Melvyn Misquita whose project this is, is one of the nicest individuals you could ever meet. In that, he takes after his father the late Valentine (Valu) Misquita from the house near the Tinto in Aldona. The family lived for many years in Dukhan the main oilfields area of Qatar peninsula. Valu was a long time employee of the State’s oil company where I first met him.
Melvyn in my opinion has done tremendous field word to create this project. This is not a research compilation sitting in some musty library in Goa, or on a laptop at home digging into some archives of long forgotten sources. This is hands on, walk-on-the ground, dealing with clueless people, travel from one end of Goa to the other kind of research where you get your hands greased and your brains all scattered. The result is a smooth weaving of all that hard work. He writes about Goa’s critical human resource, its musicians. The simple, mostly poor men as dedicated to their art as the craftsmen in rural India who worked magic with their hands. What if the Taj Mahal had not been built by an Emperor and lay all forgotten in a corner of the Rajasthan desert despite being a marvellous edifice of the kind that awes all kinds of people who come to see it. These Goan musicians may to even us Goans, not have created a musical Taj Mahal but they did create music that brings joy unfailingly to the soul and to the wide Diaspora a tingling that strikes whenever Goan music chords are heard. A wistfulness of home. Saudade. They were almost silent, almost unknown men except to those who knew them, heard them or heard of them. They worked in a metaphorical dark room in a dark place that Goa once was. Now with his work, Melvyn has turned a beacon of light on who they were and what they did and I hope his pioneering work of pushing them forward will make them as well known in the Goan world as some musicians whose names are already familiar to us. When I asked Melvyn if we could hear the music of these men, he wrote: “At this point in time, no. I do hope to get some trained musicians to read the score sheets of the original music played by the band and try and get them to perform the music, which can then be recorded into an audio file. For now, I just wanted to bring out this story which remained hidden for seven decades”. Work well done, Melvyn. Roland. Toronto.
