WINTER QUILTS

Photo credit: Yogendra Pratap Singh
Memory tag: Quilt making as a metaphor for rare family gathering in winter in Santiniketan.

Quilts are not just warm winter covers! They tell stories, record memories of winters past and present. Quilts could be made of patchwork or embroidered. Grandmothers and mothers, often sentimentally collect scraps of material associated with special events. Others are collected for their beauty of design or color. These are then cut, based on a predesigned template to suit the pattern they will form on the finished quilt. Or quilts could be made of large stretches of silk or other fabric embroidered to tell a story and to hold the frivolous cotton fluff inside. Quilts are warm not only because they are good insulators   but the cotton inside has come from buds that burst with the sun’s warmth. If not collected, this frivolous cotton fluff carries the seeds to new destination for germination. No wonder, they are bursting with stories to tell when stuffed into the covers that make a quilt.

The fields are half winter stubble, half golden mustard flowers on bright green stalks. This season is no longer the winter of my discontent, for I have been healed by the perfect yellow moon, between the white and cream frangipani blossoms. Earlier in the evening, flocks of migrating teal and pintail ducks flew over our tea trays as we sat out in the verandah. In the short twilight as it grew darker, she lit an earthen lamp and joined her hands in prayer before the tulsi (balsam) plant. The sound of the conch drew me to where she stood to witness an ancient ritual of rekindling hope when darkness fell. The essence of prayer remains the same, ‘lead kindly light amidst the darkening gloom.’

These and other patterns weave themselves into the quilts women make in the cold winters, patterns of sunrise, of sunset, and of generations following one another. Of fun, fairs, frolic, new songs and old, in this season of Auld Lang Syne and new beginnings! So much to stitch together! The needles seem to have a will of their own. They no longer guide the thread along old established guide lines or grids. They veer to embroider a glistening purple sunbird, swinging upside down to drink sweet nectar from white hibiscus blossoms. Below the hibiscus wagtails and pipits play hopscotch on the lawn where families are gathered trying to reconnect lost threads. The fabric of life stretching from year to year, person to person, from life to life! Some of them had come together after a decade:  continuity after the discontinuity that death inevitably creates. Home seemed to come together once more!  Special holiday meals as even red vented bulbuls feed on   chrysanthemum petals!  A virtual bird panchayat seems to be discussing the year past. Did they get their special copies of new year editions , making hay out of the year gone by?

Time to metamorphose, imbibe spring magic, that might change somnolent caterpillars into butterflies. The quilt maker that made the quilt that covers me in winter is no longer with me. But these designs keep telling me, life begins anew every year!