Growing up in a remote tea estate near Munnar in the 1950s, we usually had a visitor just before Christmas—Padre Marian on his annual visit to take care of our spiritual needs in preparation for Xmas.
A day before his visit, we kids would be evicted from our bedroom which Mum would tidy up for the guest, laying out her best linen.
A hefty Spaniard, Father Marian would arrive in a cloud of dust, regally ensconced in his old Morris Minor. He would stay overnight with us, conduct mass and other church services the next morning and depart after lunch, much to our collective relief.
For, his visit meant curtailment of our freedom to be noisy. Indeed we children were seldom at ease in his sombre presence heightened by his gruff voice, rather blunt manner and deep-set eyes that seemed to penetrate one. He would never make a jovial Santa Claus, we agreed. Nevertheless, watching the padre dine was a lesson for us kids.
With Dad and Mum in attendance, he would effortlessly use a knife and fork to cut and spear pieces of meat into his cavernous mouth as we kids watched in awe, hidden behind the door curtains. It was a skill we were just starting to acquire, rather clumsily, at boarding school.
I used to wonder how the ‘cassocked’ priest would look in ordinary clothes. Unable to curb my boyish curiosity, one night I peeped into the keyhole of his bedroom door. I saw nothing since he wasn’t in my line of vision. But Dad caught me in the act and the hiding he gave me considerably dampened my curiosity. The prospect of confessing one’s sins to Father Marian was daunting, given his forbidding appearance.
Instead of penance, what if he gave me a hard smack? I often tried to back out but Mum would goad me on, pointing to my brothers in the queue before the confessional. Unsurprisingly, the padre’s knowledge of Malayalam left much to be desired. Yet he insisted on delivering his sermon in the vernacular, using graphic gestures to supplement his lack of fluency.
To assist him, he roped in the elderly sacristan as a translator of sorts. This worthy—possibly the only one who could comprehend the padre’s heavily accented and garbled Malayalam—did a remarkable job for years despite his limitations. The memory of those impassioned sermons, with the padre’s arms flailing, remains vivid—in hindsight, it was a fitting prelude to Xmas.