3 Goddesses, 9 Nights and countless Maamis

I guess there are Navarathiri/Golu posts all over now.. But just found a little ‘wait time’ at work, so I thought I could use some mental recreation….

• Golu starts with Dad and me unloading all the boxes from the loft…me usually helping from below, as I was… am still afraid/uneasy/fill-in-the-blanks… when I see lizards! eeek! one word – repulsive.
• Unloading the boxes.. removing the newspaper/magazine wrappers around the dolls of varying sizes..
• Last week I spoke to me dad and learnt that they have finally bought the steel padi…
• The pre-padi stage was fun actually… Getting all the “mara beerows”, dining table, study table, any structure which can stand upright and support some weight… All these would be used to “construct” the golu padis. The drape would usually be amma’s 9 gajam podavai, or a couple of dad’s nice veshtis specifically allocated as the Golu padi drape. Yeah a couple of them to cover the entire breadth of the padi and then some… see, people coming to visit, should not know what the padi has been constructed out of..yeah?
• Then comes the arrangement of the dolls.. Some dolls always have a fixed place… like the ‘pillyar’ bommai would always be the centre of each padi…and then there were these HUGE dolls that we have from a very long time.. Maha Vishnu, Saraswathi, Raja Rajeswari, Kamakshi (the sugarcane that she has one hand actually broke a few years back.. and dad fixed it with a painted juice straw )
• The other dolls are always a round robin.. mostly because we remembered the previous year’s arrangement partially and the rest was given ‘fresh thought’.
• serial lights… and a couple of other lights too..
• Oh! and the park… Neighbours would suddenly notice a decrease in land levels outside our block and wherever there is enough top soil…only to be found later in several houses..
• Raagi, Vendhayam (dont know the inglees term) were my usual choices for the ‘park crops’

All the above was a lot of fun, but the best part was when some maami came visiting… My mom would have invited a lot of the maamis in our flats, and then some..so a pretty large crowd would turn up usually… and of course our Golu was one of the best.. so was prone to more visits…

Being the only child, sometimes I had to receive the guests and point them to the ‘vethala paaku’ , and a gift that amma would always get for every Golu for the visiting maamis.. and sometimes, rarely though,(when I’m lucky enough) some girl in the family, who happened to be visiting that maami’s golu, would have been brought along.. siggggghhh…

And then the fun would start… If my mom isn’t around (she might have gone to some other house to visit), no big deal.. whomever came would just take a look at the golu and probably ask a few probing questions and then leave… Some, who are closer to my mom, would just wait… This would kill me… I would become really nervous and fidgety and would usually resign to my study room or bedroom…I usually dont like hanging around maamis, as they make you really nervous with their prodding questions…. hmmmpppphhh… This situation would happen very rarely as I would always fight my mom into agreeing that she would not spend a lot of time visiting as I cannot handle the maami kootam too well. heh..

So, when my mom is around there would usually be a congregation and one by one they would start to sing… THIS is my favourite part of the whole Navarathiri festival.. some maamis would do alright, choose light songs and be done with it. Some would choose really heavy and difficult songs and screw them up so badly.. Poor amma.. she had to listen to this with a straight face.. but dad and me would be stuffing our hands into our mouths and turning red stifling our loud laughter… Every so often I would just walk into the kitchen, and try to make eye contact with my mom and almost laugh… she would want to let it out but she can’t, and she would make a face at me telling me shut it! ah! those wonderful moments!

And then of course Saraswathi Poojai and Vijayadasami were fun too… especially because of the awesome food! Vadai, payasam (?), et. al.

Happy Navarathiri everyone!