---------------------------------------------------------- What's On In Goa: * Oct 16-27: Vipasana meditation, Alto Porvorim * Oct 24: Antonio Pereira Puraskar (Award) ceremony, Porvorim ----------------------------------------------------------
Headline: Travel - `We've learned to share everything'. By Juliet Clough. Source: Independent On Sunday, 20 October 2002 Away from Goa's beaches, Juliet Clough revels in the magical combination of its Portuguese and Hindu heritage Without the Rough Guide, I might never have prised myself away from these blandishments and found my way inland in search of a very different Goa, the place where fallout from the Jesus-Ganesh collision, now nearly 500 years old, still casts a faint glow. South-east of Margao, viridian rice terraces flow down the hillsides to meet terracotta-roofed farmhouses half hidden in groves of coconut and mango. Their owners have inherited the mantle of Goa's patrician landlords, whose prosperity vanished with independence in 1962 but whose descendants cling to their decrepit mansions in Chandor, Goa's old capital. "Everything changed overnight," says Alda Braganza, gesturing apologetically towards three painted grandes dames whose powdered wigs and affronted expressions can just be discerned through the cracked glass of their portraits. Eighty-four-year old Alda lives alone in the west wing of the Perreira-Braganza/ Menezes-Braganza mansion, the grand-daughter, later daughter-in-law, of a house that can trace its ancestry back to the 16th-century arrival of the Portuguese and its name to the invaders' habit of embellishing converts with their own fancy handles. We move slowly through interiors drained of light and heat by window panes of thin, overlapping oyster shells, Alda trailing a length of crochet as we go. Dust has settled on great grandmother's Chinese fan, on Belgian chandeliers, on quantities of porcelain, on the library of 5,000 books collected by the famous journalist and freedom fighter Luis de Menezes-Braganza. I admire a pair of silver tureens but Alda makes a face: "All day I have to dust and polish." Sara Fernandes may have occupied her late husband's mansion, just beyond Chandor, for a mere 47 years but the house goes back to a pre-conquest, Hindu era. Proof lies in the secret underground passage, hopping with frogs and pierced with ancient shot holes, which emerges at the river. "Let me show you the entrance," says Sara, opening a cupboard door to the consternation of the bats roosting on the coat hangers. We work our way through what feels increasingly like the pages of a magical realism novel. I pick up a doll, reposing in a willow-patterned bidet, but put her hastily back as her eyes start to flash and tinny Hindi film music shatters the silence. Sara indicates here a shrine to Our Lady of Bomparte: "Efficacious in childbirth"; there a heroically collapsing four-poster bed. A worm-eaten sedan chair rests in a corner of the courtyard, put down after its last journey and simply forgotten. I reach Panjim in a snowstorm of leaflets from International Women's Day: "Stop child marriage"; "Say No to casinos, prostitution, paedophilia, pre-natal testing". "Pre-natal testing?" The woman on the lorry looks incredulous: have I never heard of female infanticide? Even Jonas, my guide, has never seen inside the Mhamai Kamat house, one of the oldest continuously occupied Hindu mansions in Panjim, but we strike lucky, finding 26-year-old Soniya in the travel agency next door. Some 35 people of all ages live in the warrens of her home. It was more like 80 when Soniya was growing up: all descendants of a famous merchant family trading in, among other things, opium, precious stones and slaves. The house rambles seemingly endlessly: an inner courtyard overlooked by crazily buckling balconies, a guest house for scholars, a suite for the visiting swami. A kitten - or, at any rate, something small and furry that I tell myself firmly is a kitten - scuttles from the earth-floored communal kitchen, whose conveniences extend to a row of stone mortars and a well, ceremoniously visited twice daily by the household priest. "We cannot come in here when menstruating," says Soniya. "It annoys the god, a golden cobra." I look nervously into the darker recesses but the cobra is seldom seen. "There was a pair," Soniya continues, "but in the time of the negroes, the male was burnt and we were accursed. For 15 years we had no sons." Faint sounds from the Women's Day parade penetrate the heavy wooden screens that shield the house from the street. Can I really be having this conversation with a composed young woman who, half an hour ago, was running her own business from a computer? But Soniya tells me that she would not trade her orthodox upbringing for anything in the world. "It is a boon to have been born in this house. We learn to share everything and all are loved equally. Given this background, I can handle any problem." The colossal opulence of Old Goa's 12 or so largest churches offers clinching evidence of the might once ranged against Hindu Goa by the Portuguese colonists. Today, disrespectful pigeons fly through the Basilica of Bom Jesus to perch on stout caryatids and Florentine bronze. Mildew blooms in the windows of St Francis, obscuring the carved tombstones of the Portuguese nobles laid end to end in the nave. But there are still pilgrims sleeping in the cloisters and Christian high school leavers gathered on compulsory retreats - life, just, beyond Unesco World Heritage status. Back at the airport, Jesus and Ganesh are still ushering Goa's newest invaders across the Tarmac together. They've had a long haul. The Facts Getting There Juliet Clough travelled to Goa as a guest of the Government of India Tourist Office (020-7734 6613) and stayed at the Taj Exotica courtesy of Taj Hotels, Resorts and Palaces (0800 282699; www.taj hotels.com). Abercrombie & Kent (0845 0700 616; www. abercrombiekent.co.uk) offers seven nights at Taj Exotica from £1,845 per person, including flights via Bombay. Further Information Chandor Mansions (Braganza 0832 784227; Fernandes 0832 784245). ==================== Don't forget - you saw it on GoaNet! ======================================================================== To view GoaNet's archives http://groups.yahoo.com/group/goa-net ======================================================================== For (un)subscribing or for help, contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Don't want so many e-mails? Join GoaNet-Digest instead!
