The Age of Kali (35 page)

Scarlet flamboya trees corkscrew out of the cobbles. Bushes block the magnificent gateways in to now collapsed convents and overgrown aristocratic palaces. The architrave of a perfect Renaissance arch has rotted to the texture of an old peach-stone. Roots spiral over corniches; tubers grip the armorial shields of long-forgotten Goan dynasties. As you near the chapel, its façade now half-submerged under a web of vines and creepers, there is no sound but for the creak of old timber and the eerie rustle of palms.

The panorama from the chapel’s front steps is astonishing. The odd spire, a vault, a cupola, a broken pediment can be seen poking out of the forest canopy. You look down past the domes and spires of the churches and monasteries, and see the evening light pick out the wandering course of the Mandovi river beyond.

The river is empty now: the docks are deserted; the galleons long sunk. Of one of the greatest cities of the Renaissance world, almost nothing now remains.

‘But of course, despite everything they hung on,’ said Donna Georgina, leaning back on her wickerwork divan. ‘Despite the loss of the trading empire, they ruled us for another three hundred years. They were in Goa for a full two and a half centuries before you
British conquered a single inch of Indian soil; and they were still here in 1960, more than a decade after you all went home again.’

‘Until Nehru threw them out at the liberation of Goa in 1961.’

‘Liberation?’ said Donna Georgina, her face clouding over as quickly as a Goan sky at the height of the monsoon. ‘Did you say
liberation
? Botheration more like!’

I had clearly said the wrong thing, and Donna Georgina Figueiredo was now sitting bolt-upright on her divan, rigid with indignation. We were talking in her eighteenth-century ancestral mansion, not by any means the largest of the Indo-Portuguese colonial
estancias
that still dot Goa, but certainly one of the most perfectly preserved. I had driven to Donna Georgina’s village, Lutolim, along a lagoon edged by coconut groves, breadfruit trees and flowering hibiscus. At the centre of the village was the large white baroque church. In front of it stood a small piazza; to one side was the school, on the other side the taverna, the Good Shepherd Bar. In it, appropriately enough, the village priest was sitting at a table in a white cassock, reading the daily paper. Scattered around the vicinity were the grand houses of the village, and the grandest of them all was the Estancia Donna Georgina.

Inside, a servant had ushered me in to the formal drawing room. On one side, next to an eighteenth-century Indo-Portuguese tallboy, stood a superb tall Satsuma vase. On the walls hung dark ancestral portraits. Other treasures – Macau porcelain, superb statuary, Mannerist devotional images – were dotted around the wooden galleries.

As she entered the room, Donna Georgina clapped her hands. Within seconds another barefoot servant came running down the passage from the kitchen.

‘Francis, Bring Mr Dalrymple a glass of chilled mango juice.
I
will have a cup of tea.’

The servant padded off down the bare wooden floorboards. It was not long afterwards that I made my gaffe about the liberation of Goa.

Donna Georgina clasped her hands and raised her eyes to heaven.

‘Now, understand
thees
, young man,’ she said in an accent heavy with Southern European vowels. ‘When the Indians came to Goa in 1961 it was 100 per cent an invasion. From what were they supposed to be liberating us? Not the Portuguese, because the Portuguese never oppressed us. Let me tell you exactly what it was the Indians were freeing us from. They were kindly liberating us from peace and from security.’

Donna Georgina had fearsome beady black eyes and her hair was arranged in a tight quiff. She wore a flowery Portuguese blouse bought in Lisbon, offset by a severe black skirt. She nodded her head vigorously.

‘We were ruled from Portugal for exactly 451 years and twenty-three days!’ she said. ‘The result of this is that we are completely different from Indians –
completely
different! We Goans have a different mentality, a different language, a different culture. Although we are now under Indian occupation, I feel awkward when I cross the border in to India … everything changes: the food, the landscape, the buildings, the people, the way of life …’

Donna Georgina stared over my shoulder towards the open window: ‘In the Portuguese days we never had to lock our houses at night. Now we can never be sure we are safe even during the day. And you know who we fear most? The Indian politicians. Absolutely unscrupulous people. They have razed our forests, ransacked our properties. They have made life impossible for everyone – particularly all us landowners. They offer
our
land to the people in their election promises: never give anything that belongs to them – oh no, not a pin – but they never think twice about offering people what belongs to others. Oh yes. That’s very easy for them.’

What Donna Georgina said reflected stories I had heard repeated all over Goa. The sheer length of time that the Portuguese had hung on in their little Indian colony – some four and a half centuries of intermingling and intermarriage – had forged uniquely close bonds between the colonisers and the colonised. As a result most Goans still consider their state a place apart: a cultured Mediterranean island, quite distinct from the rest of India. As they quickly
let you know, they eat bread, not
chapattis
; drink in tavernas, not tea-shops; many of them are Roman Catholic, not Hindu; and their musicians play guitars and sing
fados
. None of them, they assure you, can stand the sound of sitars or
shenai
.

Moreover, like Donna Georgina, many educated Goans still talk about ‘those Indians’ and ‘crossing the border to India’, while happily describing their last visit ‘home’ to their cousins in the Algarve or their brothers in Cintra. Absorption in to a wider India, they would admit, had certainly brought prosperity to the previously stagnant colony – but at a price. Public life had become corrupted, and the distinct identity of Goa was being forcibly and deliberately eroded.

Portuguese, for example, was no longer taught in Goan schools; Portuguese place-names were everywhere being Sanskritised; the superb colonial buildings in Panjim were being systematically pulled down to make way for anonymous Indian concrete: the mansion of the Count of Menem, the last of the great Panjim aristocratic townhouses, was destroyed only in 1986 to make way for a six-storey block of flats.

There were, it was true, still some last remaining corners left: the haphazard, narrow cobbled lanes of Fontainhas, for example, the oldest quarter of Panjim. Fontainhas looks like a small chunk of Portugal washed up on the shores of the Indian Ocean. Old spinsters in flowery dresses sit on their verandahs reading the evening papers, chatting to each other in Portuguese. 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 tavernas, walking-sticks in hand, and make their way unsteadily across the cobbles, past the lines of battered 1950s Volkswagen Beetles slowly rusting in to oblivion. A Mediterranean
douceur
hangs palpably, almost visibly, over the streets.

But such corners, insisted Donna Georgina, were becoming
harder and harder to find. For twenty minutes my hostess listed the now familiar litany of complaints.

‘We could not fight the Indians in 1961,’ she said. ‘They were too many. Goa was a small place and could not defend itself. Even today we are only one million people. What can we do against nine hundred million Indians? But their seizure of Goa was an act of force. The majority here were opposed to the Indian invasion. That was why they had to come with their army, their air force and their navy. That day we all cried bitterly. It was the end of the good old days.’

Donna Georgina brought out a small handkerchief and dabbed her eyes.

‘In fact, since 1961 we’ve had two invasions. First it was the Indians. They plundered Goa: cut down our forests and took away our woods. Their politicians created havoc. Then after that it was the turn of the hippies. Disgusting. That’s what those people were.
Dees-gusting
. All that nudism.
And
sexual acts: on the beach, on the roads – even in Panjim.
Panjim!
Imagine: kissing
in public
and I don’t know what else. Disgusting.’

The previous afternoon I had seen what remained of Goa’s once-vibrant hippy community. At Anjuna Beach, instead of the rusting Volkswagens of Fontainhas, a line of Enfield Bullet motorbikes were parked beneath the palm trees. The weekly flea market was packing up as I arrived: a German holy man was returning his stock of Hindu charms to his bag, while under the next palm tree a Mexican bootlegger was putting his remaining cans of imported lager back in to his knapsack. On the dunes by the shore, a bonfire was roaring, and what appeared to be a topless six-a-side female football team – an odd sight anywhere in the world, but an astonishing one in India – was kicking a ball around. A group of bangled backpackers was cheering them on while passing a ten-inch joint from hand to hand.

‘Shoot!’

‘Intergalactic!’

‘Cos-mic!’

In the sixties, Anjuna had been the goal of every self-respecting hippy in Asia. From Hampstead and Berlin, from the barricades of Paris to the opium dens of San Francisco, streams of tie-dyed teenagers crossed Asia to reach this shore and make love by the breakers. Whole nomad communities formed around the beaches: Anjuna, Chapora, Colva and Calangute, previously backwaters barely known even to the sophisticates of Panjim, became mantras on the lips of fashion-conscious acid-heads across Europe and the United States.

But in time, as the sixties turned in to the long hangover of the seventies, the hippies either died of overdoses or went home. The young who come today are mostly students, generally a pretty affluent middle-class bunch who in due course will no doubt cut off their ponytails and become merchant bankers or commodity brokers.

Very few of the genuine diehard flower children of ’67 still remain. Some have become very rich – it doesn’t take much imagination to work out what trade their fortunes have come from – but most of the stayers-on are good-natured old freaks who grow their own, flap around in flared denim, hold forth on dragon lines, the Gaia theory and world harmony, and make ends meet by selling chocolate hash-brownies, aromatherapy oils and Indian waistcoats to the backpackers. This fossilised relic of Haight-Ashbury is actually pretty tame stuff, but you would never guess that from talking to Donna Georgina.

‘Of course, it’s because of
drugs
that their behaviour is like it is,’ hissed my hostess. ‘Disgusting people. Drugs and sexual acts and I don’t know what else. I don’t know which is worse: those hippies or our modern Indian politicians. The Portuguese wouldn’t have allowed either.’

Donna Georgina sipped her tea defiantly. ‘Mr Salazar would have known what to do with those hippies. He wouldn’t have let them behave the way they did.’

The old lady took me around the house. She showed me the great ballroom, where they held the last ball in 1936, and the
sunken cloister where she grew all the essential ingredients for her kitchen – chillies and asparagus, coconut and lemon-grass, tea rose, papaya and balsam.

‘Despite the hippies and the politicians, you seem at least to have maintained your house,’ I said, looking around at the succession of perfectly preserved colonial Portuguese rooms that surrounded us.

‘Thanks to hard work,’ said Donna Georgina. ‘Hard
labour
, I might call it. I’m currently fighting twenty-five lawsuits in an effort to keep the family property intact. That’s right:
twenty-five
of them. Then there are the monkeys: big monkeys who jump on the roof and try to tear it apart. And as for preparing for the monsoon rains, it’s worse than a wedding. The amount of work: checking the drains, making sure nothing leaks … But let me tell you this: it is my duty so to do. It is my duty to my ancestors, to myself
and
to society.’

We ended up in front of the ancient
oratoria
: a cupboard-like object which opened up like a tabernacle to reveal ranks of devotional images, crucifixes, sacred hearts and flickering candles. Twice every day, the household met there to say a decade of the rosary. On the wall beside it, Donna Georgina had hung a pen-and-ink drawing of the Holy Family.

‘I drew it myself,’ she explained, seeing where I was looking. ‘The baby is Jesus and the lamb that he is feeding symbolises humanity. The old lady is St Anne, Jesus’s grandmama. All the ancient families of Goa have St Anne as their patron saint.’

Donna Georgina paused, leaving the last phrase hanging in the air.

‘It’s entirely through St Anne’s intercession and God’s protection that this house is standing and that I am still alive. People always ask me: “Living alone, you must have someone to look after you. Who is it?” To which I reply: “God Almighty, Jesus Christ and St Anne.”