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India Portuguesa - A Moment in Time As the weather in Nepal turned cold in December, I decided to follow the sun and join several friends who had already moved to a beach on the Arabian Sea. I headed south beginning with a bus ride from Kathmandu to the Indian border post at Raxaul, over narrow cliff-side mountain roads without barriers, meeting careless and careening trucks covered in Hindu and Buddhist religious symbols, carrying goods and people in the opposite direction. I grabbed a bicycle rickshaw to carry my backpack and me over the border, and made a quick stop at the Indian customs shack lit with a single hurricane lamp fifty feet off the road down a dirt path. From there it was a short rickshaw ride to the Indian Railways station where I could catch a train headed south toward Bombay. One day and night in Bombay was enough to convince me to move along to my ultimate destination. The noise, dust, traffic, and crowds weighed on me after six weeks in Kathmandu, where at the time there were few cars and only the muted sounds of human voices combined with birds and the tinkling of tiny cymbals floating up from the temples. A night sleeping under the Gateway of India with rats as big as cats and perhaps a hundred homeless Indian people and assorted "freaks" didn't help either. It didn't exactly recall images of the grand event that occurred here in 1911. The Gateway of India was built to welcome King-Emperor George V and Queen Mary to the Raj. They rode in royal splendor through the Gateway on the back of a magnificently adorned elephant to be received by their Indian subjects. Early the next morning, I awoke and made my way with a now-forgotten sidekick to the docks where the ferry would leave for Panjim at ten a.m. It was a hot, sultry day with clear blue skies, the smell of the Arabian Sea, and Santana's Abraxas playing on someone's portable tape deck as we pulled out of the harbor and headed down the coast along the Western Ghats (the old mountain range along India's west coast). All of the young foreigners stayed on the covered deck of the ship all day and all night since it was cheap, rolling out their sleeping bags for added comfort. The next morning I woke up as soon as the sun came up, feeling a sharp rise in temperature, and noticed the engines of the ship suddenly becoming much quieter. I peered out over the railing as we turned into the estuary to see the red laterite banks of the Mandovi River with its forests of coconut palms lining the banks, and the ruins of the Aguada and Reis Magos Forts at the river's mouth. We coasted slowly upriver, docking at 7:30 in the morning near the old Portuguese Customs building at Panjim on the right bank. Panjim had been the seat of government of Portuguese India from 1759 until 1961. (The Indian government refers to it as "Panaji" on its maps, using the Marathi term. The locals still refer to it by its original Portuguese name.) It replaced Velha Goa (Old Goa), the first capitol a bit further upriver that had been captured from Yusuf Adil Shah, the Sultan of Bijapur, by Afonso de Albuquerque in 1510. The Portuguese Viceroy finally abandoned Velha Goa in the early 18th century for a suburb of Panjim after the port silted up and the population of the city had suffered one too many cholera epidemics. Panjim was painted in the bright and pastel colors of metropolitan Portuguese towns, especially yellows and blues, with banana and acacia trees growing next to the balcãos (balconies) of the two-story colonial houses. It looked every bit the part of a tumbledown, forgotten, rotting, tropical, colonial capital like something I vaguely imagined out of a Bogart movie. Eight years prior to my arrival, troops of the Republic of India under Prime Minister Nehru had massed on the eastern border of the Portuguese territory and overran the few bedraggled troops guarding the border post, proclaiming an end, after just two days of skirmishes, to the 450-year old Portuguese Empire in India. After a series of government-quelled anti-Portuguese riots in 1955, the Portuguese dictator Salazar ordered all rail links into India cut, and severely restricted an already limited access into and out of India by road. Therefore, most Goans and visitors to Goa entered the Territory by sea from Bombay, and Bombay became "The City" for Goans who left to find jobs or pursue education that was unavailable to them under the Portuguese dictator Salazar's rule. (Goans were considered full Portuguese citizens under the Empire, and maintain the right to Portuguese citizenship today.) Stepping off the boat in the quiet steamy morning, we stood around for a half an hour, eating a quick breakfast of South Indian idli (a dish made from rice and lentils) and chai (the sweet, hot milk-tea sold all over India) from a street-seller, before embarking by a raft-ferry across the Mandovi where we could catch a cheap bus to what seemed at the time to be the center of the international hippie universe, Calangute beach. As the bus with open, barred windows followed the narrow macadam road that wound around, over, and through the natural features of the hilly and palm-forested landscape, we passed through villages with beautiful old single-story colonial houses that abutted the road, covered in bougainvillea and shaded by palms and bananas, each with a porch (also called a balcão), and many with elegant, delicate, translucent seashell shutters. Occasionally, in the distance a brilliant white church façade could be seen above the deep green of the palm forest. People in Bardez taluka, the administrative district just north across the river from Panjim, were primarily Roman Catholic, and though completely Indian by descent, dressed in Western clothes that reminded me of bingo nights at the NCO Club in Orlando in 1955: women in sun-dresses wearing black pointed-toe flats, and men in pleated beige slacks with white shirts, and fedora hats. Hardly a sari to be seen! We alighted at the last stop: an abrupt end of the road at the beach in Calangute next to a couple of stores and a small café/restaurant. There were few people on the street. By now it was almost lunchtime and I was eager to try a local Goan dish. The waiter suggested that I try the "famous Goan pork vindaloo." This was to be my first and last taste of this local delight for reasons that will soon become apparent. A young Australian woman who I had met in Teheran and with whom I had traveled overland by bus, truck, and van from Iran to the Khyber Pass between Afghanistan and Pakistan, met me at the café and told me of a house not far away that had an available room. Because many Goans had joined the diaspora but still maintained ownership of their homes, there was plenty of space to be had, and the young foreigners had become a new and important source of income for those who remained behind. Calangute local working people who didn't rent space fished, marketed fish, or tended cashew and coconut palm plantations. My house was made of locally available materials: whitewashed and plastered red clay bricks, dried goat-dung floors, and a palm-frond roof. A well was located a short distance from the house, and the "facility" was a cement block with a square channel leading out to the rear of the block, covered on all sides by a mat of woven palm fronds. A hole was cut into the mat where the channel exited. There were no pipes of any kind, nor were they needed. Gangs of wild-looking hairy black pigs stood-in for plumbing. They came running anytime of the day or night when they heard a person scrape the folding palm mat screen at the front of the loo, snorting and slurping at the top of their lungs, including mom, dad, grandma, and the kids. The house itself was very simple. It had two charpoys, Indian beds of wooden frames, ropes as support, and a thin mattress, but unlike charpoys in the rest of India, these had headboards and footboards of dark wood. There was a simple wooden desk with a couple of chairs. Cooking was normally done in a room off the back of the house, although we did no cooking that I can ever recall. Instead, we lived off the cheap fresh fish curries and rice or assorted standard Indian appetizers like samosas or pakhoras available in the chai shacks along the beach or at the cafes in the village. I had never lived with a well for drawing water, complete with a bucket and pulley, but I quickly learned the rules. You never bathe near the well, and you respect a circumference of about ten feet, keeping it immaculately clean at all times. I also understood the utility of dried goat-dung as flooring: it kept out fleas. Unfortunately, it didn't keep out flying roaches, spiders, or scorpions. One always had to inspect one's shoes or boots every morning before putting them on since scorpions found them convenient lounging spots. I remember one evening when I lit my hurricane lamp and immediately noted the shadow of a scorpion, tail raised, along the whitewashed wall. With every move I made, he turned in my direction with what I felt was a thoroughly evil presence. I was able to grab one of my boots and pound him into the floor, but the spooky image of the larger-than-life shadow of the scorpion stayed with me for a long time. I checked my boots regularly. I remember too that once when I sent a large roach to its maker, I set it out on the sand in front of my porch and watched how, within seconds, ants had appeared from nowhere to dismember the remains and carry it off with a speed that I found astonishing. Nature was a constant fascination for me. There were other creatures with whom one had to learn to live in Goa, namely cobras and packs of wild dogs. There was no electricity, so the moon and our lamps provided light to us at night. When the moon was full, the packs of wild dogs would follow you through the coconut forest and nip at your heels. I decided to buy an anklet of silver bells so that when I walked, I generated plenty of noise to warn any living thing in proximity that I was coming, hoping in this way to avoid rabies or cobra bite. Cobras are not bad-tempered or aggressive snakes, so the locals didn't especially fear them. My Goan neighbor, a charming woman in her 30's who had rented the house to me for the equivalent of $10 per month, explained to me that the problem with cobras biting humans occurred principally during the monsoon season, when the snakes were flushed out of their lairs underneath trees during floods and came inadvertently into contact with humans in the water. The Goan people were very hospitable and relaxed, in contrast to the people in India's northern cities where I had spent so much of my time. They were easy to approach, enjoyed chatting, and were quietly proud of their unique heritage. I searched high and low for a copy of the Goan Portuguese language newspaper, O Heraldo, in vain. I never succeeded in finding a copy in Bardez taluka. Maybe I didn't look hard enough. I asked a few of the older people who could still speak Portuguese, but they made it plain that since Goa had become a Union Territory of India (not a state with full rights like Andhra Pradesh or Maharashtra), it was considered unpatriotic to continue to speak or read the colonial language. (Never mind that English is the national language of the Republic of India.) In fact however, the everyday language in Goa was and is Konkani, a language related to Marathi, part of the Indo-European language family. After only a few weeks in Calangute, I moved to the village of Baga at the request of a friend who needed someone to share his meager rent, a bit further up the coast where there were fewer Westerners and fewer all-night parties around the bonfire to disturb the peace. My daily life became enmeshed with the rhythm of the sea, the sun, and the moon. I came to understand for the first time in my life that the natural world really is a Garden of Paradise, that it provides humans with everything they need: food from the sea and the land, material for shelter and clothing, even (dare I say it) waste disposal. I also realized that all creatures live in synch with the heavens. It was an amazing revelation for a young kid who had grown up on canned and frozen food, even though I was a Choctaw by birth and by tradition should have known better. There were other differences between Goa and the rest of India that were striking. There were no crowds except on market days. One never had the impression that every inch of the land was occupied. One was always conscious that this place was not like the rest of India. It wasn't common to hear people raising their voices. Unlike the state of Maharashtra to the north and most states in which I had traveled, Goa was not dry: you could actually buy alcoholic beverages just about anywhere. The Goans seemed not the share the prohibition or puritanical leanings of their neighbors surrounding them, although this was probably an exaggerated perception on the part of the Western visitors. It was a perception that often led to misunderstandings with the locals: like when young Western women would take off all their clothes on the beach to frolic in the sun and surf. It led to gangs of young Goan men hanging out on the beach and staring mercilessly at the women who sometimes would end up screaming in German or French at the men for so long and with such venom that the men just laughed, and appeared to consider the women crazy. The elders were not pleased at all with this "immoral" behavior and the local press reflected their concerns. Yet they never intervened in any way at the time to force a more locally appropriate behavior on the part of the young hippies. The Westerners rarely reflected upon whether they had the right to behave in whatever manner they saw fit as visitors in this hospitable country, and rarely made any effort to understand who Goans were or what they thought. It was just another beautiful beach, like so many others in the world. One day in March, as the monsoon season drew closer and the temperatures rose steadily above 100 degrees fahrenheit, I made the decision to pack my things and head back north to the cool of the Himalayas. I felt an enormous amount of saudade, the Portuguese word that combines sadness and longing, as I looked over the Arabian Sea for what might be the last time, watching the fisherman returning with their catch and the women who dried the stinking fish on the sand in preparation for the market in Mapusa, the main market town in Bardez taluka. The fishermen, drunk with cashew or coconut feni, the local alcoholic beverage, retired to the shade to sleep it off. I listened attentively to the sound of the waves and the clacking of the palm leaves, along with the cawing of crows, and watched the horizon. I didn't realize that I had participated in a minor historical event that helped to set in motion other unanticipated events that would eventually flood this charming backwater.
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- Forwarded by Almeida Gaspar, Associate, http://www.goa-world.com
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