A Hindu festival called Christmas: Encounters between a non-practising Hindu and Roman Catholicism

Come the first of December, there’s miles and miles of cotton wool snowfall in all the shop-windows of Bombay, aka Mumbai. The only transportation during this time of blizzards, avalanches and snow drifts are the reindeers and snow-sleds driven by old men in post-office red coats with fur collars and trousers and flowing long fleecy-white beards.

Everywhere you see the star of Bethlehem, toy cribs, mangers, the three magi, the shepherds and the holy couple and their baby. All the fancy stores and the malls – where else but in Bombay will you find multi-storeyed malls in the heart of downtown while more than half of the city lives on the pavements and slums – are twitching with tiny electrical lights draped on stunted or monster Christmas trees. The shiny green nylon fir needles weighed down with trinkets and crackers glitter and glint malevolently.

The temperature hits a chillingly cold 33 degrees centigrade during the day on the western littoral of India and occasionally plummets at night all the way to 20 degrees when Bombayites take out their heavy winter woollens: sweaters, jackets, parkas, scarves, monkey-caps, mittens, snow-boots, not to mention thermal underwear.

As the days race past towards the longest day of the year,...

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