The Nativity Play

“AlongtimeagoinatowncalledNazareth...” begins the Narrator and takes a pause.

One of the teachers indicates to him to go slow.

“....there lived a young woman called Mary and a young carpenter called Joseph.”

Enter Mary and Joseph in their simple ‘Before Christ’ costumes.

“They loved each other very much.”

Mary and Joseph look at each other and smile.

Mary pretends to be busy. Joseph exits.

“One day an angel appeared to Mary.”

Enter Angel Gabriel fluttering the paper wings designed by a clever mum.

Mary kneels down and looks up at the angel. The angel moves her rosy lips to tell her the good news.

“..The angel told Mary that she was the chosen one. Soon she will have a baby boy. He will be very special. He will be the Son of God and she must call him Jesus.”

Exit Angel Gabriel and Mary.

The Narrator explains about King Herod’s order that everyone must return to the place they were born to pay a special tax.

Enter Joseph and Mary. Mary ties up bundles and puts them in a big basket for Joseph to carry.

“Mary rode to Bethlehem on a donkey with Joseph by her side.”

Joseph brings in a makeshift donkey fashioned from a child’s two-seater bike. 

Earlier during the rehearsals, the children had found this bike in the hall and had taken turns to ride it.

“Does anybody have a hobby horse that we can make into a donkey?”

None of the children had one.

“Let’s make this bike into a donkey” said Joseph. Mary seemed only too happy to take a ride on it.

Everybody liked the idea. The mums played along and made a 'donkey head' to attach to the bike's handle and covered the 'donkey' with a  grey cloth.

“...Every inn in Bethlehem was full.”

Enter Innkeeper. He shows the “FULL” sign to Joseph and Mary and leads them to a stable.

In the stable, a manger is pre-arranged with a toy baby bundled up behind it and hidden from the audience view.

“In the night, Mary’s baby boy was born.”

Mary cuddles the baby and lays him in the manger. Joseph looks on.

“On a hillside nearby shepherds are watching their sheep.”

The shepherds are sitting in the front row of the audience. A mum has been supervising them because the sticks they held in their hands had a tendency to go this way and that.

They rush to the little fireplace in front of the stage, warm their hands, and pretend to look for their sheep.

“A very bright light came into the sky. The light was an angel sent by God.”

Angel Gabriel and the little angels are backstage and are expected to enter at this point.

No sign of them.

The Narrator doesn’t notice.

He faces the audience and goes on “The light was an angel sent by God. He told the shepherds not to be afraid because he had good news. The Son of God has been born. They will find him in a stable in Bethlehem.”

Still no sign of Gabriel and his tribe.

The Narrator realises that he has gone too far. So he takes a long pause.

Angels, where are you? Please enter now –  the mums of the angels are holding their breath.

The angels are getting organised to make an appearance. Mary quickly glances in their direction and gestures to them to enter.

Enter Angel Gabriel and the tiny angels from the lower primary classes pirouetting like ballerinas.

Angel Gabriel tells the shepherds the good news.

The shepherds are excited and run to the steps leading to the stage. The youngest shepherd’s headscarf comes off. He walks to his mum who fixes it.

Meanwhile the other shepherds have reached Bethlehem and are admiring the new baby.

The Narrator waits for the youngest shepherd to join them.

The shepherds gesture vigorously and tell Mary and Joseph about the message from the angels.

“A long way away in the East three wise men who studied the stars saw a new very bright star shining in the sky. They knew that this meant a great ruler had been born. The wise men followed the star to the stable in Bethlehem.”

The Three Wise Men, in their royal finery, have been hiding at the back of the audience.

They make their way to the stage through the audience pointing at the star on the stage.

Their crowns dazzle and their silks shimmer.

“They found Jesus lying in a manger. They gave him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.”

One by one the Wise Men give their gifts to Baby Jesus.

The angels, the shepherds, and the Wise Men arrange themselves in a frame around the holy family.

Joseph and Mary take turns to cuddle the baby.

“Each year people celebrate the birth of Jesus and they call this special time Christmas.”

(It was wonderful to celebrate the story of Christmas yesterday with these little actors who came from far corners of the earth - Venezuela to Australia and from Russia to India.)

Break a leg!

As the little dancer walked to the makeup room, she met Yuma on the way.

“Break a leg!” said Yuma.

The dancer looked at her, confused.

Yuma explained that the theatre world has its own superstitions and that instead of wishing the performers ‘good luck’, people wished them ‘break a leg!’

.....

As we watched the rehearsals a few weeks before the show, we wondered how it would all come together at the Pantomime.

The men who were to be Cinderella’s ugly step-sisters strutted about wearing big black bras over their shirts and copies of the play scripts sticking out of their trouser pockets.

Cinderella’s step-mother was too rosy and endearing to be wicked. She turned out to be an excellent actress and every now and then got a well-deserved “Boo!” from the audience.

The choreographer had to rehearse and re-rehearse the dance steps with the little dancers who were villagers, woodland creatures, nymphs, and skeletons. They all gave her a group hug which is the best gift in the world.

The rehearsals went on so late that the children gave gaping yawns on the stage just after the final bow.

.....

During the dress rehearsal, a girl’s pale yellow skirt got curry stains.

There were other girls whose skirts met with the same fate as they ate Butter Chicken for dinner. The children’s director took the skirts home to hand wash.

Cinderella’s blue ribbons needed a trim every now and then if they tended to fray.

.....

A woodland creature frantically searched for her mask, and had to go onstage without it. It was found soon after her dance was over as if by magic. Didn’t know Cinderella’s fairy godmother had a remote control.

As the woodland creatures rushed up to the Green Room after their dance, they found a nymph lying in the doorway fast asleep and dreaming of real forests.

.....

In a corner, Prince Charming quietly posted a selfie as her Facebook profile picture. She got instant responses from friends saying that is exactly how her five-year-old son would look when he grew up.

The makeup artist had cleverly bestowed an Adam’s apple on Prince Charming and she charmingly flaunted it.

.....

Prince Charming and Cinderella certainly dazzled in their costumes in the last scene as they bowed.

The children in the audience crept closer and closer to the stage during the performance till some of them were practically sitting on the stage.

Theatre has its magnetism, doesn’t it?

Well, thank heavens, nobody broke their legs at this panto.

 

 

A Taxi-ride in New Delhi

It’s easy to grieve with someone who shares your feelings.

Soon after we lost our second baby, my husband had to go to New Delhi on a work assignment for a month.

Sometimes, in moments of self-absorption, we tend to lose our reasoning.

Just being together heals the heart so I impulsively booked a ticket to New Delhi a few days after he had left.

He had to work late so he couldn’t come to the airport to pick me up.

I hired a taxi to the hotel where he was staying.

It was late evening.

I shivered in the freezing air as I came out of the airport and got into the taxi.

The taxi driver was young and gruff-looking.

I gave him the name of the hotel.

He got into the taxi without a word.

I did not speak too.

He drove for about 15 minutes. We reached a part of the city which had no streetlights or buildings.

Then the taxi came to a slow halt. We were nowhere near a hotel.

The taxi-driver got out and met his friends in the dark shadows of the trees.

Not a word to me.

It was only then that I realised that New Delhi had a reputation for being unsafe for women travellers.

I joined my hands and closed my eyes.

After a few minutes, the taxi-driver got into the taxi and drove me straight to the hotel.

“Fifty rupees” he said.

I gave him a hundred rupees and said “Thank you, brother” in Hindi.

(Last December, my brave sister, Nirbhaya, met demons instead of brothers while travelling in a Delhi bus. May her soul rest in peace.)

“Oh yes, it is a Pantomime!”

“BOO!”  

The children in the audience yell as Cinderella’s stepmother throws up her head and laughs wickedly.

Exit Stepmother.

Enter a good character.

He goes about his own business for a while, and then turns to the audience to ask a question.

 “Will you help me?”

The children in the audience answer “Oh yes, we will.”

The character pretends he did not hear.

“I said, WILL YOU HELP ME?” he hollers.

“OH YES, WE WILL.” The children’s voices boom in the cinema hall.

A pantomime is about audience participation as much as the story and the characters.

The children in the audience are encouraged to shout “It’s behind you!” or “Oh no, it isn’t!”

They are sometimes invited to participate in a well-known song. They are grouped into two halves and each half is encouraged to sing louder than the other half. At times, children in the audience are invited on stage to sing along with the characters.

The Christmas Pantomime evolved as a theatrical genre in England and it is traditionally based on Children’s fairy tales such as Cinderella or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There are some conventions that are followed when presenting a panto.

There are gender crossing actors, song and dance, and double entendres that are targeted at the adults and cleverly presented as utterly genteel dialogues which bounce off the limited comprehension of children.

There is humour but not much pathos although there could be a dark scene.

Conventionally, in the medieval mystery plays, the right side of the stage symbolised Heaven and the left side symbolised Hell, so in a pantomime, the goodies enter the stage from the right (which is on the left of the audience) and the baddies enter from the left (which is on the right of the audience).

These traditions are centuries old. It was recently revealed that even the Queen had portrayed Prince Charming in a 1941 performance of Cinderella at Windsor Castle.

Pantomimes provide comic relief and childish joy.

So if you are watching a panto this season in England or beyond, become a child again, forget the adult world, cup your hands to your mouth and yell with the children, “Oh yes, it is!”

(The theatre group, RAHADS, regularly puts up pantomimes in Muscat. Please see the poster below for this season’s production.)

 

 

A Beautiful White Beach

The dolphins on the PDO beach are friendly and helpful.

They stand with their mouths open and gobble up whatever rubbish you pop into them.

Most people use the services of these plastic dolphins who keep the beach clean.

.....

Nancy, a staff-member at the Club said, “Recently a member of the club sent a picture to the Club Office showing hundreds of cigarette butts in a small area on the beach. We have designated areas for smokers but we still see this happen. That’s why we decided to have a Beach-cleaning Day to create awareness among the community.”

.....

The first thing we found in the children’s play area as we started off with a black garbage bag was an ear-bud. We were amused by its appearance as it seemed so out of place. As we went along, we collected ring pulls, bits of plastic and Styrofoam, bottle caps, and lots of cigarette butts.

 

A heavily-pregnant lady bent down to pick up a ring pull half-hidden in the sand. Her husband raked the beach to expose more non-biodegradable objects. Toddlers picnicking on the beach loved to feel the wet freshly-raked sand with their soft tickly feet.

.....

An Omani father had come with his five young children. He said that he wanted his children to realise the importance of keeping our environment clean. “PDO beach”, he said, “is a private beach and not so dirty. The organisers should have asked the OIG or the men in blue not to clean the beach for a week before launching this awareness campaign”, he laughed.

.....

Jacqueline, our school PTA chairperson, has lived in Singapore before. She said that Singapore has a reputation as one of the cleanest places in the world. Yet her children, who saw Singapore with their “Omani eyes” thought that Oman was a cleaner place because the men in blue are always seen cleaning up the roads and public places in Muscat.
However, sometime back their family had gone camping to the Khalouf beach near Masirah and found a lot of waste there. It seemed like somebody had dropped truckloads of garbage, she said. It would be appropriate to launch a beach-cleaning drive in a place like that, she added.

.....

The weather was lovely and the sea was a marvellous colour. With such beauty around, the beach-cleaners certainly went home with a good feeling of having done their bit for the environment.

The children – Marieke, Fadhil, Anna, Rafif, Aya, among others – carried the memory of a beautiful white beach.

 

 

 
(On PDO Beach Cleaning Day, 7 December 2013)

 

Another Prince of Peace

At the pantomime rehearsals, children of different skin tones sat together in the green room waiting for their cue to go onstage.

Rishima said, “Do you know that Nelson Mandela died yesterday?”

Her friend nudged her “Please tell me more about him.”

Rishima turned to me, “Can you tell her who he was?”

Nelson Mandela was known by many names in his lifetime.

Do you know that he was not named Nelson by his parents?

In his autobiography, he writes, “No one in my family ever attended school. On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education. That day, Miss Mdingane told me that my new name was Nelson. Why this particular name, I have no idea.”

At birth he was given the name Rolihlahla, which means "troublemaker".

Later he became known by his clan name, Madiba.

He was also nicknamed Black Pimpernel because of his ability to trick the police by using disguises.

Born into the Thembu royal family, he was a prince. The events that shaped his life made him a leader and he led the South African anti-apartheid movement. He was imprisoned for many years. In 1994, he became the first black president of South Africa and served until 1999.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.

Mandela had a dramatic personal and political life.

In South Africa many people call him “Tata” which means father as he is also known as "the father of the nation".

O Pepernoot!

One  day in early December, our five-year-old came home from school all excited about a strange thing that had happened.

She said there were muddy marks all over the classroom and even on the carpet. The teacher said that it must have been the doing of the naughty zwarte piets or the ‘black peters’ who are the helpers of Sinterklass – the Dutch version of Santa Claus.

The piets had scattered little nut-shaped cookies all over the school.

The teacher had told the class that the cookies were called pepernoten and she even taught them a song about it:

O pepernoot, O pepernoot, lekker lekker lekker lekker pepernoot

En schuimpjes en schuimpjes

Lekker lekker lekker lekker pepernoot

It is an action song that tells how tasty the cookies and the sweeties are.

Juf Ceciel, the Dutch teacher with whom I worked, shared her simple pepernoten recipe with me. In Dutch. It was a challenge.

That’s how I learnt elementary Dutch language and also to make some traditional Dutch dishes.

Baking pepernoten is a favourite activity for children on Christmas play dates. Served with hot chocolate, pepernoten are the perfect tea-time snacks.

The translated recipe is as follows:

Ingredients:

100 gm self-raising flour

50 gm dark brown sugar

25 gm butter, cut in cubes

2 tablespoons milk

2 teaspoons speculaas (This is a spice mixture made with nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves)

Method:

Mix the flour and the sugar in a bowl.

Add the butter cubes.

Add milk and speculaas.

Knead for two minutes.

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Grease a baking tray.

Make tiny balls of the mixture and place them on the tray.

Bake for 15-20 minutes.

If children are making the pepernoten, you just have to help them with the measuring and the baking. Let them sing Christmas carols while they make them.

These will be treasured memories.

 

To find out more about Sinterklass and his arrival in Muscat, you may go to http://freshmintandlemon.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-good-holy-man-comes-to-town.html
 

Between the Two Crosses

The village of Digha lies between two Christian Crosses – the remnants of a Portuguese missionary culture. At that time, an unpaved road joined the two Crosses. The houses, spread out between and around these two Crosses, had little gardens that boasted of flowers all year round.

The Fonseca’s house had the best garden with its bougainvillea vines climbing one of the tallest trees in the village and blood-red ixora blooms competing with canna lilies and shoeflowers for attention. They had sourced some of these plants from different gardens in the town. Bees, butterflies, needle-shaped damselflies, and dragonflies seemed to socialise there.

People in the village had easy lifestyles then. There were no phones or television sets. Entertainment was found in local gossip, people-watching, and practical jokes. Home-brewed liquor or daru was made in many houses and brawls were not infrequent. Community and family prayers were given more importance than studies. Children were considered as a common wealth and all elders took it upon themselves to discipline them.

While the elders in the village had their afternoon siesta, the children played in the expansive Digha Talao – the biggest lake in the village, if it was dry. If it wasn’t, they played in the many grassy fields around the village. Some boys learnt swimming in the large wells using rubber tyres as lifebuoys. Girls sometimes sat with their sisters and friends on wooden swings and chatted or played board games.

And I?

When I wasn’t with the girls or boys, I went from garden to garden plucking flowers.

No, it wasn’t a good idea at all and I had been warned. It was a temptation too hard to resist. I am sometimes lured by this evil friend who lives in my head and takes over my reason completely.

One day, I got so carried away that I plucked all the red ixora blooms in the Fonseca’s garden. Along with the tuberoses and the lilies.

It was one of those days when villagers came to pray near the little wooden Cross in the Fonseca’s garden.

In the evening, the Fonseca’s son sprayed the garden with water so that dust wouldn’t rise when the villagers gathered there. His pretty sisters came out to decorate the Cross with flowers. It was then that they noticed that all the flowers had gone. They had suspected theft before but it was never so obvious.

The flowers were found in our house wilting away under my bed. I had hoped that their fragrance would fill up our room as we slept. We lived in a joint family then. It was a big shame for my family.

All the villagers who had gathered for prayer stood around and told me to beg for forgiveness.

I had to publicly declare that I would never ever steal flowers from anybody’s garden.

I was ashamed and could not meet my parent’s eyes. Or anybody else’s.

The villagers were all my guardians.
Today this thought makes me feel rich.

I still live with my weakness for flowers although I have succeeded in resisting the persuasions of my evil friend.

Now I visit gardens and steal flowers by capturing them on my camera.

It is not the same thing, however.

An Indian Princess

One day, Hilde came and sat next to me.

She said she would like to take some personal pictures.

“Of me?” I could not believe it. 

“Yes, in a saree. It is such a beautiful garment” she said.

“A saree symbolises the feminine spirit and elegance” I agreed.

 “You choose the sarees. Your place, mine, or outdoors – all fine” she said.

She made me feel so special with those words.

Hilde is a professional Dutch photographer and I loved her work. I had seen her portfolios on the internet. I never imagined that she would ask me to be her model. I am neither blessed with extraordinary beauty nor do I have a good taste in fashion.

That year I was helping a Dutch class at school to ease their transition to the international stream. Hilde’s son was in that class. I wore sarees on special occasions. She must have seen me on one of those days. 

However, Hilde’s family was soon to move to Moscow and did not have much time in Muscat. She set a date for the photo shoot and I could not keep it as our schedules didn’t match. So, unfortunately, the photo session never took place.

The important thing is that she made an ordinary girl like me feel like an Indian princess, if only for a while. Only a real princess can make another girl feel like a princess.

Hilde does wonders with family pictures and some of these pictures are priceless.

You may see Hilde’s pictures on her website http://hildevandersterren.net/

 

 

(The above picture is of models in sarees at a showroom in Coimbatore, India)

 

Natural Encounters

These hills of Muscat belong to them.

They are the natives.

.....

A maid brings in the washing from the drying rack outside and lays it on the bed. Out pops a scorpion from a shirt cuff and glares at her. “Yikes!” she screams and grabs a broom.

Stijn spots a scorpion near his potted plants. He carefully places a bowl above it and slides a newspaper underneath. Then he carries it off to the valley and gently drops it there.

.....

The overgrown hedge needs a trim. The gardener expertly handles the shears as the leaves drop in green cascades. A deadly viper watches from arm’s length. Soon the snake catchers have smoked it out.

Seema sometimes sees snakes outside her French windows. She ignores them. They leave her alone. They have a mutual understanding.

.....

The baby of the family likes the black and white kitten from a wadi cat’s litter. They bring it home and name her “Luna”. Luna doesn’t like being indoors so she scratches everything. Soon the family has to move to another place. Nobody wants to adopt Luna. She is waiting to be put to sleep.

Wadi cats come to Anna and they adopt her. She feeds them every morning. They live in her garden and hunt at night. When Anna goes on a holiday, they still survive.

.....

Wadi dogs stalk the hills in packs. Sometimes they attack lonely walkers on the streets. If caught, they are stoned away.

Sensible walkers stay away from the places frequented by the wadi dogs. They also avoid odd hours for walking.

.....

The birds have a better deal. They feast on the blooms and enjoy showers under garden sprinklers. Amateur photographers follow them.