It’s difficult to say how hope and familiarity manifests. Sometimes in the form of a scent or a taste, or a feeling on my skin, or something that stirs within me when I look at the landscape
I am excited to send self-made Christmas cards and to crochet some snowflakes to place in our apartment as a prayer for snow. Pic/Rosalyn D’Mello
It pleases me that the South Tyroleans waited until the appropriate moment, two days before the first Sunday of Advent, to get into the festive spirit. In Innsbruck, the other side of the Alps, trees, street decorations, and all manner of Christmassy installations had been up since November, which felt wrong to me. I think the anticipation is important. This morning I left our home at 7 am to take the train to Bozen for my Italian class. As I walked from the station till the street where the language class is located, I glimpsed at the wreaths hanging between buildings, the ice skating rink that has finally been set up, and the Christmas market stands. The air smelled sweet from the wafts of freshly baked cookies from the various bakeries and the light scent of wood burning in old houses to keep their inhabitants warm. By the time I returned to Tramin, the Christmas tree had been set up and the street decorations were already in place.
Unlike back home in Goa or Mumbai, there’s a minimalism to the affair. It isn’t overly garish or loud; the streets are lit just enough that when the sky darkens by 4.30 pm you feel the glow. I like the lightness of touch, the small interventions from ground-floor homes, like candles lit in paper bags with cutouts of Christmas trees or stars. My mother-in-law simply puts out a star-shaped mould on one of the tables in the living room and fills it with cinnamon and other spices with a large candle taking centre-stage. A day or two before Christmas a friend of my father-in-law usually comes by with an indigenous Christmas tree which looks somewhat emaciated, compared to the better-bred ones you usually see in other people’s homes, or that is associated with the festivities. We always laugh at it. He always makes it a point to mention it is native and indigenous. We are always embarrassed by it. I like saying always, offering the illusion of habituation. It is, in fact, the norm. I just like being able to talk about it as if I had always been around as a witness. This will be my second Christmas in Tramin.
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I am excited because I know that what I encountered last year was a more toned down version. This year I’m looking forward to the annual Christmas market which, a year ago, had to be cancelled. It’s a very small town, so it doesn’t have the run-on-the-mill, made-in-China products that have found their way into most Alpine and Bavarian Christmas markets. It takes place in an old quarter called Bethlehem, and features mostly handmade crafts, jams, sweets, and other delectable things. Because I had the opportunity to see my family in September, I feel less homesick. I am excited to send self-made Christmas cards and to crochet some snowflakes to place in our apartment as a prayer for snow.
It’s hard to conceive how quickly the year seems to have come to pass, how we find ourselves already on the threshold of 2022. Maybe that’s how it feels every year, and you wonder where the time went. This time around I have felt the swell of it in every cell in my body, which is not to suggest it was insufferable, rather that I feel as though I allowed myself to be immersed in the eternity of the ephemeral. Because I am more at ease here, less lost in language, more at home, feeling a little less displaced every day. I look to the future with an excitement that is unprecedented, because, every day, I get better at wrestling with two languages while remaining secure in English and feeling less uncertain about my personhood. I feel I am able to foresee that otherwise illusive point in the future in which I feel settled. I feel sure I will arrive at that responsorial quality that is inherent to fluency, being able to comprehend a piece of dialogue addressed at me and answering intuitively, without having to strategise or formulate my thoughts and convert them into another tongue.
It’s difficult to say how hope manifests. Sometimes in the form of a scent or a taste, or a feeling on my skin, or something that stirs within me when I look at the landscape, or bear witness to how it snowed on a particular mountain chain on some night. I see the trees continue to shed their leaves and I marvel at their ability to economise, to retreat into themselves in preparation for the cold of winter. I now know exactly what each tree in Tramin will look like in early Spring. Once again I will monitor the advance of blossoms, the breaking out into leaves. I think this is what it means to feel embedded within a landscape, to link elements of yourself and feeling to that which is external and yet now nestled within you.
Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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