Christmas Eve, Ooty

Men split off to the left; women to the right, kneeling first in pews or in a carpeted section, then sitting – those on the carpets making jeweled splashes of clustered sari silks. A superhuman figure of Christ leans off his cross from a corner of the nave. A beautifully dressed Mary stands with the baby Jesus in her arms, staring at the worshippers from her glass cubicle.

We are on the wrong side of the church. The realization comes slowly. Three men crowd into the pew alongside us.

It is minutes from Christmas Day in the Nilgiri Hills of southern India. Below us, as we entered the church, a drifting island of fog, obscured the lights of Charing Cross – Ooty’s town center. Above, headlamps shone intermittently as cars climbed the steep slope through banks heaped with flowering lantana and bougainvillea.

Two women, Caucasians, squeeze onto the bench one row up, giggling, light hair contrasting with the dark heads of more men. The choir assembles with men on the right, women on the left, an aisle between. Formed in their lines, they do quarter turns, facing away from the center, turning their backs to the opposite gender.

The music starts. “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” The violins – five of them – scratch out the melody a full beat behind the choir. The choir sections, lacking a visual center, sing enthusiastically and at will. “The silent stars … ,” the words straggle out. “The silent stars,” echo the violins. Nevermind. Before “dreamless sleep,” organ chords begin to roll upwards through colorful strings of foil toward the lofty arches and high corrugated steel roof of the church. Notes swell, rising in sweeping crescendos, each louder than the previous, creating, then overtaking and drowning their own echos.

The organ music gives way to the minor chords of a Tamil carol, an accompaniment for a woman in a brilliant sari of crimson silk with broad gold borders. She kneels in front of the statue of Mary, pays a brief obeisance, then moves to sink gracefully to the carpet-covered floor, adding to the growing pattern there, a model for Joseph’s coat of many colors, perhaps.

Seated on a Western-style church bench, dressed in my vacation best of gray slacks and turtleneck enlivened with an embroidered scarf – white thread on gray wool – I am a drab cousin rightly placed among the men.

Oh, well, we’re foreign visitors – Christians from a far side of the planet. Little we could do would surprise comment.

Outside, stars shine on the twin spires of this mini-cathedral. Black and delicate, eucalyptus tops sway over slopes fluffy with tea bushes. The sacred cattle of the Hindus doze in their byres. Goats, ponies, and sheep, wanderers and scavengers by day, have bedded down on some comfortable midden. Only human worshippers, gathered in churches strung through these hills, remain awake, remembering a seminal moment of long ago.