Father looks at the Christmas bulbs in a market in Shimla’s centre, the Ridge. There is Christ Church and there is the plaza with people around and then there are the stalls selling everything from chaat papdi to pudees, Christmas angels to Santa masks. He is at one of these stalls, comparing the sheen of the green one to the sharpness of the red one, and he starts to think about his mother. In the snowy hills of Himachal Pradesh, the Christian community is rare, scattered in the various other homes and communities belonging to Hindus. Still, inside of Father’s family home just outside of Solan, the word of Christ held power, and the celebrations were like any other Christian celebrations in any other part of the world. His mother used to buy ornaments like these to decorate their cottage. She would buy silver and porcelain angels, golden balls that lit up the room, and glass balls coloured in dark velvet, navy green, and icy blue. The Christmas feast was enormous, from chicken biryani to roasted mutton, and kheer made out of the freshest milk for dessert. Over the past few decades, Father celebrated Christmas in the home he shared with his wife in Shimla, but it was almost impossible for him to dissociate his mind from those blissful, peaceful memories of pine trees upon pine trees scattered across the settlements underneath the hill that their family home perched on.
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