Chp 501. Good Friday and Easter weekend

Hey everyone, hope you had a great weekend. Belated Easter wishes to all of you.

For us in Mumbai, it had been exactly a year since the whole “Tea with police” happened last year. It was on Good Friday last year that the Malabar PS and Zone II police officers came to our Mizo Good Friday Church service and delivered a speech, assuring all of us that the Mumbai police had not forsaken us.

This year, our Holy Week passed off without any such incidents.

It was great catching up with friends and meeting some of them after a really long time. Mumbai is a really big place and all of us are busy with our own agenda, hence community gatherings like these were the only times we get to meet up.

Most of us wore black on Good Friday, as a sign of mourning. Most of the women wore a mix of our traditional clothes and formal blouse.

There were quite a number of non-Mizo members who attended the Good Friday service too. The main sermon was delivered in English by our All Saints Church Pastor, Victor Johnson, and there was a Holy Communion on that day.

After the Church service, there was the usual tradition of meeting up at the Nimbu Paani stall to chat, while others like VaiVa went to pluck “maian” leaves from a roadside plant growing next to our Church, which is used as an ingredient in many of our Mizo cuisines. Basically three things – (1) People in Maharashtra aren’t aware that these leaves have culinary value, (2) We can’t find these being sold by any veggie vendor here, and (3) This means free food, lolz.

Since there was a choir practice after the Good Friday church service, to be performed on Easter, it was quite late by the time all of us left the Church premises. Here is a sneak preview of our Mumbai Mizo Association’s Wives Group practicing for their choir performance…

Bee, Babie, I and a few others then went to have dinner at Colaba. Since it was quite late, there weren’t any taxis near Hanging Garden, Malabar Hills, so we took a bus! It was my first long distance bus ride since I came to Mumbai! And boy it was hot as hell inside, but we somehow managed to have some fun in the bus…

We ate at Ling’s Pavilion, Colaba. We loved the place because of two main reasons - cheap alcohol and great ambience. In fact alcohol is cheaper there than at Gokul’s, another favorite Mizo hangout in Colaba.

The restaurant is run by an actual Chinese family, and their exquisite menu, especially the Pork dimpsums, Mongolian chicken, and bamboo cooked steamed rice are très excellent.

After that, we all went home.

Saturday – most Mizos living in Mumbai met up on Saturday to practice for their Easter choir performance, and also decorated Easter eggs with paints and sketches, meant to be distributed the next day. I couldn’t participate because work caught up and I spent the entire day working on our latest game release – Zaamly, a quiz based Android game where you are rewarded instantaneously with prepaid recharge on your mobile phone, a new instant gratification model of reward redemption.

Sunday – Easter! A joyous occasion for all most Christians. I’m striking out “all” because I’ve just learnt that Seventh Day Adventists don’t celebrate the Holy Week like other Catholics and Protestant denominations do. They believe in the resurrection of Christ but do not treat any particular Sunday to be Holy as such, they only observe the practices and faith of the early Christian church (Upon further “research” online, I discovered there are quite a number of other Christian denominations too that do not observe Good Friday, Easter Sunday or even Christmas due to their affiliation with Pagan rituals, but hey, let’s leave that discussion for another day)…

So… yeah, there we were on Easter, to celebrate the resurrection of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Not wanting to reach the venue late, I left home early, but I was one of the firsts to arrive…

Everybody immediately rushed to sit under the fan as you can see from the above photo, especially those of us braving the immense heat to wear a suit! :)

Our Easter service was indeed joyous, with our friends from TBZ (Thlarau Bo Zawngtute) camp gracing us with their presence and conducting a very interactive and physical “Praise & Worship” programme. This was followed by various choir performances, including the Mumbai Mizo kids group and Mumbai Mizo wives group…

A lot of photos were taken…

Was great meeting up with Fifi and family too.

Easter eggs and other refreshments were served, courtesy of Mrs. Maliani Band, in remembrance of her father who passed away a year ago…

Thara came all the way down from Surat to spend Easter with us. My first reaction on seeing him was to look around and see if my niece Eunice was in Mumbai too. He was as usual busy taking photos of everybody, even though he was a stranger and not a Mumbaikar, not even a part of our Mumbai Mizo Association. Man, he really had a lot of guts :)

A few of us Engineers discussing about the velocity and projectile trajectory of our Easter egg. And as is with any Engineering conference, all of us disagreed with one another, concluding that the our hypotheses did not have enough proof :P

More photo sessions…

After saying goodbye to others, a few of us then went to this really awesome place called “New York” where I watched the Arsenal - Hull City match on a big screen. Arsenal won 3-0.

This was an important match for us Gooners as we’ll be facing Hull City again this coming Saturday at the FA Cup final. It will also be our first silverware in 9 years.

“New York” was a really swell place, with cool music and many Happy Hours offers across their exhaustive bar menu. Definitely a place worth visiting again.

 Soon, we all went our separate ways.

I tried my best not to tell anybody about the next day because I didn’t want to celebrate or let others know… but when I reached home, my dear flatmate had this waiting for me!

…which was soon followed by this:

Much as I wanted to keep it a secret, I guess there’s no escaping… maybe I’ll update my blog with photos of what happened next in my next blog post. Until then, hope you all had an amazing weekend too. Take care and cheers!