Goa, Going, Gone

By Ravibala Shenoy

I was seated in the library of the steamship S.S Jalabala, absorbed in a novel while the ship sailed overnight to Goa on the West coast of India. I’d rather have ventured to some fashionable place like London or Paris so that I could later brag about it to my classmates, or to some Himalayan hill station. Instead, I was being dragged to Goa by my family, and I was mutinous. Goa was a backwater as far as I was concerned, and the crumbling historical forts dotting the coastline from Mumbai to Marmagoa scarcely interested me. 

It was quiet when we disembarked at 11:00 in the morning in Marmagoa. A green, Gauguinesque landscape spread beyond the shore. It was 1962. The Portuguese had only left the previous year. A Sikh soldier was drinking beer at a sunlit wooden table, outside a thatched bar. Despite my reservations, the soothing air felt like a welcome homecoming. My family would be going for a ten-day stay at the temple, where we would wait for my paternal grandparents and a couple of cousins to join us. 

The taxi drove through a landscape of wooded hills. In places where manganese ore was being excavated, whole sections of hillsides had been gouged out. In Vasco da Gama, the dazzling white churches and grottoes contrasted starkly with the green paddy fields. Hindu homes had red-tiled roofs and a tulsi or holy basil plant growing in the front yard. The road signs often had curious Portuguese approximations of Hindu names. For instance, Shankar Naik became Xencor Naique. 

Nearly two hours later, we finally arrived at the Shanta Durga (The Peaceful Durga) temple, set in a bowl-shaped valley surrounded by hills amid coconut groves. There was a white lamp tower in the courtyard. The temple itself had a sloping roof and a dome over the inner sanctum, something I had never seen in other parts of India. I jumped up to reach the clapper of the brass bell suspended from the ceiling and the deep sound reverberated in waves. Crystal chandeliers lit the main hall and silver-clad doors led to the sanctum sanctorum. Inside, the amber light from oil lamps illuminated the flower-decked image of the deity. (It is said that when Afonso de Albuquerque, the Portuguese conqueror witnessed a puja when he first arrived in 1503, he assumed it was a mass for the Black Virgin.) The priest assigned to our family was handsome. He was twenty-five years old. My cousins predicted that he was going to marry the daughter of another priest in six months. 

Our family was billeted in the agrashala (pilgrims’ dwelling) on one side of the temple. My mother and grandmother put together meals on a little earthen hearth in a corner. Other meals were eaten at the priest’s home. The long grass near the coconut grove served as toilets.

There were not too many people around, maybe two or three visiting families like ours, the families of the resident priests, the few women who swept and cleaned around the temple. We soon got used to the routine of early morning, noon, and evening waving of the lights. At night, a bhajan singer sang devotional songs or a kirtankar lulled us to sleep while he gave a sermon in song. In the afternoons, the young priest came to play rummy with my older cousin and father. 

Outside the temple, a few thatched shacks along the road sold packages of tea and soap. Local women hawked fruit, coconuts and strings of flowers for the goddess. Occasionally I saw a toddy tapper shimmying down a palm tree, after extracting palm. It was late October. The monsoons had just ended. From the paddy fields to the tall palm-everything was a different shade of green. The dirt roads sent up puffs of red dust every time the rare Peugeot or Citroen passed by. These were the only cars to be seen, and other than the cars, it was like entering a time warp. We lived as it were within a magic circle.

At night, as I lay on a pallet on the floor, listening to the sound of crickets and nightjars, my fervid imagination conjured up periwigged Portuguese grandees in palanquins, the war cries of Maratha armies and the sepoys of the John Company just across the border. Bajirao was the ruling Peshwa in Pune. He must have resembled our priest: intelligent, articulate, and tactful. Beyond the temple, where a lamp shone, it was easy to imagine a devadasi, a dancer wedded to her art and the gods, singing a nighttime raga. 

During our stay in Goa, China, which was considered a friendly country at the time, had launched an attack across the northeastern Himalayan border and entered India. Not having access to newspapers at the temple, the news reached us only when we were back in Bombay. 

The day we traveled to Panaji, the capital, to visit the father-in-law of a first cousin once removed, we took a ferry across the Mandovi River. Passengers swarmed onto the open deck. One large family had olive skin, shiny black hair; their green eyes gleamed as they spoke fluently in Portuguese to one another, but most of the passengers spoke Konkani, my native language. Everything was familiar yet foreign—like returning after a long exile.

We got off the ferry at the Idalcao, palace of Adilshah—the Sultan of Bijapur and the ruler of this region who had been driven out by the Portuguese in 1510. (According to one of the chroniclers, Yusuf Adil Shah the founder of the dynasty was none other than one of the competitor siblings of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II. Other chronicles give him a Turko-Persian ancestry.) Unaware of this historical footnote we shuffled down the cobblestones of Panaji’s empty shopping area while the locals were taking a siesta. We ended up not far from the bronze statue of Abbe Faria hypnotizing a woman in the central square. Pigeons fluttered overhead in applause for him. From there, we easily found our relative’s house. Judging by his glazed look, we must have disturbed his nap. We were there to deliver a present from his only daughter who, after marrying my father’s cousin, now lived in Bombay. The house of the widower was silent and sparsely furnished. I could smell a story in the empty rooms. Houses in Goa carried secrets. As in a palimpsest, the present and the past coexisted here.

We visited the basilicas of Old Goa, an empty city of Baroque churches, convents and monasteries surrounded by jungle. It had been abandoned by the Portuguese authorities in the 18th century after a plague epidemic. The churches in Old Goa are the closest one could come to the great cathedrals of Europe. At the Basilica of Bom Jesu in which lies the body of Saint Francis Xavier, the guide told us of the seventeenth-century Portuguese noblewoman who bit off the toe of the dead saint and carried it in her mouth to keep as a relic.

The region of the Old Conquests (which included Old Goa) was full of churches, Portuguese villas and town squares, while the region of the New Conquests was full of temples- there was always a 17th or 18th-century temple at a stone’s throw. One day, in the late afternoon, my father and I set off to visit a 12th-century temple. We left around 4 pm and traveled by taxi to Ponda and by bus to the temple. I didn’t step inside, having had my fill of temple-going. Years later when I asked my father the name of the temple he could not even recall this excursion. So, while my father entered, I wandered into a side yard where there was a stone image of a goddess. I looked at an indentation where a lamp would have been. For some reason, this scene pierced my heart. Someone had once worshipped here. 

I needed to be alone and found a lake or river in the rear surrounded by wilderness. The water glistened in the fading sunlight. I sat on the stone steps and recalled a quote from T.S. Eliot: “When the evening is spread out against the sky. Like a patient etherized upon a table.” A figure appeared, a barefoot girl of ten, perhaps, clicking her tongue as she rounded up her goats. Judging by her kurta pajama she was probably a Muslim, however, her green eyes belied some Portuguese blood. 

It had turned dark as we finally walked towards home; I was trailing behind my father. It felt as if I had walked on that red mud lane for a thousand years. While the houses on either side of the lane had no lights on, in the darkness, to my right, maybe twenty feet beyond me, I saw a vaporous scene. 

In a courtyard, women were talking excitedly, a woman at a grinding stone listening rapt and wordless. A third peered into a well reciting something, poetry perhaps. They hung there before me as in a tableau outlined by moonlight. Beyond them, there was a large house. Upstairs, a jackfruit was slowly ripening. A man in his late forties stood in the side yard. He wore a dhoti and had the sacred thread across his bare chest. There was anguish on his face. 

Years later, I still wonder about the cause of that man’s anguish. 

Of course, it was impossible to see anything in the dark. They were neither ghosts that I saw nor was it a hallucination, nor was it time travel, it must have been my imagination or some kind of inspiration. 

A few days later, we were guests of a gentleman who lived in a Portuguese villa with blue shuttered windows in Madgaon. The house was clean, simply furnished and I remember going into the bathroom to wash up and finding no running water. Instead, copper cauldrons were filled to the brim with well water. I still recall that clean bathroom and the clear cool water so perfectly in line with the rim of the cauldron.

At the end of our stay, I did not want to return to Bombay. It felt as though I had been yanked from an enchanted realm; I wanted to remain in the eighteenth century. Once home, all I could talk about was my trip to Goa. 

“Goa?” one friend asked. “Where is it? Is it in India?” 

Had anyone asked me, while in my deepest sleep, if I wanted to visit Goa again, my eyes would have flown open and I would have jumped up to pack my bags. The fact that my forebears came from Goa may have had something to do with it. They left the town of Borim on the Zuari River in south Goa sometime in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries, crossed four rivers and settled south of the border in Karwar. At that time, the zeal for land was matched by the zeal for converting the natives, and if the locals wished to keep their land and avoid higher taxes, it was best to convert to Christianity.

This proselytizing zeal of the Catholic Church was matched by the narrowness of Hinduism. Bread in those days was considered a foreign thing. This may be apocryphal, but it was believed you were ostracized by the Hindu community for drinking water from a well that had been defiled because a piece of bread had been thrown into it. 

A few months after that initial trip, the priest from our temple came to our home in Bombay. Dressed in trousers and a shirt, he didn’t quite look like Bajirao, and among the billboards, bright lights and pace of Bombay he looked quite out of place.

Years later when visiting Goa had become the thing to do; my friends told me they thought of me when they went.

***

When I became a new immigrant to Chicago in the mid-seventies, images of Goa haunted me. In Goa, it appeared to me stories were as plentiful as rain-bearing clouds. In Chicago, however, that inspiration deserted me. I attempted stories set in Goa but the scanty material at my disposal failed to coalesce into a narrative and I carried within me the despair of a miscarried or stillborn creation. If only I could be in Goa I would be drenched with stories. Or so I thought. I was consumed by homesickness and a sense of dislocation. Perhaps it was the result of the natural beauty surrounding me, but I was persuaded that in Goa an ethereal realm co-existed alongside ours. 

I read about Goan history: about the horrific Auto da Fe and the Inquisition, about Abbe Faria who was immortalized in The Count of Monte Cristo, about the nineteenth-century English orientalist Robert Burton who in the course of a visit to Old Goa smuggled the wrong nun out of the convent at dead of night. I romanticized Goa, my lost Eden even though I had never really lived there for any length of time. 

I ascribed some of the special qualities of Goa to the locals the way Virginia Woolf idealized the inhabitants of St. Ives in Cornwall. There were a few more brief visits to Goa after that first visit. Each time I would ask myself: do I still love Goa? And I did.

 There is a popular song set in the early days of the Portuguese colonization and conversion of the natives of Goa. A devadasi dancer in the colonized area is invited to sing at a wedding in the house of one of her former patrons, who fled the mass conversions and escaped to the other side of the river. Dressed in her finery, she begs a boatman to ferry her across. She tries to bribe him repeatedly with her jewels. Each time he refuses. We are never told if she ever reaches the other side. Manohar Malgonkar Inside Goa, wrote, “Some echo of an unrequited longing, an unreachable goal, a broken love affair, lost moorings,” That is exactly how I felt.

As time went on, the pressures of family life, children, work, and the process of assimilation into the U.S. absorbed me. Yet Goa was never forgotten. 

***

The last time I visited Goa was with my sister in 2018. Outside the Basilica of Bom Jesu, there were long lines of school groups and tourists waiting to get in. Hilary Mantel is quoted in a recent Guardian article, “The past and present are always in dialogue…” New historical evidence had emerged that was not known in 1962. Excavations at the ruined church of St. Augustine in the Old Goa church complex revealed bone relics of a 17th-century Georgian queen, Ketevan of Kaketi. At the age of sixty, she had been martyred when she refused to renounce Christianity and become the bride of the Persian Safavid king who had conquered Georgia. Eventually, she was canonized by the Pope, despite her Russian Orthodox faith. Her bones had been smuggled into Goa by the Augustinian friars in the 17th century and buried in that church.

We attended a mass at the sixteenth-century Church of the Holy Spirit in Madgaon. The Sunday Mass was packed. An auto-rickshaw idled outside in the church square. We asked Mohammed, the auto-rickshaw driver, if there were any sights we could squeeze in before meeting our train that afternoon. Mohammed took us to two restored Portuguese mansions in the countryside. The restored homes turned out to be like restored homes everywhere. Along the way, I gazed out of the auto-rickshaw searching for the Goa I had glimpsed in 1962. The streets were bustling but there was a banality to even the Portuguese colonial architecture. At one point, I asked Mohammed to stop at a bend in the road. Only the experience of the breeze rushing over the peaceful green paddy fields was recognizable. 

In 1962, there were only churches, forts, temples, and the exterior architecture of homes for Goan tourists to see. Now, Goa is a tourist hotspot, with resorts, tarred roads, concrete buildings, rave parties on the beach and a population influx from other Indian states who have made Goa their home. 

The market near Palolem Beach was animated by a noisy stream of humanity passing by. Western hippies strolled among the locals like blonde streaks in long dark hair. On a sandy lane near Colva Beach, I was surrounded by scores of Russians returning after watching the sunset. Even the street signs here were in Cyrillic. That year, twenty thousand visitors came from Russia alone. 

The city streets of Goa look like a scene out of the Bourne Supremacy, which was filmed here. Many Bollywood movies have been filmed in Goa. When I asked a policeman how I could get to the major sights in Panaji, he said, 

“Have you seen the movie Singham? Watch it. You will see all of Goa in comfort.”  

The antiquity of the temples is now covered in bright-colored paint. The streets leading to the crowded temple are lined with shops on both sides and illuminated with fluorescent lighting. In the Shanta Durga temple, Russian guides explain to Russian tourists the symbolic meanings of the images along the walls while worshippers crowd around the inner sanctum. Luso-Goan, continental delicacies and dishes from all over India are available in restaurants. Some would say this is all for the better. I viewed everything with detachment. I was no longer beguiled. Perhaps it was I who had changed. I had lost my sense of wonder. 

In 1962 Goa had one foot in the past; the other merely hovered over the present. It wasn’t just that history lay around me, I had walked into it. Goa was like stepping into the pages of a historical novel. Only this history was relatable and because of my ancestry, I had been invested in this history. 

Lydia Davis writes in her essay “Fragmentary or Unfinished,” from Essays, One:

“We can contemplate a Mayan ruin in a jungle, and consider it a whole thing, though it is only a fragment of something that was once whole. Though a Mayan who had lived at a time when the entire temple was there and as originally built, and used it, would see it now as broken, for us nothing is missing.”

For me, in 1962, nothing was missing. 

*

Ravibala Shenoy is originally from India but now lives in the Chicago area. A former librarian and book reviewer, (Library Journal, Jaggerylit), she has published award-winning short stories (India Currents), short stories (Chicago Quarterly Review, Best Asian Speculative Fiction, Copperfield Review, Cooper Street Journal), flash fiction (Jellyfish Review, The Menacing Hedge. The Aerogram), a memoir (Sugar Mule) and op-ed pieces (Chicago Tribune, India Currents).