-Brian Mendonça
In May, you hardly expect to find a calendar for the
year. But a calendar was what we were looking for when we stepped into our
place in Navi Mumbai this May. Our last visit was in November last and the wall
calendars were still on that page.
Sprucing up the whole house for our stay did not seem
quite right with the calendar six months old. I was close to despairing. The 2018 calendar in our bedroom was from Don
Bosco, Matunga. It showed Jesus as the Good Shepherd. Curiously, the image seemed
appropriate for May 2019 too, as we had recently celebrated the feast of the Good
Shepherd on 12th May – the fourth Sunday of Easter.
After we did our cleaning of the rooms and the
umpteen rounds of washing, we stepped over to our dear aunty and uncle’s place
nearby. I casually asked uncle Oswald (Ossie) Trinidade if he had a calendar to
spare. The words seemed hollow when I said them.
Uncle Ossie’s face lit up. He called to his wife Anne
to bring a calendar. I noticed it was a Don Bosco calendar for 2019. It was
just what I was looking for.
And then Uncle Ossie told me of the journey of the
calendar . . .
The Don Bosco calendar was posted from the shrine of
Mary Help of Christians, Matunga, Mumbai to a relative of Uncle Ossie in
Caranzalem, Goa. Since the person
staying in the flat is based abroad, he picked up the calendar when he was down
in Goa in January 2019, brought it back to Bombay, and gave it to uncle Ossie. He asked him to give it to
someone who needed it.
Uncle Ossie mentioned it to another relative in
Bombay who said she would pick it up. When she was reminded about the calendar
she said, ‘I don’t have a nail to put the calendar.’
So the calendar stayed with Uncle Ossie for six
months from January to May. ‘I wanted to give it to someone who was really
interested in taking the calendar,’ uncle said. Uncle’s hopes of someone
claiming the calendar began to dim as the months went rolling by.
Until we came
to Mumbai to claim it.
It is said that there is a blessing waiting for you.
But you have to claim it. You need to be worthy of the blessing. Or else it
will not come to you.
The journey of the calendar was a lesson in faith. As
the Good Shepherd says, ‘I know my own, and my own know me.’
Julius Caesar is believed to have introduced the 12
month calendar in 45 B.C.E i.e. 45 years before the birth of Christ. He also
made 1 January the start of the year. In the year 1582 Pope Gregory XIII
decreed that there should be a change in the Julian calendar on the basis of
lunar cycles. This is the calendar in use today.
But on holiday one lives
in a timeless zone. Time itself drips and dissolves into eternity.*
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*See Salvador Dali’s painting The Persistence of Memory (1931). Article published in Gomantak Times Weekender, Panaji, Goa on Sunday, 26th May 2019.
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