Chasing Away Shadows

~ Deepam. Deepam. ~

My childhood Summers were spent mostly at my maternal grandmother’s home in Kerala. My Ammamma, my Mothermother, was brilliant, a self-educated soul who read without discrimination. Sharp-witted, insightful, funny, and loving, with little interest in cooking. She would delight in things of beauty, and my mother would secret away small presents that would thrill her. When Ammamma died, we found an almirah full of Avon hand-painted soaps with beautiful flowers on them. She had squirrelled them away, considering them too precious to ever use.

~ Deepam. Deepam. ~

Ammamma held strong religious beliefs and many superstitions. Children shouldn’t cry in the evening because it would bring out the evil eye. If they did, there was a complex ceremony of roasting dried red chilies and other whole spices, which would then be waved in circles in front of the crying child’s face while prayers were incanted. Of course, the crying child immediately stopped, because they’re instantly distracted with how delightful to be made a fuss of, what is that funny smelling stuff, what’s she muttering, is she praying? Perhaps, it really did ward off the evil eye too.

~ Deepam. Deepam. ~

Ammamma staunchly believed that if you handed money to someone through a doorway, you would be forever poor. That money would go out through the doorway, and the remainder of your wealth would obediently follow. She would actively demand that people step one side or the other of the door to conduct their business.

~ Deepam. Deepam. ~

I can’t count the number of times she scolded me for sitting on a threshold with my legs either side of the door. Kerala houses have framed doorways, and on a hot day, there’s nothing so satisfying as sitting on the wide frame of the doorway between the dining room and the garden outside, catching any passing breeze. In Ammamma’s eyes, this was irritatingly indecisive. “You cannot have each foot in a different boat!” she would shout in Malayalam, and the visual image of my feet in different canoes floating on a canal in the backwaters of Kerala, as I valiantly tried to stay upright and not do the splits, would have me in fits of giggles.

~ Deepam. Deepam. ~

The quietest, most precious of her superstitions though, involved light and shooing away the darkness. Every evening, as the sun went down, before a single electric light was turned on in the house, she would light an oil lamp and pace quietly through every room chanting deepam, deepam (light, light). It was a spiritual sweeping away of all the frightening terrors that lurk in darkness and shadow. Her call would ring in every room, and only after she had waved the lit oil lamp, the mystic broom of God, could the lightswitch be flicked on.

When I was there, it was my job. Reverently, silently, conscious of keeping my footfalls soft and cushioned, I would carry the lamp in my hands, my eyes darting between the oil threatening to spill over the lip of the lamp, and the floor ahead of me. I would chant my breathy deepam, imbuing it with as much gravitas and heartfelt wish to banish the unholy as I could. It is a memory of a stillness of spirit, a quiet prayer, edged with terrifying shadows, that I still find sanctuary in.

I don’t carry on that daily tradition, but in every house I’ve ever lived in, before we have spent a single night there, I have been sure to walk through the rooms, padding softly, lit oil lamp in hand, thinking of my Ammamma, and chanting deepam deepam.

The Summer Kitchen

My mother’s sister’s house in Jackson backed up to the junkyard where my Uncle Sam squeezed out what he could of a living during the Depression. Aunt Itkeh cooked three meals a day in the “summer kitchen,” a dark room, shaded from the relentless “fry an egg on the sidewalk” July and August heat of Michigan. She cooked for her six children, cooked for my mother, father and me who had moved in with her, and for any Detroit cousins who might be sent to visit in lieu of summer camp no one could afford in those days.

I remember sitting in that summer kitchen one stifling summer day, half dozing, lulled by the voices of the two sisters: laughing at wry jokes, complaining about their husbands, and always, about the lack of money.  At five, what could I know of their tsores? I had a feather bed on the floor to sleep in, enough food to keep my belly full, and cousins to play with. And I had the radio to bring in the world of a reality I couldn’t understand or of fantasies that fed my dreams.

When I raised my head from the linoleum-topped table, snapped awake, I whined, just a little. “’I’m hungry," I said.  Above me, yellow fly paper indolently twirled, studded with corpses of flies like black currants.

My Aunt itkeh looked up from the cabbage she was shredding for the soup that would feed us all that evening, and she said in Yiddish, “Mamele, how about some bread and milk?”

Where ever had I found the words to say, “I don’t want bread and milk. Only poor people eat bread and milk!"

I felt my mother’s shame. I can see my Aunt Itkeh now in her cotton housedress, her forehead glistening from the heat, the soup.  “Don’t ever say we are poor,” she told me.  Her Yiddish was clear, and I have never forgotten her words. “We are not poor,” she said. “Only people who have no hope are poor.”

Faye Moskowitz is the author of Peace in the House (David Godine, 2002); A Leak in the Heart (David Godine, 1985); Whoever Finds This: I Love You (David Godine, 1988); and And the Bridge is Love (Beacon Press, 1991; reissued in 2012 by Feminist Press), among many other volumes. Her columns poems, essays and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Moment Magazine, and the Jerusalem Post. A longtime professor of creative writing at George Washington University, she is the popular instructor behind Jewish Literature Live, a course underwritten by David Bruce Smith and named one of 17 "Hottest Seats in the Classroom" by Time magazine in 2013. She is the recipient of the Alice Goddard Douglas Award for Excellence and two PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards. Read more about her work here.