by Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca (Calgary, Canada)
I was born and raised in a Bene Israeli Jewish family in Bombay, India. The mezuzah on our door and the menorah on the shelf were to me the sweet and meaningful symbols of my Jewish identity. I lived with my paternal grandparents since the age of ten, and I loved raising my fingers to touch the mezuzah on the door of their home and bringing them in a kiss to my lips. The elders in my family explained that when I made that gesture, it meant that I was taking the name of God as I left the home and when I returned home safely. I felt protected and blessed. I didn’t know then that there was a scroll inside the mezuzah with the words of The Shema “Hear O Israel, The Lord is our God, the Lord is One,” a prayer I recited on waking each morning and going to bed at night. An aunt of mine sent me a mezuzah from Israel and even my husband who is not Jewish, never leaves the home or returns home without kissing the mezuzah.
On that fateful Saturday in October, I happened to turn on the TV and watched in horror as a young girl, with her arms waving frantically, was calling out for help sitting sandwiched between two masked men on a motorcycle taking her away to where I had no idea at the time. They were shouting the name of their God, a chant familiar to me as there was a mosque just a few steps from my grandmother’s home in Bombay. I had grown up listening to the muezzin’s call to prayer five times a day over the loudspeaker. The neighborhood had Muslim, Christian, Parsi and Jewish families living side by side in peace and harmony. At home we were taught respect for the customs and traditions of each of the different faiths and actually took part in their celebrations.
Continuing to watch the TV, I soon learned what had taken place and that the young girl was at a dance festival and was being taken hostage. In Gaza and in some Muslim countries as the news of the tragic events of the day began pouring in, I watched people in the streets rejoicing, chanting the name of their God. Soon after I saw a clip of a crowd of people marching towards the Opera House in Australia, with banners reading “Kill the Jews!!! Gas the Jews!!!” My mind at once went back to the Holocaust. The murder of six million Jews was not enough for them. The real aim of the protestors was the annihilation of the Jews, not their support of the Palestinian people.
In India, growing up in the sixties, nobody ever mentioned the Holocaust and there never was any talk about what was happening on such a large scale to the Jewish people in Europe. The Indian Jews were free from persecution and blended in completely with the local population of India, the majority of whom are Hindu. I entered college in my mid-teens into the Arts stream, and along with other subjects like Logic and Economics, World History was also taught. I cannot recall a single mention of the Holocaust in our textbooks. Only much later, I watched a film on the Diary of Anne Frank, and a movie called Schindler’s List. In fact, the movie had such a powerful impact on me that I watched it twice, weeping throughout the film. I prayed that there would be more ‘Schindlers’ in the world. My mother always spoke about ‘the basic goodness of mankind.’ I believed there were as many good people in the world as there were who brought harm to others.
In the seventies, a discotheque called Blow Up was located in the basement of the Taj Mahal Hotel. That name would be considered taboo in the context of today’s world. Many of my cousins were musicians and played in the bands at the disco. I loved music and loved to dance, often dancing the night away till the early hours of the morning. The waiters would toggle the lights on and off in quick succession, to signal us to leave. A cousin of mine still remembers that I did not sit out a single dance! The next morning in college, I attended the first lecture of the day with the green eyeshadow still prominently showing up on my eyelids. Those days we didn’t have access to make up remover and the soap we used did not do a decent job!
The murder of so many innocent young people at the Dance festival touched a deep nerve in me. I had danced freely and without fear, at so many music festivals, it was beyond belief what I was seeing. My love of dance will forever be colored by the tragic scenes playing out on the TV screen… I was contorted, frozen in that moment, unable to move, let alone dance.
All I could do was pray…
In a career spanning over four decades, Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca has taught English in Indian colleges, AP English in an International School nestled in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains in India, and French and Spanish in private schools in Canada. Her poems are featured in various journals and anthologies, including the Sahitya Akademi Journal Of Indian Literature, the three issues of the Yearbooks of Indian Poetry in English, Verse-Virtual, The Madras Courier, and the Lothlorien Poetry Journal, among others. Kavita has authored two collections of poetry, Family Sunday and Other Poems and Light of The Sabbath. Her poem ‘How To Light Up a Poem,’ was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2020. Her poems celebrate Bombay, the city of her birth, Nature, and her Bene Israel Indian Jewish heritage. She is the daughter of the late poet Nissim Ezekiel. She currently resides in Calgary, Canada.
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