Nostalgia and Beyond
By Savia Viegas
BOOK REVIEW: Dominic's Goa: A nostalgic romp through a bygone era: Abbe
Faria Productions: Panjim: 2007: Rs 350
A yearning for what was or went before does different things to different
people. It made Shah Jahan build the Taj Mahal to commemorate the death of
his beloved queen Mumtaz Mahal. The dethroned monarch yearned for a glimpse
of his dearly loved edifice when held prisoner at the Khas Mahal, but had to
be content with a distant reflection of the Taj Mahal across the Yamuna
river in a little mirror embedded in the wall.
Nostalgia has made Dominic Fernandes an Anjunian, now working as
advisor-cum-chief registrar of Saudi Aramco in Dharan, to burrow into his
archive of memories to regurgitate Dominic's Goa: a nostalgic romp through a
bygone era. This book affords a delightful read. The author admits that this
is just a fraction of the narrations he has penned and more is yet to come.
These candid outpourings take us to Anjuna, his village and to Goa, the land
of his birth, and the unspoilt childhood it gave him. It is also the land
that fills him now with longing as he lives in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,
secure no doubt but its topography, its desert light, its modernity and the
minimalist vegetation only make him dig into his past to retrieve a cache of
dense memories layered with a lush spread of a way of life which he can call
'goenkarponn'. The village of his childhood and the land of his dreams are
morphing, changing, its pristine dells which look like garbage pits, its
hillsides sore with shanties that defy planning but get converted hastily
into a 'votebank' opportunity. Coastal land and sand dunes have turned to
tawdry colonias and sand dunes to glass.
Dominic retrieves the archive of his past with honesty to the last detail
engraving like a meticulous sculptor subaltern detail upon detail 'of a Goa
he knew' to be able 'to inform his readers of what life was in Goa.' and
encase in their mind and hearts the most beautiful and pristine memories of
a long ago, which can perhaps be visited only through memoirs such as the
book under review. Dominic's book does just that while flaneur- like he
inhabits the world of his childhood, almost becomes child again and
painstakingly creates typologies, retrieves vignettes of memory to bring
alive not only his own childhood but an era of Goa that is now past and can
be relived only in nostalgia. Those bylanes have exited and been silenced by
time.
http://www.goanet.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=852
A very vital contribution through this book is that it relives subaltern
native memories. A malady endemic in Goan writing in English is the
valorization of its elitism, what one can describe best as the deep but
vacuous sigh of the Bhatkars. 'O for a time when tomatoes were a paise a
kilogram' such nostalgic lines are legion in the writings: we become more
Portuguese than we were, more European than we ever could have been. This in
turn feeds a contemporary media fallacy. Friends, artists and photographers
often talk of Goan architectural heritage as 'Portuguese houses'. The
tourism industry touts the same logic. Dominic work is more important than
it seems for it opens up Goa's hitherto unexplored West Asia vein and by a
plethora of seemingly simple details bares open the cultural nuances of how
'bassurkars' were received.
The Goan worker braving the alien environments of equatorial forests of
Africa or the bellies of the oceans, or the hot deserts of Arabia has been
an 'othered' entity not withstanding the fact that his/her toil in alien
environments has brought home the economic remittances that have partially
allowed Goa to don its mantle of prosperity. Dominic's book weaves together
these tendrils of memory to give the Bassurkar or Bomboikar his place in
history. The pain of absence held together by the slender link of occasional
letters, the network of departing and arriving workers who helped enchain
and keep alive family ties. The return of the Bassurkar weighed with the
privations of life in 'tents in scorching heat' yet glossed over with
gabardine pants, terelyne shirts roamer, brand wristwatch, gold bracelet,
rayban glasses and 555 cigarettes drew the critical eye of the Goan elite
till these early forays paved the way for greater job opportunities in the
Gulf. Dominic's work provides rich Braudelian details for writing working
class histories.
Those of us who have grown up on home turf like me will identify with the
cultural imagery of a Goa now past of memories sweet but excised to a large
extent from reality. The abundant splattering of konkoni phrases comes as a
rich offering for one realizes that to awake this 'kundalini' of memory it
is best done by being true to one's language and cultural expression. Who
does not remember the first bye- bye to Goa on Panjim jetty, the many knots
of sea travel and the " Vonk vonk and zav tonk' experience or the return
journey when you keep asking your soul, "Agbot kednam Goeam pavteli" or the
long surreal journey on the meter gauge accompanied by the smells of
mangoes, jackfruits, chourisam and fenim.
For those of us who have decided to anchor our ties with the land still
remember the morning alarms of neighbourhood cockerels or the whine of the
pulley which Dominic describes as natural sounds and rhythms: the human
heartbeat, the song of birds, the rustling of the wind, the thunder and the
sound of the rain, the dripping of water in a cave, the crackle of the fire
or the sound of waves breaking on the beach. These have unfortunately been
'othered' today by the whirr of mixer grinders, washing machines, the
idiot-box or in extended environments by the zip of noisy motorbikes or
recklessly driven cars. I read somewhere that Goa is among the States with
the highest number of road accidents given its land-man ratio. Goans are bad
drivers and the situation is exacerbated by their big cars and Goa's narrow,
winding roads.
Dominic's boyhood romps hunting monitor lizard hunts, the eating of the
forbidden 'kanntam' and 'churnam' and 'poddkovam', the guava forays into the
neighbour's yard, the sin of stolen coconuts easily assuaged with the padre's
own logic, the sighting of an occasional 'paklo' quarantined by native logic
and the long penitent visits to the holy places of Old Goa and the culinary
improvisations that allowed families to stay overnight and cook in the
cathedral precincts offer vignettes of the socio-religious history of Goa.
http://www.goanet.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=852
In the final years of colonialism and in post liberation Goa the rural
economy yet in its feudal slumber held the village in its pristine siesta.
This sylvan monotony was punctured occasionally by the entry of the person
who sold the 'askrut' and was called the 'askrutkar' like Satyajit Ray's
mithaiwala. He became for children of Dominic's generation the ice-candy man
who introduced them to the range of colours and the concept of ice, and the
visit to the ice factory that familiarized them to the principles of
freezing. The askrutkar brought ice to Anjuna.
Dominic recounts the simple pleasures of downing 'limbu' soda stirred at a
speed whilst simultaneously adding salt and sugar. The world of the radio
and the pranks with church bells, which offered an opportunity to every
village boy to broadcast his prank. Slowly the book moves on to adolescent
and adult anecdotes like the fiery waters bred in village tills and downed
with the murmur of 'the Lord's name on your lips' whichever way the eulogy
was phrased. As Dominic has rightly stated "the good old feni is a drink
that cheered young and old alike."
Growing up in a village in the last decade of colonial or post liberation
Goa was a long wound sequence from Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali. A life
marked by seasons punctuated by an occasional 'gaddekar' making it to the
village. He allowed its children to listen to his tales and through his
narrations prism views of the world.
Portuguese was spoken by the 'bhattkars' and Dominic's book dispels the myth
of the universality of Portuguese-speaking Goans. His memories are in
konkani and his mind archives material in that blessed language. Who cares
in what script it is written! That is the pre-occupation of an idle,
opportunistic and dreamless politician. It is the imagery, metaphors, and
the literary richness of the language that matter. You can cache it in any
script. The years of Dominic's growing up were also the years in which the
mother tongue was heavily disenfranchised. In school you got caned or fined
or were kept kneeling for speaking in konkani. It was a naïve method
introduced to make students better English speakers but only ended up
depriving the mother-tongue of its rightful place and esteem in our society.
True, when growing up there was beauty in the landscape and in the houses
and in the churches and the people but there was cruelty for high paying
jobs were few and far between. The politicians had failed to match standard
of living with salaries. It was time to pack your bags and seek another
destination to work. Now older, greyer Dominic returns with his offering of
memories of his own past which he knows he can visit only in his writings
which were hitherto relegated to 'cyberia' but now have been made more
tangible in a book form.
The book comes at a time when Goa -- tramped upon by hippies in the sixties
and seventies, and in the more recent past by the mafiosos, the
Delhiwallas -- could be sitting on the brink of an ecological nightmare.
There are also those who make their voices heard over the question of
illegal immigrants the Maharashtrians and the Kannadigas. He beholds this
morphed image with a great deal of anxiety but without bitterness. They came
here for the same reasons that Dominic went someplace else. Labour inflows
have always had porous boundaries. Homelands don't wear a mask of nettles
and recede into forest so that its antique possessors could return, cut the
nettles to be able to recurate memories of their old past?
I have lived in the matchbox in Mumbai city, there are several other Goan
who people the attics of the world carrying a picture post card memory of
their Goa- It is the sheer economics that drives Goans to another
destination. "When I can afford, Mae, I will come and look after the
properties in Goa but now I have to earn." Every year my uncle wrote the
same thing and my Avo died with that hope, and finally he died before he
could return.
What kind of fire is it then, this nostalgia of ours, which breaks out like
encrusted lava?
It is a purifying fire that tells us its plough back time.
"Don't be a dreamer, a bloody fool," my mother says when I tell her I wish
to return, "others have tried it before you and burnt out."
The 'sumbacho dhorio' that kept Dominic's ties with his homeland alive were
language the memory of the old life. These were the cookies that got
activated once in a while and brought in the rush of adrenalin.
Here too the landscape of what once was has altered. Way back in the 1980s
politicians led a language agitation had immobilized transport and indeed
life. Young kids in the village would merrily climb electric and telegraph
poles and bring them down as if they were felling bamboos. They were
fighting for recognition for language. In the thick of this I remember
walking from Carmona to Varca and taking the canoe then on to get to
Chinchinim Navelim and walking to Margao with my year-old son strapped to my
back.
Two decades later you see the mess that the unplanned introduction of
Konkani has left the Goan schools in. Teachers and students had to be
trained in Konkani and English was introduced as a second language. English
is important in a globalised world and so is the mother tongue and so is
language diversity. No matter what the script Antruzi, Saxtti, Bardesi all
have to live and grow. So why not encourage younger people to think and
write rather than complicating the issue over standardization.
Just the other day sipping a acidic orange juice under the scrutiny of a
glassy eyed manager in a deserted Marliz café, my ears picked up the most
powerful and beautiful phrases of Konkani from a speaker two chairs away. I
moved closer and began to listen. It was a tiatrist in conversion with a
friend. Noticing my obvious interest he tried his theatrics. "Women find me
attractive nowadays" he told his friend twirling is moustache. "It's not
your looks but the richness of your language." Only the language of a
tiatrist could have such power to make people move chairs and listen. It is
here that the richness of the language has grown.
Dominic's book teaches us many lessons. Goa is a state whose main strength
is its villages. Let us restore the village. We need libraries, community
centres, good schools, and hobby centres for young children. After the
computer revolution, a number of Indians have come back to their villages in
Uttar Pradesh and Punjab and started creating infrastructure. Faiz Ahmed
Faiz wrote in a poem: 'Let your pallau become your parcham.' In the same
vein, ball up your nostalgia into a fist so that it can torpedo back to the
village of your origin, providing it the infrastructure, and living beyond
longing. (ENDS)
http://www.goanet.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=852
Goanet A&E
http://www.goanet.org
