Read Online Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast by Samanth Subramanian - Free Book Online
Authors: Samanth Subramanian
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cultivating his earnest interest in the town’s history and in getting to know, nearly literally, everyone. On that first visit to the Periya Kovil, he talked in considerable detail, off the top of his head, about Mary of the Snows. ‘In the fourth century, Rome was going through a severe drought—and yet, on the Esquiline Hill, it snowed,’ Fernando said. ‘Mary appeared in a dream to the Pope Liberius, at the time, directing him to build a church on that hill. That is now the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.’ The gilded statue of Mary in Our Lady of the Snows, flanked by miscellaneous putti, was a legendary one, Fernando added, brought to Tuticorin from Manila in the sixteenth century.
On a Sunday morning, three days before Christmas, I attended my first two Masses at Our Lady of the Snows. Up front, women sat on the floor with their children; behind them, in the few pews available, were the men and senior citizens. Some of the women sported fine, sheer, Iberian veils, worn on their heads like long conical caps, looking like they had stepped out of the canvas of a Velasquez painting. The men held handkerchiefs and absently swatted at flies, which in Tuticorin come in such XXL sizes that they rivalled the length of my thumb. A faint breeze blew across the church, bearing the distant voices of the harmless, Santa-hatted motorcycle gangs, shouting ‘Merry Christmas’ to passers-by as they sped through the road outside.
I did not follow the Tamil Mass too closely. The service was led by a junior priest with the trudging, uniform intonations of a university lecturer, and his sermon—on compassion, if I recall rightly—was dry and flaccid. He had positioned himself in front of a standing fan, and sporadically, his purple vestments would fly up from his white cassock, like the plumage of an exotic bird shaking itself dry. Next to me, on the floor, a little girl with liquid eyes tumbled into giggles every time this happened. From thebalcony above me, a choir occasionally gave us music, accompanied by a keyboard that reeled off disco rhythms in step with the hymns.
The next Mass, in English, was delivered by Father Jerosin Kattar, the rector and parish priest of Our Lady of the Snows and a fireball of a speaker. To a thinner but more attentive crowd, he spoke about Christ’s love for his subjects, equating it to an almost maternal love, of the sort embodied by the Virgin Mary. Kattar is a short man, in danger of being hidden by his pulpit, but he makes up for it with his resonant voice and his animated manner of speech. He posed rhetorical questions to his congregation, answered them most satisfactorily himself, plucked Biblical quotes out of the ether to support his answers, and drew conclusions that appeared watertight and irrefutable. During his predecessor’s sermon, there was always a low vibrato of surreptitious conversation in the church; during Kattar’s, his audience clung to his every word.
Kattar is a heavy-set man in his fifties, with broad, thick hands, gray hair combed neatly back from his forehead, and a dusting of white stubble; over his cassock of dulled white, around his midriff, a red sash sat comfortably. When I met him, he was on a five-year rotation in Tuticorin, occupying an office in the compound of Our Lady of the Snows. He carried a Tamil Bible in a zippered case of soft felt, and a mobile phone that rang to the strain of ‘Hark now hear, the angels sing,’ although that may have been a purely seasonal choice. ‘I was in Rome just before this, for a two-year stint, but I didn’t like it. It was far too bureaucratic,’ he told me. ‘I was itching to get back here, where I felt more involved with the community.’
Kattar converses as he preaches—with considered pauses, sentences modulated to a flourish, didactic patience, and a vivid sense of history. When, during one of our discussions, the subject of that Sunday morning Mass on maternal love came up, herapidly traced its roots
On a Sunday morning, three days before Christmas, I attended my first two Masses at Our Lady of the Snows. Up front, women sat on the floor with their children; behind them, in the few pews available, were the men and senior citizens. Some of the women sported fine, sheer, Iberian veils, worn on their heads like long conical caps, looking like they had stepped out of the canvas of a Velasquez painting. The men held handkerchiefs and absently swatted at flies, which in Tuticorin come in such XXL sizes that they rivalled the length of my thumb. A faint breeze blew across the church, bearing the distant voices of the harmless, Santa-hatted motorcycle gangs, shouting ‘Merry Christmas’ to passers-by as they sped through the road outside.
I did not follow the Tamil Mass too closely. The service was led by a junior priest with the trudging, uniform intonations of a university lecturer, and his sermon—on compassion, if I recall rightly—was dry and flaccid. He had positioned himself in front of a standing fan, and sporadically, his purple vestments would fly up from his white cassock, like the plumage of an exotic bird shaking itself dry. Next to me, on the floor, a little girl with liquid eyes tumbled into giggles every time this happened. From thebalcony above me, a choir occasionally gave us music, accompanied by a keyboard that reeled off disco rhythms in step with the hymns.
The next Mass, in English, was delivered by Father Jerosin Kattar, the rector and parish priest of Our Lady of the Snows and a fireball of a speaker. To a thinner but more attentive crowd, he spoke about Christ’s love for his subjects, equating it to an almost maternal love, of the sort embodied by the Virgin Mary. Kattar is a short man, in danger of being hidden by his pulpit, but he makes up for it with his resonant voice and his animated manner of speech. He posed rhetorical questions to his congregation, answered them most satisfactorily himself, plucked Biblical quotes out of the ether to support his answers, and drew conclusions that appeared watertight and irrefutable. During his predecessor’s sermon, there was always a low vibrato of surreptitious conversation in the church; during Kattar’s, his audience clung to his every word.
Kattar is a heavy-set man in his fifties, with broad, thick hands, gray hair combed neatly back from his forehead, and a dusting of white stubble; over his cassock of dulled white, around his midriff, a red sash sat comfortably. When I met him, he was on a five-year rotation in Tuticorin, occupying an office in the compound of Our Lady of the Snows. He carried a Tamil Bible in a zippered case of soft felt, and a mobile phone that rang to the strain of ‘Hark now hear, the angels sing,’ although that may have been a purely seasonal choice. ‘I was in Rome just before this, for a two-year stint, but I didn’t like it. It was far too bureaucratic,’ he told me. ‘I was itching to get back here, where I felt more involved with the community.’
Kattar converses as he preaches—with considered pauses, sentences modulated to a flourish, didactic patience, and a vivid sense of history. When, during one of our discussions, the subject of that Sunday morning Mass on maternal love came up, herapidly traced its roots
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