The Charms of Santa Cruz of Yore - part three

Sacred Heart Parish and Boys’ High School had their special occasions or events – some annual, others monthly or quarterly, end of term, etc.

One such event was Mission Sunday. At the children’s mass we attended, there was no collection except on this day. My father would give me two four anna (25P) coins, one to put in the collection box and the other for an ice cream at Cafe Marissa. Yes, that’s what we paid for an ice cream those days. On one such Mission Sunday, I was carrying the two coins handed over to me, both clenched in my fist. One coin fell off and rolled into the drain nearby. Besides 25P ice creams, we also had closed drains in Santa Cruz those days. I just looked up to heaven (that’s where we were told it is) and said “Lord forgive me for having dropped your coin in the drain.” I realized years later that there was no one upstairs to forgive or condemn me. I didn’t inform at home for fear that my father would think that it was the Lord’s coin that I was holding on to and the cafe’s coin that I dropped.

Approximately a month later would begin the season of Advent. The nuns at Sunday school told us that Advent was for preparing us for the birth of Jesus.  So, this was a period we had to be at our best behavior. This was also the time when grapes were purchased for the Christmas wine and the dry fruits were soaked in rum for the cake. Sweets for Christmas were prepared at home then, unlike these days when we buy them from shops. Midnight mass at Sacred Heart was always special; after all, we had the best choir in the diocese.

Hardly did the Christmas Season end and Lent would start. Two days of the year – Ash Wednesday and Good Friday – when meat was banned. Oh! How deprived we felt! Lent also meant that we didn’t hear sermons from the priests of the parish. Instead, we were visited by special priests in black cassocks, Redemptorists is how they were labeled. They didn’t need microphones. They had such powerful voices that they could be heard even in the next parish. But come Easter and all that would change as we prepared for our final exams and the summer vacation to follow.

One integral part of the Holy Week (the week before Easter) was the Mass on Maundy Thursday, the Good Friday service, and the Easter vigil mass. These were held on the school grounds as the church was too small to accommodate the congregation. There were different points on the ground where communion would be distributed. My father, who was the head usher at these services, always made sure everything was in order before and after the services.

One such year, when I was taking a break from Easter vigil duty, I saw Dad kneeling at a place on the ground. I walked up to him to tell him that the inside of the church was a better place to pray than the ground. The moment he saw me he heaved a sigh of relief. When I reached the spot he pointed to the ground. There were two round hosts – the body of Christ – lying on the ground. These could only be touched by a priest whose hands were anointed, not commoners like us. No problem with our tongue and the saliva as well as the digestive juices in our stomach. But hands were banned. My father asked me to wait while he called a priest to pick up the two hosts and dispose of them as was ordained in Cannon Law.

On the way home Dad told me about how he saw two tiny round objects. Thinking they were coins he went to pick them up and drop them in the collection box. On reaching the spot he realised they were the body of Christ. “What if somebody had stamped them the next day?” He said. Well, that, I thought, would have been a far worse sacrilege than touching them with un-anointed hands. The incident was forgotten by both of us after that.

A month later there was a report in the Church Bulletin about how a miracle had taken place. A parishioner and his son (names were not mentioned) saw two bright lights flashing like car headlights. Thus, the body of Christ was saved from being desecrated. So, gullible was I in those days that anything the clergy said we accepted. I actually started to believe that this is how it happened. I began to wonder years later if this is how every miracle originated.

The summer holidays meant several things to us, one, a week’s camp for the best altar boys in Khandala and two, the parish summer club. Being among the best altar boys and a future priest, I was one of those selected every year. For the benefit of those not from Bombay, Khandala is a hill station about 70 kilometers from Bombay. It used to be a pristine green area then. Today, it’s a concrete jungle.

The summer camp was an opportunity for us to meet altar boys from other parishes. For the first time, we realized that English could be spoken in several different ways – the boys from Bandra, with their brudder and fadder, with those from Colaba who spoke with a British accent. Wow! If George Bernard Shaw had to visit Bombay, Pygmalion would have been a story of the city of Bombay not set in Britain.

The parish summer club had a charm of its own. Boys were divided into four teams called dens – tigers, bears, lions, and panthers. We’d have hockey, football, and volleyball tournaments. Besides there would be individual or doubles games like table-tennis, carom, and tennikoit. There would be a whist drive every Saturday evening and a movie in the school hall on Thursday evenings. It was great fun for us as children. The clergy really knew how to keep the young parishioners in check.

Summer holidays also meant that we joined the local circulating libraries. In Std IV & V, it was mostly Enid Blyton novels, Dennis the Menace, and school-girl comics. Later we graduated to Perry Mason and Archie and Superman Comics. Despite what my parents named me my favorite comic character was and continues to be, Dennis the Menace, not Veronica. Once school started it was only study books that we were allowed to touch.

[part IV to follow]