A Line for Alina

After a long day teaching at St. Lawrence Agacaim, when mama returned home at lunchtime she used to tell me anecdotes of her life at school. Though a little boy at Don Bosco’s  then,  I remember her telling me of a colleague called Alina who was much admired and resented at the same time. Resented for her innovative teaching methods that often strained the old school staff to keep up.  And yet much more admired for her dedication and selfless effort to make things happen. Be it in the subjects that she taught or the extra-curricular activities that she guided, there was always a spark towards guiding the simple students of that school to something far above the ordinary.

I remember being very delighted when this Alina Sousa whom I had not yet met, married Matanhy Saldanha who taught the senior section in my school. For the few years that I was at Don Bosco, Matanhy was perceived as a very stern teacher. Most of us little boys scurried for cover when the tall bearded figure strode quickly and purposefully towards his classroom.  When I left Don Bosco I had hardly interacted with Matanhy except for one or two odd biology lectures.

With Alina however it was quite a different story. My mother and she got along very well. I had a talent for oration and I used to participate in every available competition in school and outside. Very often these elocution competitions or debates were on current topics. One very popular topic those days was ‘The Konkan railway, a boon or a bane’. Most of my speeches came from Alina. Every year she would help out with a new topic. I won many competitions in those years but what mattered more was the wisdom I picked up as I delivered these orations. A young boy got a taste of the despair of a few enlighted Goans as they struggled to educate a sleeping Goa to the dangers that were creeping into our homeland. It left a very deep impression on me and even today I feel very strongly for causes related to the conservation of all things Goan.

This was the time when the tiatrists skipped their regular ‘bakaar-mundkaar’ scripts and spoke about stopping the sale of our lands to outsiders. Remo Fernandes sangs songs warning of the rape of Goa. On the streets, practically calling “Aux barricades” were Matanhy , Alina and the activists of those days. Protests were held all over Goa. Matanhy was the voice but Alina was always at his side. She walked with him as he led morchas, she courted arrest with him, endured police beatings and suffered many indignities for the sake of Goa and the Goan. Between the tiring job of a teacher giving more than 100% and an activist shuttling across Goa, she still managed to be a beloved wife. It is difficult to imagine one of that couple without the other. While most politicians have wives who base their existence either on spending their husbands ‘earnings’ or furthering their husbands political rise, here was a woman who was partnering with her husband, fiercely fighting together with him for the ramponkars, for the environment and for related burning issues.

When I did meet her I was in awe at the delicate, graceful, queenly figure always fashionably dressed. I should have known that the stateliness of the tigress only compliments her ferocity.

Both Alina and Matanhy have since been guests at most of our family functions. In fact when I met them last at my nephews Christening in October 2010, I was pleasantly surprised by Matanhys eagerness to work with young people like me based outside Goa. In the subsequent months, he went further to share some of his views and communications with us on e-mail, some of which we managed to publish in the Global Goan newsletters that I work on with Rene baretto, another son of Cansaulim.

Today when the gods have decreed that Matanhy was needed elsewhere it would have seemed the end of a legacy for all who did not know this couple. To those who knew them there was not a shred of doubt that Alina would be now the voice of the same causes they supported, just as much as the left hand takes over when the right is unavailable though they have always existed together.

Alina is now the Cortalim MLA but she does not pick up the banner that Matanhy carried………she was carrying it together with him all along.

Eulogy To Fallen Oaks

Most amongst us will live the plain lives we live. And on our passing, we will be remembered as souls much loved and cherished by their kith and kin. Surely, it is a wonderful land blessed thing to be loved and remembered by your family and friends.

But yet, there are others who while they live, even their seemingly mundane existence, create something far bigger, something alike to a banyan tree where many a stranger can take rest. By the sheer generosity of their personality, creating worlds so big that there is place to welcome all peoples, people much starved for the magic that these great magi have created. Such people on their passing remain no longer mere human beings who have left us but great institutions. Institutions, that will no longer be available to us in person but only in memory.

My family has had the fortune to know a few such souls and the greater misfortune of having seen three such leave us between Christmas and today.

Donna Ida Gonsalves as we knew her was perhaps the last of the great ‘matriarchs’ of a generation that saw the Portuguese leave Goa. As a little boy attending violin classes with my sister at Santa Cruz, I had a long wait before Papa finished work and could pick us up. We walked to Donna Ida’s home and waited there. Donna Ida was blessed with many children and with the responsibility of upbringing some of her children’s children. But she had place for more. I remember walking through the gate and finding jackfruit preserves drying outside, ‘batica’ being served in the verandah and cake and doce on the table. Donna Ida would rush out and giving us a big hug rush to feed us off her infinite larder of food and drink. Many a mother would have done the same but Donna Ida’s went beyond that. 

It was impossible for a friend, a friend’s friend or even a stranger to enter that house and not leave without enjoyed something of her motherly hospitality. Even more astonishing are the sheer numbers of people in their hundreds who must have known her hearth. When her son entered politics and her other children rose to socially prominent positions, the number of visitors increased manifold and yet that spirit was never found lacking. The vast amount of fruits from her estates seldom found their way to the market. They were sent off to all that she knew, relatives, friends, priests, neighbors, the poor and needy. At every wedding, at every funeral, at every birth, at every mourning, Donna Ida would know what traditional custom needed to be followed, what needed to be done or sent.  The hundreds of people at her funeral, from the poor to the polished, from the priest to the sinner, bear testimony to how even the life of a simple housewife can be lived in a fashion grander that many an empress.

A few days before her, Donna Ida’s brother the now famous Maestro Anthony Prabhu Gonsalves passed away. I never met him in person but his was a hollowed and whispered name in our family. A genius, a great musician to emulate and a role model for us children. His graceful wife Melita visited my house whenever she was at her own home nearby. We would look at her in awe as someone who was connected to this legend. The sheer genius of this man was uncovered only recently a few years back when I was researching him for my article on him in a local newsletter. A man way before his time in music, he was named as one of India’s finest violinists in his time and worked with legends like S D Burman and Laxmikant-Pyarelal.  In April 1958, he founded a 110-member Symphony Orchestra. , which performed in the quadrangle of St Xavier's College, Mumbai, and Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Chowpatty, featured singer Manna Dey and Lata Mangueshkar. He paid for it himself ! 

Far back in those days he was one of the pioneers blending his knowledge of western music from Goa with the exposure he received to Hindustani classical. And creating something of a class and genre never known before! Sadly for many years, he lived in obscurity. However, thanks to a few wonderful Goans, he received some recognition in his declining years. Perhaps for reasons similar to those for which Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace, he too never received national awards and recognitions awarded generously to those of much smaller stature and merit. But those citations do not make great men; so Anthony did not need them to become the legend he now is.
In a strange twist of coincidence, the parish of Santa Cruz where Donna Ida lived also lost their parish priest Fr. Cristovao Caldeira. The Reverend who is from my village andhis family and my family’s association goes back generations. He was a priest who being a man of the cloth had a soul as pure and white to match. In these troubling times when the Church often groans under scandal and shame, here was a priest who lived above it all. At home we had always hoped to see him someday donn purple; he reminded us so much of the benevolent Bishop Myriel from Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables’. Like Bishop Myriel, he lived a life of a simplicity almost in shocking contrast to this learning and eminence in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. I recollect how he, much to our regret, was seldom available on his birthday; preferring to retreat to a secret quiet place and spend time in prayer rather than host grand celebrations that his parish would have loved to supply. 

Ever smiling and always with a kind word he never refused a kind word or an act of generosity to anyone who he saw needed it, long before they even had to ask. The nippy ‘Santro’ wizzing from village to village, from patriarchal palaces to poor hovels, he was the Lord’s labourer hard at work in the Lord’s vineyard. I hear he died at the hospital where was carrying the last sacraments to a patient. For a Christian what greater death could there be but that while bring the Lord to those that needed Him

As is often the case, I along with many others lament how we did not spend more time with these wonderful institutions. To have lived and shared time with them would probably have added fertility to our sometimes dry and parched existence. While we light candles and lay wreaths at their graves we must remember that it is no longer our praise that they need. On the contrary, they leave us anecdotes and stories of how they lived their larger lives. We must rush to listen, absorb and learn before the finer details are lost in time. Such has been the purpose of this writing and I pray that many more will add their own experiences with these pillars of society to my own.