I was still a child in a frock, and I have the faintest recollection of my mother holding me in her lap at a long dining-table. I had, apparently, insisted on joining the festival banquet (I later recalled it was the wedding of a much older cousin), as a man among men, and had cried sobbingly for being left out.
—Armando Menezes
By Selma Carvalho
The 21st century has been disrupted by extraordinary events, creating overnight a surrealism which we have come to accept as our present-day reality. It will forever mark our lives: the trauma of food shortages, lock-downs, self-isolation, quarantine, surgical masks, deaths doubling in numbers, burials without mourners, grief without utterance. But the period will also be remembered for the pause the world took, for the time we spent at home together as a family, an enforced solitude away from the rhythmic and ritual churning of the world. For the home has always been a special place, one we take for granted perhaps, but which dwells in our imagination—the geographic specificity of it, the relationships which unfold within it, the momentous events we share and celebrate—and particularly the homes of our childhood remain with us, becoming an indelible part of our consciousness.
So it is for our Goan writers and artists that the childhood home informs their work. The great modernist artist FN Souza, born in 1924, sporadically spent his childhood at his grandmother Leopoldina Saldanha’s house in Saligao. It was not a happy time for the young Souza; sickly, and scarred by small-pox, he found himself amidst a matriarchal and unchallenging household. There was his grandmother of course, and his aunts Blanche, Matilda and Bridget. ‘There was nothing for me to do,’ he wrote in 1958 in Arts News and Review, ‘not even among the women of Goa…’ It could not have been easy living in Saligao, orphaned for all purposes, his father had died soon after his birth and his mother escaping debt had fled to Bombay where she made a living as a dress-maker. Of his childhood, he recalled, in his essay ‘Nirvana of a Maggot,’ being an insignificant ‘blooming maggot on a dung heap,’ and what he remembered was the taste of dung in his mouth, likely a metaphor or perhaps quite literally; Goan homes were smeared with dung for its flooring.
The childhoods of a near-century ago may seem in some manner charming, but they were not without disquiet. There was penury to contend with, Goa’s economy was floundering, and aspirations blooming within the context of Portuguese colonialism struggled to find fruition. We see this struggle articulated by acclaimed writer Victor Rangel-Ribeiro in the forthcoming book, The Brave New World of Goan Writing & Art Anthology, 2020. Rangel-Ribeiro was born in 1925; his father, Oscar having survived the 1918 influenza pandemic, was offered a job teaching Portuguese at the newly established Mater Dei Institution. Victor’s mother, to buffer their dwindling financial resources, had come up with a novel idea. Rangel-Ribeiro writes: ‘Through the social grapevine she would find out which families were moving out of Saligao for extended periods of time, usually a year or so, and strike a deal with them: in return for looking after the property and making any needed repairs, we would live there rent free, and would also be given two large sacks of rice and two large kerosene tins as compensation for our trouble.’
This displacement in childhood had one constant for Rangel-Ribeiro—the family library. He writes, ‘The annual move was always exciting. The family carriage would be summoned from Porvorim; it was a large box-like contraption mounted on two very large steel-rimmed wooden wheels, the driver Laximon sat perched high up on a wooden shelf, and it trundled along the rutted mud roads not propelled by an engine, not pulled by horses, but drawn by two sturdy and very energetic bulls…On arriving at the next home, the most prized possession to be unloaded first was always the family bookcase. While the bulk of the family library remained in the ancestral home in Porvorim, the books that were most prized travelled with us. There were several novels in English (Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, Thackeray, Jane Austen), in Portuguese (Júlio Dinis and Eça de Queirós), and in French (Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, Balzac, Zola, Flaubert).’
Born two decades prior to Souza and Rangel-Ribeiro, Goa’s major poet Armando Menezes narrated his own recollections of childhood in his unpublished autobiographical notes. He wrote, ‘I was still a child in a frock, and I have the faintest recollection of my mother holding me in her lap at a long dining-table. I had, apparently, insisted on joining the festival banquet (I later recalled it was the wedding of a much older cousin), as a man among men, and had cried sobbingly for being left out. The other was when I was twelve…I remember quietly crying in a corner of a remote room, and my mother trying to soothe and reason with me.’ Much like Rangel-Ribeiro, Menezes’s focal point was a family library: ‘Our bookshelves were stuffed with my great-grandfather’s Latin tomes—one of these, as I remember, Justinian, long “digested” by, and transmigrated into white ants.’
The stark contrast in Souza’s childhood with that of Rangel-Ribeiro and Menezes provides us with a profound perspective on Goan life. While Souza is mired in poverty, family separation and isolation, Rangel-Ribeiro and Menezes grow up surrounded by books, music, and close-knit familial ties. It is only a move to Bombay, away from the fault lines of caste and privilege which allow Souza to achieve his full potential. But the same can be said of Rangel-Ribeiro and Menezes, that a fortuitous move to Bombay in early adulthood was the propeller to their own success. These childhoods are worth investigating; if anything, they inform us how imaginations are ignited, how creativity is nurtured and transformed into something essentially transcendent.
Banner image is the ancestral home of poet Armando Menezes and is copyright of Selma Carvalho
Selma Carvalho is editor at JRLJ.