| 3rd Annual Konkan Fruit Fest, Goa - May 6-8, 2005 |
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| Today's Events include Fruit Carving - Decor - Watermelon eating |
| Fancy Dress. Check out http://konkanfruit.swiki.net | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The year was 1665. The Great Plague was sweeping through Europe. They didn't have vacuum cleaners then, so sweeping was still considered cool.
Thousands were dying. Cats were feeding on diseased dead rats and dying.Dogs were feeding on these diseased dead cats and dying. These dead cats and dogs were piled up in huge heaps at the side of the road to localise the contamination. When it rained heavily the dead bodies of the cats and dogs used to float in the gutters and people used to say, "It's raining cats and dogs!". All this has absolutely nothing to do with the Goan legend that follows but it sure is a great way to start a story. Or is it?
Damodar Naik had no male heir. He had no hair either but that is irrelevant to this story. Or maybe it is. Damodar was one of seven brothers and four sisters. Remember this was the 17th century and families were big, as survival was tough. Female infanticide had not yet been thought up but it was not uncommon for fathers to kill their grown-up daughters if they were particularly ugly and huge dowries were being demanded - even though the prospective groom was even uglier.
Damodar had four good looking daughters but no son. Every morning he cursed his wife Mogrem for not begetting him a son. "Why don't you beget me a son?", he would wail every morning. Mogrem would just continue sweeping the floor in bewilderment. She didn't understand English. She was fed up with the wailing, and the sex. Damodar would sit in the small shed by his fields everyday, smoking his beedies, and ask passing by fathers of sons for the secret of their success. These cruel men would see the desperation in Damodar's eyes and suggest to him the most arcane sex postures, weird herbal concoctions and chants for ensuring a male progeny. All of these Damodar tried on, or with, Mogrem, to no avail.
One early morning as Damodar was going off to water his fields he came across a seer. "Hey seer. What do you see?", asked Damodar thinking himself very witty. The seer wasn't in a particularly good mood that morning as had got off on the wrong side of his bed and stepped on a rusty nail (please note that it is a myth that Hindu holy men sleep on beds of nails). The seer thought "Let's teach this smart alec a lesson". "What is you username and password?", he asked. Quite befuddled our Damodar replied "Damodar Naik, spelt with a 'i' and not a 'y'". Damodar didn't know what was the relevance of this but had heard his paternal uncle saying it and had adopted the phrase as it sounded quite profound. Many centuries later whether you were a Naik or Nayak would be as important as whether you wore Nike, Puma or Bata but at that time designer footwear was still the domain of the lower castes.
"You are the Damodar of the four daughters and no son?", said the seer.
"Holy mackerel!", thought Damodar, "Is there anyone who doesn't know my situation? Goa sure is a small place". The last sentence was also a phrase he had appropriated from his paternal uncle who was quite a bundle of phrases as you can well imagine.
"The grass is always greener on the other side", said the seer with his best seer-like attitude. "Thy neighbour's rose she blooms much better than that of thou!"
"Oh! Quit the cliches already and tell me what you actually mean. I've bought the T-shirt on these mysterious sayings."
The seer by now had decided that he better attend to his sore foot and without any further explanation just hobbled off.
Damodar pondered what the seer had told him the whole day as he watered his fields and fed his cattle and did all the typical 17th century things that Goan men did. In the evening as he watched Mogrem prepare the chappatis for him he asked her "What do you think the seer meant by that and repeated what the seer had said. "The grass is always greener on the other side. Thy neighbour's rose she blooms much better than that of thou! Whaddya make of that?".
Mogrem just shrugged. Let us not forget she couldn't understand English. But the name "Rose" did spark of a bit of recognition in Mogrem's eyes and gave Damodar the look which said, in any language, "Let me so much as even catch you looking at Rose and you will wish you were never born!"
You see Rose was the next door neighbour's nubile twenty two year daughter. The neighbours had converted to Christianity a few decades back and had already started pretending they did not know Konkani and only spoke Portuguese - with the most atrocious accents. They dressed in the latest Western styles which at that time were very pre-Maria Antionesque. It was the rage in Europe then to wear tight corsets that accentuated the hips and breasts. When Rose walked past Damodar's house he would cast her appreciative looks. But Damodar was a devoted husband and had never had even half a lustful thought about Rose. So Mogrem's look was totally unwarranted.
That whole night Damodar tossed and turned trying to figure what the seer was trying to tell him. In the early morning Mogrem could have it no more. "Stop tossing and turning" she said to Damodar. So Damodar went out to do the morning puja at the tulsi outside his house but it was much too early.
He decided to take a walk around the neighborhood. Not once did it strike him that his Konkani speaking wife had just spoken an entire English phrase.
As Damodar walked around before the dawn broke he noticed that the rose plants in his neighbour's garden were in full bloom, whereas the asters in his garden looked pretty pale in comparison. Then it struck him, "This must be what the seer was suggesting". He looked around surreptitiously if he was being watched and then with quick darting movement reached over the neighbour's wall and grabbed a few freshly bloomed roses and shoved them into the plastic bag he always carried on his person - thus being extremely environmentally unfriendly long before being environmentally friendly even became fashionable.
These roses he then took to his tulsi and did his puja. Mogrem walked out at this very moment and saw him holding the neighbour's roses and doing his puja and almost had a fit.
"What do you think you're doing?"
"Using the neighbour's roses"
"Why can't we have our own?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Our own rose garden!"
"I never promised you a rose garden!"
"Along with the sunshine there's gotta be a little rain sometimes", so saying Mogrem grabbed Damodar by the elbow and they did a splendidly choreographed Hindi song and dance around the neighbourhood joined by all the village folks who had suddenly learnt the art of dancing in perfect unison. Mogrem went through twenty costume changes in seven minutes. The skies opened up and it started drizzling. Mogrem's semitransparent sari clung sexily to her wet skin. Suddenly they were alone. They looked at each other passionately. Neither said a word. Neither had even noticed that the only-Konkani speaking Mogrem could now speak English and sing in Hindi with a voice amazingly similar to her cousin from the neighbouring village of Mangueshi.
No words needed to be spoken though. The desire was obvious in their eyes. As dawn was breaking their passion was awakening. It does sound corny but it rhymes. "Will you?" he asked. "Well if the scene and the script demands it, I don't see what's wrong with flaunting what you have", replied Mogrem. They went into their hut.
Well to cut a long legend short Mogrem conceived that day and nine months later delivered a baby boy. Finally Damodar had a male heir. His joy knew no bounds. But his budget did and so he had a small party with recorded music only and home catering. And hence till date some Goan Hindus rob flowers early in the morning.
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