The Saligão Balcão Edition Twenty Seven |
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Picture this. I am in Bombay, looking after my mom who was not doing too well, missing Goa and my life here. It is evening light and just when I think I will not be able to handle yet another visitor, would walk in Jimmy Devasia, a huge smile on his face holding a chicken roll in one hand. The chicken roll was not for me. It was for him but I knew that he had brought his own snack (from Lucky Restaurant near the station) so I would not have to bother about fixing him something to eat at the end of a long working day. That was Jimmy, always thinking of others and never about himself. He was working in an architect's office in Bombay then. Every single day was a gruelling commute to work and a back-breaking schedule. Yet, Jimmy would get to the office before anyone else and make (unsigned) caricatures of his colleagues, pin them up on the notice board and keep everyone guessing! He would double up with laughter every time he told us the story. It was the same when we were working on the Fontainhas Festival of the Arts in Goa and the same when we were working on the Crafts Map of Goa. Jimmy would slip little caricatures, jokes embedded in various signages in the illustrations and cartoon characters in his drawings. His sense of humour and wit was not confined to the illustrations. When I adopted my first cat, it was Jimmy who gave her a name. "Oh, so now the activist has a catalyst." And, that is how Catalyst came into our lives, attending every Goa Heritage Action Group meeting, observing decorum and keeping her cool if she saw a mouse in the garden and slapping the neighbour's German Shepherd if he tried to get too close for her comfort. Career moves took Jimmy to other places, outside Goa and abroad. The Final Move took him away from us on June 24th this year. I feel, like a lot of us, that he has left us a huge legacy in drawings, illustrations, caricatures and dry wit. Jimmy San, you may think you have fooled us into thinking you were leaving but you are right here, with us, on the pieces of paper and in your smiles. Watch out! We have you framed. |
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A sit-down tree walk with Arti Das |
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Being part of a Tree Walk with Arti Das is always a pleasure and this time it was a presentation at the Institute Menezes Braganza Hall hosted by Dr Vidya Kamat and Dr Pandurang Phaldesai, of the Centre for Study of Mythology and Culture) on UNDERSTANDING GOA’S ECOLOGY THROUGH RITUALS AND FESTIVALS. What a wonderful, rich presentation! It began with the month of January and took us through all the festivals, rituals and customary practices held in Goa right through the year. And though we were seated, riveted and fixed to our seats in an air-conditioned hall on a cloud-filled day by the River Mandovi in the city of Panaji, our eyes were feasting as if on a journey right through the trees, forests, hills, rivers, plateaus and thorny, prickly, plants (and environmental issues) of our beautiful, bountiful state. |
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Jane Borges comes to town |
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Tell me, Jane, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love the journalist, the writer, the screenplays, the smile and the compassion with which you meet people and bring out the stories that have never been aired. I also love the fact that you fly in from Bombay, tell us about the archival project you are working on, documenting the hitherto untold stories of the half a million odd Goans who left Goa (in search of jobs or in a “migration by marriage”) and settled in enclaves in tony South Bombay, how they were forced out from there and have had to move to the suburbs (outlying less affluent margins) of Greater Bombay abandoning their roots, their feeling of belonging, their ethnicity and culture. We are so looking forward to the documentation now. It is as if one arm of Goa was missing and has just been found. |
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BOOK OF THE MONTH Coins in Rivers by Rochelle Potkar Hatchette Book Publishing India Pvt. Ltd |
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COINS IN RIVERS. In fact, the title has a special place for me in the vault of my memories. Grandma would insist that we toss a coin into every river we passed, bunched up with the spent flowers from the altar in the house. This would get mixed reactions from my parents and us children. My mother Mana would scoff in her pragmatic, philosophical way. Dad would try and swerve our 1956 Vauxhall as close to the side of the bridge as possible so the squishy flowers and coin package would land in the waters. As the eldest child I was entrusted with the tossing. I still remember the heavy burden of responsibility on my young shoulders. I was always the “good girl” shushing my youngest sister who bemoaned the loss of a precious coin that could buy “oh, so many things.” And keeping one eye on my brother saying you could toss all the coins in the water for all he cared if someone got him freshwater chestnuts at the end of the trip. Moving on and into the coins in the book, I wonder why the perpetrators of all the atrocities described against women are men. Rochelle writes as a feminist who sees and understands scars. Even the ones under the skin. And yet, I see a soft gentle touch, not the caustic, harsh and scarred perspective of a hard-core man-hater. If I were to collect all the coins she has tossed into rivers, I would indeed have enough to fight an election. I would stand for the birds that feed on the banks of the rivers; the freshwater shrimp, the wasps, the bees and the jewel beetles and I would campaign for survival. I would campaign for insect larvae and symbiotic relationships, for bread. Bread. The first poem took me to the oviyos (songs sung at the grinding stone) by women in rural Goa as elsewhere. I absolutely love the line “thoughts of divinity, baguette giving way to unity, challah to duality, brioche to trinity” … can we revisit the line and get into the roti, paratha, bhakri and chapati? Can we look through the tears, the torn jagged edges, and the keyholes? Can we re-read the Marathi bhakti poet who said to us, “The rich can sit in their verandas and gaze at the moon/for me the moon is the bhakri in my thali.” In Amber, memories (like your heart) explode. This Amber could be me, could be you. And when I stumble upon the line that says, “And walking near Hamburg pockets a stone/that upon drying, ignites in her coat/setting ablaze memories of postcards.” I trip. This Amber could be the stone, could be me, could be a memory. Or, wait a minute, am I the stone? Shattered? Lava. I looked up the origin of the word. It is Latin. Here I was, thinking it was one of ours. You know, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Indian. That just proves how wrong one is and proves, like Rochelle says, “Immigration is home. Your body is my home. Your lips/ my envelope, letters are teeth.” Harry Mendonsa. Rochelle gives us the entire gamut of personal habits of “dirty Harry” who dies at 98, having lived a life of sleaze, smut, and motorcycle grease. It is not just “dirty Harry’s” history. It is also ours, the history, the shame of how everything about us becomes public knowledge when the “Day of Reckoning” comes. In ATS you must read the poem several times over several weeks and you are still looking for the story. Burning, burnt out. Bulbs appear in some poems quite frequently. What does that mean to you? To me? Frog, Postmoderne. This is a deep, passionate understanding of gay love. “Our frog has to come out again and again/into the bedroom of the princess” for our “frog has no gay icon” And, at the end of the poem, “That’s why our frog breathes also through his skin.” Compatibilities. Everyone remembers their first piggy bank. Mine was a clay one, shaped like a pot with a slim slit on the top. Coins were small then. My piggy bank was made by our local potter whom my mother knew by name. Rochelle compels you to see the piggy bank in quite a different way, through a harsher lens, a lens that is as thin as the sliver on my piggy’s head. There are times when the titles of the poems seem a little distantly connected to the main body of the poem. Loafer is one of these. But I loved the last para nonetheless: Some things left for another blight/some things devoured in slur and slight/my enmities seeming like in this churlish amenities café of Ol’ and de novo half lights. To Daraza. This poem is a tribute to all the great Sufi and Bhakti poets, philosophers and to those who touched our hearts and our minds with their one-liners, their writing, their wit, and their collection of truck backwords. I shall think of Daraza, Rochelle when I next see chalti hai Tata, udti hai dhool/jaltey hai chamche jab khilte hain phool when I next tail the truck as I cross a border. Resurrection. Who can tell for certain whether Christ was the only one to have risen? As Rochelle says, so do “Kings on cards and humpty dumpty – a dream in someone’s heart breaking down churches.” For “when the houses of spirituality are severed” the energy that is contained over the years, are those severed too? And when Rochelle says, “Christ, Zoroaster, Allah, Nanak, Ram/now pilgrimize the bazaar and boulevard” I hear the words plagiarize, print and, pimp squashed into that one single loaded word. “When Asoka turned a new season, he looked skywards and entrusted 9 men with books, sending them into oblivion.” Why he did not entrust 9 women with books is a question. If he had, it might have turned the course of dharma. Anyway, the 9 positives,the gender-free secrets of survival are revealed in this poem that speaks of “carrying poison” on the tips of tongues “without swallowing”. Eat your heart out L. Shiva! Bedrock. Ship-building or house-building, relationship-building, script-writing our own lives “isn’t a skill we learn since birth. That is discovery.” And at the end of the poem, “Karm, the labor of our palm lines.” Also the lines we refuse to toe, Rochelle. |
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The reading (in private) of the book Coins in Rivers was followed by a conversation (in public) with Rochelle at Dog Ears Bookstore in Margao. Leonard and Queenie run a tight ship at this tiny, snug treasure house of books with a few slices of fruit cake thrown in as lifesavers. It was an invigorating evening, a chance to show my unabashed admiration for all three…the poet, her poetry and the boundless magic of poetry. Rochelle read from her books (performed is more like it) while I added my penny-worth of childhood memories, recollections of tailors in Colaba, Bombay (yes, it was still Bombay then) and, a rounding up of cosy, comfort-zone “fireside” stories. The month of June, named after the Roman Goddess Juno, Jupiter’s wife, Goddess of marriage and childbirth, began with a honeymoon with books. |
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A consult with research students |
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June was also a month of creativity and sharing of creativity. Two students shared their dream ideas, both completely diverse from each other, at the end of which you think, it is all the same anyway. One was a project that is aimed at understanding how tourism is changing a Goan village and the other is how an ancient monument can be re-interpreted with Augmented Reality. The students knew their topics inside-out and I had very little to do except be impressed but I also learnt more about how the elections worked (analysis is a hobby with some) and also what AR really means (broke down so patiently for someone who grew up on Black & White TV). |
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The MOCA team does not have to take you on a tour. The team of Ar Noah and Clive takes you to a monument, sketches out a few word-maps and then leaves you to journey on. Questions come in from the group like frisbees, answers come from research, local history from the writers of the past and from first and second generation parishioners. What a treat to listen to someone who has been a member of the community since he was fifteen! This is truly a timeless tradition. The stories of the St Sebastian Chapel, Nossa Senhora de Piedade Chapel, the most unique depiction of St Anthony of Padua holding a cobra by a rope, and the Chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Anguish outside of the gate of the heritage house of the Sousa Monteiro family were as if they were meshed together by a single common thread. And the thread is of faith, knowledge, love and compassion. |
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Why do we call it a book release? In fact, isn’t it just the reverse of release? Holding, reading, and experiencing a book is an inhalation, a holding in of your breath, waiting for a revelation. |
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