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Manohar Shetty
Old Goa was once a city, the ‘Rome of the Orient’, the most prized metropolis in the Portuguese dominions. The magnificent 16th and 17th century churches in modern Old Goa are testimonials to that past glory when travellers coined a proverb in Portuguese, Quem vio Goa excusa de ver Lisboa (If you have seen Goa, there’s no need to visit Lisbon). Contemporary Goa is, of course, not a city, but a state of 1.3 million people, the smallest in the country. But it is still a state, and for most Goans statehood in 1987 came as a benediction. It released them from the arbitrary whims of succeeding, all-powerful Governors and invested real power in democratically elected leaders. That Goa has seen an astounding thirteen changes in the chief minister’s post in the last ten years is another story — and a prize claimant to doggerel verse. My assimilation into Goan society was made much easier by my marriage to V. Xenophobia existed in 1985 as it does now, as hordes of ‘outsiders’ find a place in the sun in this blindingly-green state. Curiously, my Mangalore origins also paved the way for easier acceptance here. Perhaps it has to do with the early history of Goa when thousands of Hindus fled to neighbouring areas in the wake of Portuguese ecclesiastical zeal.
The Goa I live in is very different from the one experienced by ephemeral visitors. Within a few months of my arrival, I found a job as an editor of a monthly magazine, a position I held for eight years. I soon discovered that beneath the gloss there was much that was gross. Legal threats and abusive phone calls are stock-in-trade for any editor. But provincial meanness can take some absurd turns. In one instance, when I refused to publish a clearly defamatory letter by a young college lecturer, he sent me eight foolscap sheets of invective — in red ink, in stylish cursive and on both sides of the paper. I saw at close quarters the tussles of politicians with their daft dreams of transforming Goa into ‘another Singapore’, the struggle for Konkani to achieve official first language status in the state, the wanton environmental degradation by iron ore miners, the ruinous fallouts of unplanned tourism, the most repellent avarice in both the higher and lower ranks of government, and builders and property developers trampling over the fragile ecosystem with sickening boorishness. The colour of corruption and venality is the same everywhere. For some, Goa is paradise; for others, who have always lived here, it is indeed paradise lost.
Of great concern to the community are the wild distortions about Goa blazed abroad by the media and popular cinema and fanned by the demands of tourism. In my Introduction to Ferry Crossing — Short Stories from Goa, I wrote: “Such has been the gilded smokescreen created by tourism and its avaricious auxiliary industries. It becomes necessary, therefore, to clear the air and place the facts as they are. Few in the rest of the country even realise that the Catholic community in Goa is very much a minority; that the most widely spoken language in Goa, Konkani, is an official language under the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution; that the caste system (the word is derived from the Portuguese ‘casta’) remains deeply rooted in the Catholic community too; or that the tiresome eulogising of vapid, risibly moralistic pop stars has been at the expense of some of the finest Goan exponents of Indian classical music.”
Another misconception is that inter-racial marriages were common and widespread in Goa. The truth is, except in the early years after the conquest of Goa in 1510, when Afonso de Albuquerque favoured such unions between the Portuguese and the native population, miscegenation was rare, and looked down upon by both sides. In the Introduction I also point out howlers on Goa in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay and in the otherwise admirable A Son of the Circus by John Irving. But so deeply ingrained is the brochured image of the place that even an astute observer like William Dalrymple, the award winning and seasoned British travel writer, goes into starry-eyed overdrive. In his At the Court of the Fish-eyed Goddess, published in 1998, the same year as Ferry Crossing, here is his description of Fontainhas, the Latin Quarter of Panjim, much touted as a tourist attraction in coffee-table books: “Wandering through the quarter in the evening you come across scenes impossible to imagine anywhere else in India: violinists practise Villa Lobos at open windows; caged birds sit chirping on ornate art nouveau balconies looking out over small red tiled piazzas. As you watch, old men in pressed linen trousers and Homburg hats spill out of the taverns, walking sticks in hand, and make their way unsteadily over the cobbles, past the lines of battered 1950s Volkswagen Beetles slowly rusting into oblivion.”
I spent well over three years in this same area, editing that magazine from a small, poky office from 1986 onwards. I’ve seen nothing resembling Dalrymple’s rosy description. The residents of Fontainhas, in fact, routinely complain of the inadequate sanitation facilities, the poor ventilation in their houses and the constant flow of noisy traffic. And as for the famed ‘cobbles’, I discovered that nobody could recall seeing them since the beginning of the last century! All I saw were a few potholes. More worryingly, Dalrymple shares the widely held Western fallacy that most Goans did not desire freedom from Portuguese rule. He derives this conviction after a few interviews and a conversation with a quaint, anachronistic old lady who dwells entirely and most blissfully in the Portuguese past. Such cock-eyed perceptions are inadvertently disparaging of the Goan community at large, and more so to the spirit of the 72 martyrs and the thousands incarcerated and tortured by the Portuguese police in jails in Goa, Portugal, Angola and Cabo Verde during the state’s long and arduous struggle for liberation.
Both the horizontal world of prose and the vertical one of poetry have been a part of me. I write poems because I need to. It is not an act of will, but must come, as Anne Stevenson says of love, as naturally “as a Ferris Wheel to its fair”. Poetry is for me an internal stabiliser and that moment is unmatched when some ephemeral, drifting wisp of thought and image is snatched miraculously from midair and made palpable on paper. Goa has not gifted its poetry to me. I have written poems here, of course, but they have no ‘setting’ and could have been written anywhere. I cannot write obvious Socialist verse, of ‘the blood in the street and blood in the bread you eat’ kind. To me Paul Celan is an infinitely greater poet than Pablo Neruda. And though Ted Hughes’ last book, Birthday Letters, was to me a huge disappointment, his birds and beasts speak to me as lucidly and disturbingly as they did those years ago. In Goa the sunsets are gold and saffron, the seas opalescent, the rivers sinuous and silvery and the greenery riotously green. But there is no intrinsic poetry in external beauty.
The provenance of poetry lies elsewhere. There’s an avocado tree in our backyard. Planted by my neighbour, a Scotsman, several years ago, it is tall and spindly. Lovingly tended, it flowers every year but never bears fruit. I’ve been told that it’s the female of the species, and for it to bear fruit it must cross-pollinate with its male counterpart. No amount of water and fertiliser will bring that tree to real fruition. Native chicku, cashew, bora, guava and mango trees flourish everywhere, wild, fecund as the mongrels in the neighbourhood. But not that solitary, spinsterish tree, alien to the rocky terrain of the place. There’s the seed of a poem in this somewhere. But I can’t get to the root of it. Poems are like that — elusive, sentient creatures. Teasing, disparate images floating about, very rarely dovetailing into place.
There are other pictures: a cauliflower vaguely brings to mind the human
brain (vegetable?); a brinjal wears a Roman helmet; a panicky centipede
on the widow grille is a roller coaster or the wagons of a goods train;
windscreen wipers swish to and fro and I’m reminded of an umpire
signalling a boundary; my twelve-year-old daughter’s asthmatic
lungs are a guttural tremolo; her sore throat is emery paper. Singly,
these are showy, empty pictures. But linked and anchored to a comprehensible
reality, to a wider human canvas, and tautened by language and the tug
of emotion, these images can grow to meaningful metaphor, claiming a
living identity of their own. Poems are not merely ways of seeing but
ways of feeling too. Those colourful shreds of cloth scattered on the
floor of a tailor’s shop can easily be stitched into a wall-hanging,
but into a usable garment — free-size? That’s a little more
difficult.
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