It is not everyday that one comes across a light and delightful reading on Goa. I thought it deserved a kind of a review. I chanced to find this book by Afonso de Melo in my University bookstall in Lisbon. It is a second edition, but no reference where and when the first edition was published. That is the style of this book with 206 numbered pages, many of them starting and ending in the middle of a page.
The author introduces himself as a sports journalist who wrote columns for Ajkaal of Kolkata, but also for several in Portugal. We are told that the book is written in Panchatantra style. The book is focused on Colvá (south Goa) which he visits biannually to look up Michael Fernandes who owns a shack named Michael Bob’s and whose daughter is godchild of the author. The visit takes place in October when tourists arrive from Europe and Shiva, a newspaper seller on the beach and converses easily with English, French and German tourists. Michael Fernandes had picked up some Portuguese words like bom dia and boa noite, and a few choice bad words from his mother. He was obssessed with the idea of visiting the beautiful Lisbon which he had never seen but was dying of saudades of being there. He refused to listen to Afonz, the author, when tried to convince him not to exchange the Goan paradise for the hell of Lisbon. After long shots of beer and occasional swigs of rum he would forget that Lisbon existed.
Michael Fernandes is depicted as a devout Catholic believer, but also in karma and that he will be reborn as a middle-classy Lisboner, owning a house in Baixa. The place name sounded good to him, but had no other information except what the lawyers Misquita & Associates, arranging his emigration had told him, without mentioning that it was impossible to live in Baixa Lisboa. Elsewhere the author refers to a dialogue between Camões, Afonso de Albuquerque and D. João de Castro, whose busts were in the Museum near the Kadamba bus terminal, but the only witness to those confabulations was Prakash Bivshet, the curator who did not understand Portuguese.
Describing the weather as sweaty, where one could smell the sweat of the pigs and eggs could cook inside the hens, he wonders how that heat did not provoke yet another miracle of sweat on the incorrupt body of St Francis Xavier. For Michael the Child Jesus of Colvá performed more miracles than St Francis Xavier, though the original child Jesus was no longer in Colvá, but at Rachol Seminary. The child Jesus of Colvá was no longer one, but two. The one in Colvá had a ring of the one in Rachol. In chapter 6 the author expands his findings about St Francis Xavier, all based on the hearsay and the fertile imagination of the author, but attributed to Goans.
Afonso de Melo has quite a few asides about Goan dailies which he classifies as very naive in their reporting, and often tend to refer to events of today as tomorrow’s, suggesting that it could be due to the fact that their online edition is ready on previous night but prints made available in the early hours of the next day.
What about the orange coloured Tiger that gave the title to the book? One can find its explanation (if it is any explanation) in chapter VIII. The orange coloured tiger was only seen by Niranjan Kurdekar, who suffered from hallucinations ever since he lost his wife many years back, but believed she was alive and would sit for hours on a chair beside the empty chair of his dead wife, seemingly in conversation with her. However, there were many in the surrounding villages who mentioned the ferocity of the tiger they had never seen, but had left them maimed in different ways.
The roaring of the tiger was heard once early morning, while Fr Nestor was preaching in the Church of Sacred Heart of Mary in Chandor. He began reciting Hail Holy Queen, but went into a slumber half way. The incorrupt body of St Francis Xavier opened its eyes wide, shocked probably by what was happening. Michael Fernandes did not notice anything, because he was only dreaming of Lisbon.
Michael Fernandes would only mount his shack when his cook Rajendra arrived from Nepal overland, and he had probably brought with him the story of Jim Corbett’s “ The Man Eater of Kumaon” [http://bit.ly/1OOS0cf], whose imaginary shadow injured more people around Colvá than any real tiger anyone ever saw.
At the fag end of the book the author quotes from a book with some veiled emotions a phrase he wished could be his: ”Since Adam was expelled from the paradise, he had never been so close to it again”. Apparently, a methaphor to convey that the Portuguese now feel closer to Goans than ever since the expulsion of their colonial regime. Curiously, the author has no word of sympathy for the Portuguese consulate in Goa.
Teotonio R de Souza is Founder-Director of the Xavier Centre of Historical Research (1979-1994), Fellow of the Portuguese Academy of History (since 1983), retired professor of Universidade Lusófona, Lisboa (1996-2014), author of Medieval Goa (1979,1994,2009), Goa to Me (1994), Goa outgrowing Postcolonialism (2014) and a dozen of edited works and over 200 published articles
