Photo Credit: Vincent Braganza
One has to literary look twice to locate the smiling face of this learned man, squeezed humbly in his modest chair surrounded by huge piles of files and books on law in his first-floor office in Panaji. Once you meet him, however, time just flies.
Chatting with him, he takes you on a voyage down memory lane. "When I was 13, I saw a movie which made a lifetime impact and turned me into a person strongly advocating against the death penalty. I saw that same old movie again recently at one of the IFFIs in Goa and realised how deeply the storyline was carved in my brain,” says Fernando Jorge Colaco, now 86.
Born in a death-penalty free country Goa, (the death penalty had been non-extant from the time Portugal banned it for the metropolitan territory, and all their then overseas territories, by the Law of Abolition dated July 1, 1867), Colaco has stuck with his views and taken the liberty to expand this topic in to two chapters of his soon-to-be-released book - “December 18-19, 1961 - Before, During and After - Memoirs of a 20th Century Goan Voyager” and devoted an independent book - “Return of the Gallows” that will be published next month, in December 2016. “It is my contribution within my limited means to this great cause of humanity,” he humbly shares. and will be released at the Goa Arts and Literature Festival held from December 8-11
Colaco’s book is a memoir with an interspersing of travelogue, autobiographical elements with certain experiences in his professional career and from his private life. The book includes incidents and accidents in time and space around Goa, Colonial Mozambique and other parts of Africa, India and Portugal, other places in Europe where the adventures of life took him. “These are stories of the societies in which I lived, told with utmost sincerity and truth, and exactly how I remember them. Sad and joyful by turn, with the minimal fiction but with sufficient emotion, without which no work of this genre would perhaps sufficiently appeal to the average reader,” he states.
In this long journey, the focus remains on the maelstrom of the Goa Case of December 1961, which overnight replaced the Portuguese flag with the Indian flag and all the ensuing consequences it had on its population, and on the personal lives of many.
For Colaco, it has been a long journey to reach the end of this memoir. From his primary schooling in Beira and lyceum in Goa, to his pursuit for higher studies in Portugal to obtain his law degree at the Faculty of Law of the Universidade of Classica de Lisboa, and then his career as a notary. He was appointed notary on the island of Sao Jorge, Concelho of Calheta, in the Archipelago of the Azores in insular Portugal. He was also appointed to discharge the functions of government advocate in the Julgado Municipal of same Concelho, in the Comarca of Velas of the island.
In 1958 he was transferred to the continent, as notary and civil registrar of the Concelho of Vila Velha de Rodao, in the Province of Beira Baixa.
After completing his legal training as advocate under a senior colleague and practiced occasionally in the capital Comarca of the Province, Castelo Branco, Colaco travelled back to Goa, his homeland on December 26, 1959 and was appointed as the notary of the Comarca of Ilhas de Goa, at Nova Goa, the capital of the ‘Estado da India’ till Goa was liberated from the Portuguese rule and merged with India.
Colaco was the last notary of the Portuguese administration as the post was abolished. He remains a notary of India till date. “I am in the twilight zone now,” quips Colaco, thankful to his family and friends. And as for the thousands of books in his office? “I have spoken to the curator of the Central Library and am in a process of listing my books,” discloses this font of wisdom with a bright light in his eyes.
