A Muggu Moment

This is not a glamorous blip, but one that brings on simple and satisfying thoughts. It shows the room next to mine, which I have colonized for the past year or so for various purposes. My gorgeous kitty Laura Earle spent several months cooped up in this room when she and her Mom were in my foster care. Now I use it to watch films on DVD and eat.

This past Sunday I made the horrible error of forgetting to attend the local celebration of Charles Dickens' 200th birthday at the monument to him that's just around the corner. I feel awful about it because we're all very proud of that statue hereabouts. I would have seen many friends there, got a better blip, and had a grand time.

As a way of relaxing and killing daytime hours and save energy for upcoming night work, I watched the entire 5-hour BBC series Cranford, based on five of Elizabeth Gaskill's novels and set in the early 1840s in England. It was excellent throughout and often very funny. I've never read Gaskill for some reason, but I'd be inclined to do so now. In the film Mr. Dickens popped up briefly when a character glowingly recommended The Pickwick Papers to a skeptical neighbor.

One scene caught my attention, though I think most people would not notice it at all. One morning as people were on their way out to celebrate May Day, a woman decorated the front step, outside the door of a house, with swirling patterns of colored powders that she let fall from her fist. I said "Wow, muggulu!" Apparently the scene showed a practice that marked a special day only, but when I was a student in India I was fascinated seeing women early in the morning, sweeping in front of their doorways, and when the little area was all clean, they would make a symmetrical pattern in the spot outside the door in white powder. It would be either all curling lines or mostly such, as I recall. The pattern would very soon disappear as people walked on it, and they were like snowflakes --no two were alike.

I inquired as to what it was about, and was told that it was just an ornament that meant the floor had been cleaned and was fit to start the day. The noun was muggu, with muggulu as plural. It had nothing to do with religion. Some house with concrete steps had the same sort of pattern set in the cement.

But now I've done a little searching, and it turns out that the culture of the muggu is of South India only (I was in Andhra Pradesh), and it's not limited to doorsteps. I have no idea whether there is a connection between the indian practice and its occurance in Cranford, but I suppose there might be.

Here is a muggu that seems like the ones I remember.

This is a simple and quite satisfaction, to think about muggulu for the first time in decades by enjoying a fine story and having a blip-world to record my thoughts in.