In Puliyoorkurichi village in rural south India, the Christmas crib is never small. Every year the parish builds life-size figures out of fresh palm leaves and pongal grass: Joseph with a real beard, shepherds carrying actual lambs, and a Baby Jesus so delicate that mothers reach out to stroke its tiny fingers and forget to breathe. The work always begins on the first Sunday of Advent, and the only woman the parish trusts to weave the holy bodies is Roselet, forty years old, widowed seven years, hips still wide from the child she lost the same week her husband drowned in the Thamirabarani.
This year the priest asked her to take an assistant because the diocese wanted twenty-four brand-new figures, one unveiled every evening when the Angelus bell rings at six. The boy they sent was Antony, just eighteen, only son of the catechist, fresh from St. Xavier’s Higher Secondary with marks high enough for Chennai engineering college. His father declared that before city books he must learn “to shape God with his own hands.”
So every morning at four-thirty, while the village still slept under kadjan roofs, Roselet and Antony walked into the palmyra groves behind the church. December air in Tirunelveli is cool enough for a shawl, but the dew is heavy and the ground smells of wet earth and cow dung. She wore a plain violet cotton sari; he wore a white veshti folded to the knees, chest bare because boys believe cold makes men.
Day 1: The Lamb
She showed him how to strip the newest palm leaf without tearing the vein. Their fingers brushed. Nothing more.
Day 4: The Donkey
Under a single hurricane lamp, when she bent to tie the grass tail her pallu slipped. Antony saw the side of her breast, heavy, dark-nippled, moving free under the blouse. He grew so hard the veshti tented. She pretended not to notice.
Day 8: The Shepherd Boy
She guided his hands from behind. Her belly pressed against his back; heat bled through cotton. When the figure was finished she placed a piece of wet kalkandu sugar on his tongue with two fingers she had just sucked. He almost came untouched.
Day 12: The Angel
They climbed the cashew hill for the tallest palms. Dawn mist floated like incense. A thorn pricked her thumb; he took it in his mouth without thinking, sucking gently. She let him. That night she whispered, “Come to the weaving shed after rosary.”
He went. Moonlight striped her bare skin when she unwrapped her sari. No blouse tonight. Her breasts were fuller than he had dreamed, nipples the colour of tamarind paste. She knelt, freed his veshti, and took him slow, reverent, the way she tested palm strips for strength. He lasted seconds, spilling with a broken cry. She swallowed, wiped her lips, and said, “Tomorrow we make the body of Christ. You must learn control.”
Day 15–22: The Holy Family
Each dawn they worked faster because each night they loved longer. She taught him from behind while she bent over half-finished Joseph, breasts swaying. She taught him to lie on the grass and let her ride, hips circling cloves and cardamom into his skin. She taught him to use his tongue until she bit her palm to keep from screaming.
They gave the figures shameless detail: veins on Joseph’s forearms, the curve of Mary’s pregnant belly under real blue cloth, the tiny erect penis of the Infant, because in village cribs Baby Jesus is always naked and fully man, “so mothers remember.”
Day 23: Mary
Roselet stripped completely. “Today you copy me exactly.” She lay back on the gunny, legs open, and told him where to place each wet palm strip, how to mould breasts, the soft rise of the mound, the delicate folds between. When the palm-leaf Madonna was nearly done she pulled him down onto her real body and guided him inside with the same calm voice: “Slow… like you are weaving the thigh… press deeper… tie the knot there…”
He moved in her until the six o’clock bell rang. They came together, silently, her tears falling into his hair.
Christmas Eve
After Mass the whole village gathered. One by one the curtains were drawn. Gasps rose when they saw Mary: face serene, body so lifelike that old women crossed themselves and young men shifted in their lungis.
Antony stood beside Roselet at the back. No one noticed his hand resting on the exact curve of her hip where the palm-leaf Madonna’s hip curved. No one saw her fingers brush the front of his veshti, feeling him already hard again.
Later, when fireworks cracked over the tamarind trees, they slipped away to the shed one final time. She locked the door, spread the last clean gunny sack, and lay down.
“Tomorrow you go to Chennai,” she said. “Tonight you leave something here that is forever mine.”
He entered her gently, as if afraid the world would break. She wrapped her legs around his waist and whispered the only prayer she knew now: “Take and receive… all is yours…”
When he came deep inside her she held him until the roosters began and the first bell of Christmas morning rang clear across the fields.
Years later, when Antony became an engineer and married a city girl who never understood why he kept a small palm-leaf Virgin on his desk, he would still remember the smell of pongal grass and the taste of a widow’s tears on Christmas night.
And every December, in the Puliyoorkurichi crib, the palm-leaf Madonna still looks strangely alive, because a real woman once gave her body so a boy could learn to shape both God and love with the same trembling, dew-wet hands.
