How a May prayer ritual came to tie together the Catholic community in Bombay's Bandra suburb

It is May, and last night my mother reminded me on the phone from Bandra that it is rosary month. Every evening, as the temperature falls and the sea breeze dries some of the summer sweat, Catholics in the neighbourhood gather at roadside shrines and crosses and in the compounds of small apartment buildings and churches to say, as a community, a series of prayers to Mary, mother of Jesus. This is a far cry from the hip restaurants and shops so commonly associated with the new Bandra. But Bandra has its own reasons that reason can’t understand, some of them having to do with being Catholic, so we also say rosaries.

Many of the roadside shrines and crosses that dot Bandra’s villages date from the years of the Bombay plague, between 1896 and 1906. They were built in thanks for protection from disease. Others have existed from earlier, and were built for protection against the evil believed to be lurking in certain paths running through the fields that are now covered with buildings.

Whatever their origins, the shrines became centres for community prayer, including the rosary. As the native Catholics of Bandra, who call themselves East Indians, were joined by migrants from Goa and Mangalore, particularly after the advent of town planning and the region’s incorporation into the Greater Bombay area in the 1950s, Bandra’s rosary traditions swelled. Goan Catholics, for one, had carried rosary traditions around the Indian Ocean during their centuries of seafaring, clinging to rosary beads as a certain practice in an unpredictable life.

Transplanted to the bustling seaport of Bombay, these traditions found natural setting in Goan kudds, the dormitory-style spaces in which male migrants found shelter and community, even before Goan families made the city their home. The kudd dwellers were obliged to attend community rosaries at a fixed time in the evening, praying before an altar that was, in many cases, the only adornment in a large rough-and-ready room, furnished with only the trunks of its inhabitants.

Daily devotions

During my childhood in Bandra in the 1980s, we got good training for community rosaries at home, because of my Goan grandparents, who were sticklers about them. It was compulsory to sit with the family every evening around 8 pm, rosary beads in hand, to get out the requisite number of Our Fathers and Hail Marys, commemorating significant events in the life of Mary, followed by the Litany, a series of titles honouring her.

Games had to stop, studies had to be postponed, and if surprise visitors were Catholic, they were obliged to join in. The idea was to take the problems and triumphs of the day to Mary, though 15 minutes of sitting still was an effort for small children.

The rosary beads did have some allure for fidgety children, particularly the fake crystal rosary beads from Don Bosco’s Shrine in Matunga, which beat out the glow-in-the-dark rosaries, the rosary rings, or the blessed wooden rosaries from Rome or Jerusalem.

The Litany of Mary’s titles also held much scope for imagination. “Mother inviolate” suggested that Our Lady was wearing a particularly fetching lavender frock, and “Tower of David”, “Tower of Ivory” or the “Ark of Covenant” were quite inexplicable alongside the rest of the titles, which were variations on Mother-Virgin-Queen themes. The response to each title in the Litany, “Pray for us”, frequently became in Bandra a two-syllable condensed version that sounded a lot like “Wafers”, as if it were an invocation of Blue Circle, our favoured supplier of potato or banana chips.

Most, if not all, Catholic families in Bandra had similar daily devotions, but mine definitely took its rosaries very seriously. In fact, in the early 1960s, my grandfather, Papa Lauriano Mendonca, decided to express his devotion to Mary by presenting Mount Mary’s Basilica in Bandra with a set of eight enormous rosaries to decorate the church building. For this, he commissioned the crafting skills of Mr Carvalho from Ferrao’s, a hat shop in Marine Lines, a neighbourhood where my and many other Goan families in Bombay had lived for years before moving to Bandra. Much appreciated at Mount Mary’s, the rosaries swung overhead from the choir-loft until a few years ago. These beads, however, weren’t crystal or wood, or even glow-in-the-dark, like the rosaries we used at home. They were a delightful and clever make-do of painted Ping-Pong balls.

Social experience

The greatest sense of how the rosary was so much a part of family life came when we visited friends and relations. As the last bit of the rosary was reached, there were prayers tacked on as per individual taste and sets of Our Fathers, Hail Marys, and Glory Be-s were said for family specific reasons, such as dear departed ancestors and relations. These structures tended to be unvarying within families, but they were perplexing for outsiders.

The day my parents suddenly added a prayer to the Sacred Heart, after years of not changing anything, I was so shocked it felt like they had moved around all the furniture in the house and put the piano in the kitchen. And the day my mother added a set of Our Fathers for Nana Patricia deSouza, who had died the night before, I cried unabashedly. I had lost all belief in “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end”.

Community rosaries were always a much more social experience. Getting the community rosary in our building meant fetching a plaster statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, two candle stands with glass covers and a tablecloth, and setting up an altar on an old wooden table. Somebody would go to Bandra bazaar in the day to pick up a fresh garland of jasmine or magnolia for the statue. Lighting the candles was possible only through divine intervention, given the strong breeze that blew through the coconut trees in our building compound, and as people waited, they caught up on the day’s news and opinions with each other.

During the 15-minute prayer session, the adults were, of course, busy praying that any litigation or disputes involving our cooperative housing society would be sorted out soon. We children meanwhile watched the candles, with the singular aim of getting to blow them out at the end. On occasion, this was startlingly dramatic – such as the time a sudden gust of wind blew the tablecloth upwards, so that it made contact with a candle and caught fire. As we stared, transfixed, Mrs Colaco strode forward purposefully and swatted out the fire, missing not a beat of her Hail Mary. On more predictable days, the drama was in who would race forward fastest, pull off the glass candle shades, and blow the candles out.

Almost as important were the boiled chickpeas and cold drink served on the last days of May and October, in celebration of the end of the community rosaries for these two months dedicated to them.

While everyone else chatted amicably, we children trawled the auntie line-up, taking handfuls of channa, noting who had added the most coconut, pulling faces at any lack of sugar in the cold drink, and eventually deciding which auntie was to be looked upon most favourably for the rest of the year because of her generosity and culinary talents. This, however, remained secondary, probably because it was a thrill of just two days, whereas we got 60 days a year to compete over the candles.

Changing faith

In the new Bandra of the 2000s, it’s hard to imagine things are quite the same as they were in my childhood 25 years ago. Community rosaries do remain a regular practice in the Catholic cooperative housing societies in the neighbourhood. These societies were all formed and registered pre-Independence at a time when membership, and therefore apartment ownership, could be restricted on the basis of religion, and they hold fast to that identity in a neighbourhood that has changed bewilderingly since the late 1990s.

The community rosary is a public performance of that Catholic identity as much as it is an act of faith and of neighbourly socialising.

But even in Catholic societies, few people have the time anymore for a rosary said at a fixed time, as work hours become longer and longer, and not that many parents insist that their children should go. There are still channa and cold drink at the end of May and again at the end of October, but they have lost their charm for a generation brought up with more aspirational tastes and a plenitude of treats.

Unlike Bandra’s secularised celebration of Christmas or pan-religious veneration of Our Lady of the Mount, the community rosary cannot quite cross boundaries. In the rapidly-growing, simultaneously gentrifying and degenerating Bandra, where wealth is paramount, the community rosary is, it’s on the fringes of daily life for many, Catholics included. The stalwarts who continue the practice would probably disagree, as it remains central to their world. But it is undeniable that the community rosary no longer holds the same position it did a quarter century ago in Bandra, which now encompasses burgeoning worlds very far removed from it. As uneasy as I always am about community based on religious identity and practice, I frequently wonder if that’s better than nothing and if selectiveness is unavoidable in building solidarity – and hope that in the new Bandra we all do find community somewhere.

Wafers, O Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.