 3, I shocked my mother by proclaiming I
was going to kick off the doll festival at our home here in America and I asked
her if she had any of our old dolls still around.
Contrary to what I said earlier, the old dolls were not truly
lifeless. Life was breathed into them by the stories
told by my grandmother – like the “Blue Shiva” which was always the first doll
we would set up, the very first doll my parents bought as a couple; or the “baby
boy” with his hands under his chin – a mirror of one that was at our cousins',
or the pairs of animals that arrived at our home every year, thanks to my
maternal uncle who probably thought he was Noah rescuing these pairs from the
streets of Chennai to the ark that was our golu padi. As I write this my
jukebox of a mind is popping up images of me in Kuralagam with my mom (the only
other shopping besides books that I truly enjoyed) or my grandmother coming
home in a rickshaw in pouring rain clasping a couple of dolls which she thought
were absolutely needed for our collection, and the kids in my neighborhood
going out on golu visits as a group and rating different golus and the sundals.
So here I am on my 4th year of golu in America
and although I started off with completely new dolls, some of them have stories attached to them already, and not just the mythological ones. Some remind us of
friends who no longer live near us geographically, and others of our travels to
countries near and far, still others tell us stories about my daughter’s
current interest (Ninjas rule!), and some are just there to speak for my mom
and they appear to be saying “I told you so” while she has the sagacity to not
say so.
As we welcome friends to our home these days, I confess that
I’ve come a long way from my first golu when I was seen sporting lounge pants,
to this year when I am actually seen in a decent looking kurta (thanks mom!)
and am making the same sundals which suddenly taste delicious, and asking my
daughter to play the piano for the dolls which are back in power at our home…
just nine nights after all.
