Happy New Year!

As I recollect my earliest new year celebrations, I remember my mother taking 'head bath', it being a 'nalla naal' (auspicious day) equivalent to any of the countless Hindu festivals. Of course she used to wash her hair for 'varushapirappu' as well as 'mathapirappu' (new month). People would come to our house to wish my father a happy new year-with fruits, sweets and gifts-a custom carried over from the British Raj days when government officials were greeted with gifts on the first day of the New Year. My mother had bought a big coffee vessel just to keep hot coffee to serve all the visitors coffee on this day.

The season would be pleasant with just a nip in the air (as it is now) and the trees would look like they had been washed and waxed, as winter follows the rains in our state. 'December' flowers would be on girls' hair and school-going children would be enjoying the last of their winter vacation, the schools being reopened mostly on 2nd or 3rd January after a fortnight of Half-Yearly holidays including Christmas and New Year. We would have returned from our grandparents' place by then. On very rare occasions, we would have stayed back to celebrate Pongal festival.

With the promise of another bout of holidays for Pongal festival, returning to school would not be as boring as after the shorter Quarterly exam holidays in September. We were contented and happy on this day. The fad of new year resolutions had not caught on. Nor were we old enough to analyse the bygone year's merits and demerits. The new year brought no more challenges or expectations other than having to remember to put the correct number in the year's column when we wrote the date in our school notebooks!