"Some Other Country" - INDIA CURRENTS (California - June 2014)

Night had fallen on Melbourne by the time I had gotten through immigration and customs. I made my

way through the crowd of smiling people, some holding up “Welcome Home!” signs. For a moment, I entertained the possibility that at least one of them could be for me. In the arrivals area, I found a quiet spot and, fortunately, free wifi – always such a boon to itinerants. There was just enough power on my phone to send a quick message to let my folks know I had arrived safely. For a long while, I stood by my luggage cart and eyed the exit. I was not ready, just yet, to leave the neutral space of the airport, and step into terra incognita.

Sure, I had found myself in this same situation many times before. But it never ceases to feel daunting, that alienness of being on the precipice of starting life anew. En route to Australia, I broke my journey in Beirut. At immigration in Lebanon, I surmised that the officer was asking me if I spoke Arabic, but being unable to respond in that tongue, I apologized in English. “How come?” He interrogated. “You were born in Kuwait,” he said, jabbing his finger at the tell-tale information in my American passport.

Just a few weeks prior, the moustachioed official collecting departure cards at Bombay’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport – which will always be Sahar Airport to me from my childhood memories of transiting through there between Kuwait and Goa to see my grandmother – insisted on speaking to me in Hindi. As if to go with the nationalistically inclined name change of the airport, he questioned my inability to articulate myself fluently in “the mother tongue” that is completely unknown to my mother who was born and raised in East Africa. Waving my Overseas Citizenship of India card in my face, he chastised me, in Hindi, for not speaking the language of “your country.” I thought of the title of that novel, the one in which James Baldwin writes, “The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world.” I thought of 1961, the year in which Goa ceased being Estado da Índia Portuguesa and, without the benefit of a local referendum to ascertain the will of its people, was handed over to India some fourteen years after a certain “Tryst with Destiny.” I signed my Portuguese name on the exit form, and departed the country that neither of my parents, nor I, had been born in.  

“It’s not just another country for you,” a friend remarked. “It’s a whole other continent.” Nonetheless, some things were immediately familiar, I thought to myself as I prepared the cash to pay the taxi

driver near the end of the ride from Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport. For instance, there was the crowned head on the heavy currency – the paradoxically common royal visage on the coinage of the Commonwealth. I remember her well from those days of scrounging together my all too uncommon wealth as a student in London. And English is spoken here – that other imperial legacy. I thought of 1968, the year in which England withdrew the right of entry to British passport holders from its former colonies and how the lie was given to the concept of the Commonwealth. I thought of “Rivers of Blood,” Enoch Powell’s speech delivered that same year, in which he proclaimed, “Whatever drawbacks attended the immigrants arose not from the law or from public policy or from administration, but from those personal circumstances and accidents which cause, and always will cause, the fortunes and experience of one man to be different from another's.” The rising anti-immigrant sentiment resulted in the turning away of exiles, some of them South Asians from once British East Africa. Never mind that they were part of Britain’s history, or that they spoke “the same language.”

There was an awkward silence when the cab driver finally ended the call he had been on from the time he had picked me up. I had gathered from the phone conversation that he was Punjabi. “How long have you lived here?” I enquired. “Ten years.” After another protracted pause, he asked, “You’re here for work?” I nodded. “Yes. New job.” He said, “Good, good.” Leaning forward in my seat, I queried, “So, some years ago, there were those attacks, no? On Indian students… Some were murdered?” His head bobbed in assent. “But it is safe. You know… just mind your own business. You do your work and you go home after and everything will be fine.”

I thought about whose home this country really is and I thought of homelessness. I thought of 1869 and the ironically named Aboriginal Protection Act, which led to the Stolen Generations of state-abducted indigenous children. I thought of Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence, which was turned into a film and tells the story of just such Aboriginal children who had been taken away from their families. I thought of the earliest South Asians to come to this country, the so called “Afghans” who served as cameleers in the 1860s, transporting goods across Australia’s deserts - Muslim men who married into Aboriginal communities. I thought of the migrant who goes everywhere and belongs nowhere. “This is your stop,” the driver announced as he slowed down. “All the best!”

This article appears in the June 2014 issue of India Currents. A shorter version of it can be read in The Goan.

"The Difference between Deserts and Beaches: Sands of a Goan Childhood" - SEMANA DE CULTURA (Goa - 2013)

“Hindi! Hindi! HINDI!” he kept saying, his voice escalating with each utterance. The Arab lad was, at most, a year or two older than me. I was sitting on a chair, hands firmly gripping its sides, paralysed. I was not scared. Even now, I know that what I felt course through my four-year-old body, like a red hot fever, was shame. The boy ran out of the store when the adults entered. I felt a wave of relief wash over me as I saw my father come in with the proprietor. But something changed for me that day, and there was no going back. On the ride home, I did not utter a word of what had happened. I was different. And different was not good.

I would accompany my dad on his work visits to the little shops and grocery stores around Kuwait City, on occasion. He worked for an American company that would send him out to service cash registers around town. I would have to go along if I had the day off from school. There were times when it was fun: the shopkeepers would bestow a fistful of candy on me. Other times, my dad would instruct me to sit still while he finished his work. I would be bored out of my skull, waiting and waiting for him to wrap up the repairs. Playing outside in the scorching heat and away from parental supervision was out of the question. It was the 1970s. There was not then the plethora of digital paraphernalia to keep a middle class child occupied, and I was yet to discover the joy of books.

At Carmel School, I was one of hundreds of Goan children. It described itself as an Indian Catholic institution, and was run by nuns. My teachers were of various South Asian ethnicities, including Malayali, Singhalese, and Goan. The only non-subcontinental instructor I can recall having was my first Arabic teacher. Sure, there were other communities that made up Kuwait’s large international work force where the natives themselves were a minority. Paths crossed in personal interactions, but they were the exception. It could have been segregation by design, or sticking close to the familiarity of one’s own while trying to get by in a foreign land. Or both. 

Mom knew a Filipina seamstress whom she had sew a pink dress for my sister’s birthday, one year. When she came by to make alterations, she would fill my mother in on the latest goings on among her circle of friends. Some of them were maids in dire circumstances. They were looking for new employers, because they were unhappy with their current situation and could not stay in the country without a sponsor. Did my mom know if one of her Kuwaiti bosses was looking to hire, she would ask. There was the Yemeni caretaker responsible for the upkeep of the complex we lived in. He had a small room outside our building, which was one of a pair of twin blocks of flats. My parents once requested him to have me wait at his place after school because they would both be late from work. He sat me down on the rugs on the floor in his room among his friends, and I felt rather grown up as we sipped hot black tea from petite glasses in which sugar cubes, piled high, were slowly dissolving. From video footage my cousin shot on his visit to Kuwait last year, I was surprised to see that the flats in which I had spent my childhood still stood. They were dwarfed by tall skyscrapers of glass that blindingly reflected the sun.

Surrounded by Kuwait’s diversity, I knew I was Goan, because what else could I be ensconced as I was within a cocoon of community institutions in the tiny Arabian desert kingdom. A liberal dose of prejudice also helped craft my burgeoning cultural insularity. No, you’re not like Nabil (the boy who lived next door); yes, Nabil’s family are Christian, but they’re not Catholic and they’re Pakistani, I was instructed. Maria is Goan, true, but she’s a maid; yes, Filipinas are Catholics as well but, no, a Goan maid would be a better employee, I was taught to decipher. Mangaloreans were a tricky lot, I came to learn, what with their ‘Goan Catholic’ names and Konkani-speaking ability but, no, they were also not like us... Between being surrounded by Goan classmates at school and attending Catechism classes with some of those same little people at Holy Family Church on Fridays, which is when Sabbath services were held to coincide with the weekly holiday, being Goan in Kuwait was just about as commonplace as hating the fact that there was but a brief hour of cartoons to watch on television. 

There was only one channel. Because it carried programming in Arabic, English, and the occasional screening of a Bollywood film, there was no guarantee that even that hour of children’s programming was sacrosanct, as it was sometimes interrupted by the call to prayer or breaking news. Sandstorms periodically wreaked havoc on transmissions, delivering static instead of Tom and Jerry. Having waited all day for it, there was one time when I was so disappointed at my favourite show being suspended because of a signal failure that I attacked the television with a long-handled broomstick. It was a good thing that our miniscule black and white CRT set had a glass screen as thick as Sheldon Cooper’s sarcasm – both inescapably bad television.

That scarring moment in the shop when my difference was pointed out to me so unforgettably must have informed my realization that the hole at the top of my nose was something I was not supposed to have. I asked my father about it. Pointing to the space between my eyes, I whined, “Why do I have this? No one else does. I don’t want it.” He stopped working on the kitchen cabinet he was fixing, and smiled. “It’s so that if you got lost, and we have to describe to people how to find you, we’ll be able to say: ‘He’s the only boy in the entire world with a hole on his nose!’” No one else in the world, I mused... But my wonderment was short-lived, and my angst struck again with a vengeance. Looking at a photograph of myself, I saw the hole again as if for the first time. It was staring back at me – dead centre like a third eye between the other two. This time, I went to my mother.

She looked stricken at my query. “It’s because I was sewing when I was pregnant with you. They told me not to, but I did anyway. They said that for the first born I should go home to have the baby. There was an eclipse, and I pricked myself by accident.” I took in this information with horror. “You mean you poked me with a needle while I was still inside of you?” I nearly shouted in disbelief. From the look in her eyes, I realized my mother had never revealed this incident to anyone else before. 

It took me many years to understand what the guilt I saw on my mother’s face was really about – why she had forced herself to believe it was the eclipse that had caused me to be marked. What home would she have chosen to have her first born? Her father had died in Merces, and her mother in Mombasa. In fact, my grandfather had returned to Goa, knowing that his end was near. He brought his youngest, my mother, with him. The British Africa she was born in had now been relegated to the chapters of colonial history, and having taken up my father’s citizenship after they were married in Kuwait, she was no longer a Kenyan national. And so her children would be born not in her place of birth, nor in Goa where their father was from, but in yet another alien land.

Often unintentionally, my parents recreated the Goa they knew in our modest flat in Kuwait. An indescribable smell accosted my olfactory sense, one day, as I walked in the door after having been dropped off by the school bus. “What is that?” I enquired of my parents, my nose crinkling at the unfamiliar stench. “Rice. Goa rice,” they said proudly, my mother ladling a spoon of the characteristically husk-stained grains onto a plate for me. Not even that combined look of hurt and horror – like they had been hit in the gut – could compete with my revulsion. “I don’t want any!” I said before turning on my heel. My parents let their firstborn brat be hungry that afternoon in retribution for his cultural betrayal. Even now, when I picture Goa, it is as the verdant paddy rice fields tended by my grandmother in her village in Aldona, a breeze caressing the tops of grain-laden stems that sway as stark white egrets take wing. It makes it all the more peculiar why I still have no palate for rice and fish curry – that staple diet of my ancestors.

It is a mystery to me how my folks came into possession of paddy rice so far away from its origin. But my guess would be that they acquired it from one of those many ‘uncles’ whom I came to see as part of my extended family. Mostly in working class professions, they might have been from my father’s village, or friends of friends. There were ‘shippies,’ or tarvoti, like Uncle John who travelled frequently between Goa, Kuwait, and other places, stopping by our home while in transit to drop off some contraband, rice included I suppose. John, who was very fond of me, stands out in my mind as a kind man who bore more than a passing resemblance to the then Crown Prince. Sheikh Saad of the Al-Sabah dynasty, rumour had it, was of mixed race birth. My parents tried to explain to me that I would no longer see John after we went to visit him in the hospital after many weeks of him having not come by. I could tell he was in pain though he put on a bright smile when he saw me. Whenever I saw Prince Saad on the news, thereafter, I secretly hoped that it was really John who had gone on to assume his alter ego full time. But I could not square away seeing his mother, clad in black and tearful, being commiserated with by my parents on the steps outside Holy Family.  

My family was part of the Kuwait Goans Association whose activities included charitable work and annual events, like the Christmas shindig. More informally, there were house parties and picnics. Of the latter, one that sticks out was an excursion that involved a long ride by bus. It was hot and the flies were merciless, but there was much merriment as songs were sung, sandwiches divvied up, and cups of cola passed around into which had been swirled miniscule amounts of precious bootleg liquor. When we arrived at our destination, I was grateful for the opportunity to finally stretch my legs. The sight that greeted me was less welcome. For as far I could see, there was nothing but sand. “What is this?” I interrogated, quite incredulous that this wasteland could be any one’s idea for a good place to have a picnic. “This is Kuwait,” my father responded cryptically. I had long given up on trying to understand why adults could never give it to you straight (except for when you had done something wrong and got caught, and then there was no stopping their verbosity...). 

“Look, look!” another man standing nearby exclaimed. A few others came over, further restricting my view of what they were looking at beyond the dunes. “Ah, yes,” someone said. “Bedouins.” Though I craned my neck, I saw nothing. As I imagine it now, here were two tribes regarding each other from across the desert sand: the natives of Kuwait on one end, the Goan migrants on the other. “The day will come when all this will be a city,” speculated one of the onlookers, breaking the silence. “Our children will drive on the roads they build through here,” a woman added. Another pregnant pause followed as I wondered if the adults were experiencing a collective mirage. Slowly, people peeled away and busied themselves with setting up for the picnic: tents, food, games, and more. It ended up being a much better time than I had expected.

A picnic is also what I recollect as my first memory of Goa at the tail end of the seventies. I want to say it was on my first visit, but my mother tells me she had brought me to Goa as an infant, previously. No matter – this was my first memory of a place that I had heard so much of, but never knew, so it might as well have been my first time. I remember that family outing to the beach, with several of our relatives, so well, because I saw a familiar figure lounging on the sand. Long blond locks, blue eyes, and a loin cloth. I was awestruck. “Mom, mom!” I gushed. “It’s Jesus!” My mother, simultaneously embarrassed and amused, joined the party in giggling as she shushed me. The young hippie who was in earshot laughed too. I was puzzled about what all the fuss was over.

***

Just before I turned nine, my parents sent me to St. Peter’s School in the hills of Panchgani, Maharashtra. It had been the European Boys School, formerly. Attending the institution was my first experience of an India outside Goa. Having planned an eventual return to their roots, my parents had probably thought it prudent to culturally acclimate their son beforehand. But the boarding school was trapped in its own post-Independence identity crisis. It needed to be British enough to retain the caché of elitism that attracted the well-heeled to have their children schooled there, but desi enough to cater to the nostalgic requirements of parents from the diaspora. At the risk of making the comparison, I cannot help but ponder if the Zanzibar-born Parsi rock star Freddie Mercury, who also went to St. Peter’s, felt just as out of place there as I did. 

My school holidays were spent either in Kuwait, or with my grandmother in Aldona. I completed high school in Goa in 1990, joining my family who, by then, had repatriated from Kuwait. Other than when they had been on vacation, this was their first time back as fulltime residents after leaving Goa

in the sixties, shortly upon the transfer of power of the enclave from Portugal to India. The discovery of oil in the Middle East, during that same period, had led to a large demand for foreign labour to transform the various emirates into modern urban oases. Goans were among those who heeded the call in large numbers. About a year after my parents returned voluntarily, the Iraq invasion of Kuwait brought several people I had grown up with ‘back’ to Goa. We were the lost generation: Goans our entire lives, suddenly plunged into a foreign place called home. For some, there was no getting over the culture shock. Like many other ‘Gulfie Goans’ of my generation, I went abroad to continue my college education. My journey to California called for a change of planes in a country I thought I would never see again. My non-Kuwaiti blood having disbarred me from being a citizen, I was only permitted to view my birthplace from the airport. There was war damage that was still being repaired. In the window, looking out onto Kuwait, I caught a reflection of the t-shirt I had decided to wear for the trip. It said GOA.

While in college in California, I visited a thrift shop where I rummaged through the used books section and found a copy of The Rape of Kuwait. I paid twenty five cents for the book – diminutive in size despite its heavy title. In one go, I consumed it in its entirety: tales of the marauding invaders who pulled babies out of incubators and who plundered the land of my beginnings with all the restraint of comic book villains, until the gallant Americans came to the rescue. Reading about the atrocities, I felt something course through my teenaged body that I had never felt before – the red hot fever of nationalism. Jean Sasson’s hastily written book, I learned later, was part of a huge public relations effort that had been orchestrated to drum up support for the Persian Gulf War in the United States and around the world. I believe I ended up donating the book back to the thrift shop.

Last year, I was awarded a doctoral degree by the University of London for my thesis on Goan characters in postcolonial and diasporic fiction about displacement. My academic pursuit, clearly, has mirrored my personal trajectory and that of my family’s. Often, I think about the confrontation from my childhood in that shop in Kuwait and of the shame I felt that day. I mull over whether that boy might still be where I left him. As for the hole on the bridge of my nose – no bigger than a grain of sand – it is still there but, now, I enjoy it because it is different.

Semana de Cultura (2013) is currently only available in print. This piece also appears in the Winter 2015 issue of Mizna, and an excerpt can be read in The Goan.

"Looking for Goa at Midnight: The Cartography of Loss" - SEMANA DE CULTURA (Goa - 2011)

Passports and Maps - A Family History

I was born free.

It is true that neither of my passports is from the country in which I was born. And one of them is not in fact my passport anymore. But I was born free.

Both of my parents, as their parents before them, lived in colonies. My father was born in Goa two years before India won its independence from Britain and at which time Goa was still occupied by the Portuguese. Two months before the decolonization of India, my mother was born in Kenya, which was then and continued to be a British colony for almost as long as Goa remained under Portugal’s dominion. They were not among Midnight’s Children.

Having laid his wife to rest in the Goan section of a Mombasa cemetery in 1958, my grandfather, who by this time had gone blind, wished to return to Goa knowing he would die there. He took his youngest daughter, my mother, with him. The rest of her siblings and their progeny would, in time, scatter themselves across the world. Besides India and Kenya, they also live in Sweden, England, Canada, Australia, and the United States.
When my father found out his future wife was to enrol in typing school, he did the same. I believe it is what destined me to be a writer. My fingers took to the old manual typewriter my parents had far more easily than they did to a computer keyboard. The clack of metallic keys accompanied the conception of the first words I ever had printed in a newspaper as a teenager. And that was long before I formally learned how to type in community college in the United States. The early 1960s saw my parents, both the youngest in their families, take bicycle rides on the dusty red roads of Merces, Ilhas, which is where my mother’s family is from, and alongside the lush green paddy fields of Panarim, Bardez, where my father grew up.  

My father’s parents once lived in Portugal. It was before their little Goa briskly changed partners in a dance that whisked them around the world over two short days in December 1961. Though they never left Goa, they were citizens of two different nations in their lifetime. Three of their four children, including my father, worked in the Arabian Gulf. The Ferrão children of my generation were born in Kuwait, except the eldest. Following tradition, my oldest aunt wanted to have her first child in Goa with my grandmother in attendance. My only other cousin born in Goa was the daughter adopted by my uncle, who did not migrate to the Middle East. Today, in addition to India, my paternal cousins also reside in various parts of North America.

By some coincidence, my father shares his name with his mother-in-law, Felicidade, whom he had never met. Her name bears the same root as my father’s – the Latin felicitas. He was named for his father’s brother Felix, who mysteriously left Goa. Among my grandfather’s effects was found a letter he had written but never sent his brother. It was meant to be mailed to Italy. In the last reported sighting of my great uncle, he turned in recognition of his name being called out, a name that means happiness. He looked away and kept walking. It was in the Persian port of Abadan where the plague was running rampant. 

In Iran, perchance, there is a family that does not know where their father came from. My kin has been spread far and wide, but there is not much that separates my family from so many other middle class Goans or, indeed, other postcolonials who have dispersed beyond their homelands. I lay out my family’s travels not to provide a source of wonderment, but to consider the cartography of loss. What does it mean to be Goan without having been born in Goa or to no longer be resident upon its red earth? I do not use loss here to imply the sadness that arises from not having something anymore. Is it possible to miss something you never had to begin with? Indeed, melancholia informs what I attempt to explore here, something akin to the Portuguese word saudades. Yet it is not even the smouldering yearning that glows like embers at the edges of a burning map, singeing away time and places past. Can one be nostalgic for what they never possessed?

My once Portuguese father and British mother suddenly turned Indian in the postcolonial, freewheeling 1960s. Well, if it could happen to the “hippies” that went native, then why not my parents? As Europe and America’s flower children made their way east, my parents made their way to the Middle East. It was here that they became Indian, constantly reminded of this fact not only through the passports they now had, but also the special privileges afforded them: special schools for their children, special treatment under the law, and special words reserved only for their kind. But it was also here that they found community with hundreds of other expatriates like themselves. Their earnings, far more than they had ever made before, helped cushion all the specialness they felt in their non-home away from home. And when they did return to Goa decades later, it was unlike the place they had left. Like them, their homeland had also changed.

I belong to the first generation of Goan children born after the end of colonial rule. And unlike my parents and their parents before them, I was born an Indian citizen. But that is odd really, for I was not born in independent India. I hold the irony of my birth, marking me as one of a legendary cohort, so close to my heart that I could not give up my Indian passport when I reluctantly became an American citizen. When asked to relinquish proof of previous citizenship, I said I had lost it. Did I ever really have it to surrender anyway? I was born Indian because I was not allowed to be a citizen of Kuwait. I have a passport-shaped hole in my life; an ersatz citizenship mapped not by lands of residence but, instead, by their loss. The traces of this invisible geography are in the names passed down between generations like stories, in storied sightings of the lost, in lost letters to addresses unknown, in the unknown locations of distant graves, and in the distant birth of babies beneath unfamiliar stars.

I was born free. Free of any country.

***

The Other Midnight Child

“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”
Jawaharlal Nehru’s words that announced the independence of India have always sounded like an incantation to me. Their magical quality is captured nowhere better than in Midnight’s Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie, himself born in 1947 and just a few days after my mother. In the novel, the newly liberated nation’s firstborns, brought forth from their mother’s wombs between the stroke of the midnight hour and 1 AM on 15 August, 1947, embody the fledgling country’s ambitions and aspirations; they possess an ethereal telepathic connection symbolizing their shared earthly trajectories. In the midst of this enchantment, however, is a desperately gnawing anxiety. It is the anxiety of separation. Two children are switched at birth in the novel, and are separated from their biological families. This cleaving is not only symbolically that of Britain and the erstwhile Indies, but also India and Pakistan – the tempering of the rampant joy of independence by loss. This torn postcolonial map is also haunted by other missing pieces. Like my father in Goa and my mother in Kenya, midnight’s other children were still asleep. And what was to say that they would want their freedom, once they awoke to it, to be cleaved to the new nation?

In Mirrorwork, a compilation of writing co-edited with Elizabeth West, published in 1997 to commemorate 50 years of Indian writing on the anniversary of India’s independence, Rushdie notes of his allegorical novel: 

After its publication ... I learned that the idea of a long saga-novel about a child born at the exact moment of independence – midnight, August 14-15, 1947 – had occurred to other writers, too. A Goan poet showed me the first chapter of an abandoned novel in which the “midnight child” was born not in Bombay, but in Goa. 

While Rushdie’s own “midnight child” could conceivably have been a Goan born in Bombay – indeed there is much evidence of such vibrant characters in both the book and life – the genesis of the novel’s protagonist, the very story, and hence the symbolization of India would be impossible if not for a Goan character. It is Mary Pereira, the nursemaid, who switches the children at birth – one from a well-off family and the other from a disadvantaged background - and changes their destinies in an attempt to effect social equality. At the moment of India’s birth, Goa was a component of the landmass of the new nation, but was not then constitutive of its polity. Nevertheless, Midnight’s Children implies the impossibility of thinking of India without Goans. 



Mary Pereira need not have been a Goan character, but there is particular significance in her so being. She re-emerges later on in the book as Mrs. Braganza, borrowing her name from Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese Infanta who was married to the English King, Charles II in 1662. The arranged marriage, a custom thought of as so quintessentially South Asian, was an alliance between the two colonial powers. Portugal acknowledged Britain’s pre-eminence by including one of its Indian ports in the royal dowry. Perhaps Portugal gave up that possession thinking it far less significant than the natural harbour of Goa, but the gift was to become a major factor in the establishment of British commerce in the East. That port was Bombay.

In having Mary Pereira/Braganza be Goan, the author brings into focus the significant role of his character’s native land in the European imperial history of South Asia. The Goan character draws to mind the ports sought out by the Europeans in their search for the fabled Indies and the harbours that were to become the centres of imperial power. Mary Pereira also evokes the figure of Goa as one of the earliest colonies and then the last foreign dominion in what was to become modern day India.

Though adopting the Braganza moniker, Mary Pereira arguably challenges heteropatriarchal constructions of nation, unlike her namesake. Catherine’s marriage to Charles II was to secure the bond between two colonial powers, but it was clear that it was to be an unequal coalition – the queen signifying the feminized position Portugal was expected to occupy. Mary, on the other hand, switches a rich child with a poor one in an attempt to impress Joseph, the man she loves, who is a communist radical. Rushdie’s use of the biblical names of the parents of the Christ child is deliberate; yet, where there should be an immaculate conception, there is anything but. Mary and Joseph of Midnight’s Children ultimately never have a relationship. Additionally, the switched children – of different economic and religious backgrounds – are raised by parents of other means and faiths. Through Mary, Rushdie destabilizes familial order consigned by biology, culture, and economics, and instead envisions a postcolonial independence where such constraints will bear no consequence to the new nation. Saleem, due to Mary’s intervention, is welcomed into a life of privilege and is chosen by a newspaper as the midnight child, born at the same moment as India’s independence. Nonetheless, Rushdie attempts to mitigate Mary’s maternal instincts gone awry by making her so consumed with guilt that she signs on to become a nanny to Saleem, the chosen male child of midnight.

At the same time as Mary Pereira had her hand in creating the midnight child of Rushdie’s book, what became of the other midnight child, the subject of an abandoned novel set in Goa? Is that child forever lost? The position of Goans in relation to the recently formed Indian union in 1947 was an ambivalent one – a part yet apart – somewhere between a child unseen because she or he had not been fully authored into existence and Mary Pereira who from the sidelines becomes involved in a moment that emblematically represents the new nation. In this regard, Goans of the homeland and the diaspora were similarly displaced, mapped onto other lands and still looking for their own Goa.

If Rushdie acknowledges the importance of Goan identity to the emerging India of Midnight’s Children, Victor Rangel-Ribeiro does the reverse. In his introductory foreword to Donna Young’s Mirror to Goa (2009), the diasporic writer argues

that despite Portugal’s long and determined attempts to impose a Portuguese culture on Goa, once Goans began to emigrate en masse to Bombay in search of a university education and well-paying jobs, we became exposed to liberal ideas and to India’s push to independence; the more deeply we breathed in the heady winds of freedom, the more tenuous became Portugal’s grip on our hearts and minds.

Rangel-Ribeiro’s observation of the burgeoning thoughts of liberation amongst the Goan diaspora in Bombay extends to Goans in other parts of the world; the quest for freedom would involve transnational influences from across the diaspora. 

Tristão de Bragança Cunha (1891-1958), often referred to as the father of Goan nationalism, and poet ManoharRai Sar Dessai (1925-2006), both French educated, could not help but feel the limits to their freedom and the desire for self-emancipation in the colonial context. Maria Aurora Couto chronicles Sar Dessai’s firm grasp of his identity when deemed alien upon his return to a country he thought of as his own. In Goa: A Daughter’s Story (2004), Couto writes of Sar Dessai’s experience that

... he was disqualified in the 1950s from the first job he applied for when he returned from his studies in France. It was a government job at the prestigious Elphinstone College in Bombay. [It was] because he was a foreign national, a condition over which he had no control. “I did not choose to become a Portuguese citizen,” he argued. “I am Indian. No one listened. We were perceived as foreigners within our own country ...”

As the movement for India’s independence intensified, the effects were felt in Goa where demonstrations led to a crackdown by the Portuguese army in 1946. Tristão de Bragança Cunha and other activists were taken to Portugal where they were imprisoned in Peniche. If the administration was repressive in Goa, then “Salazar’s regime was even more repressive at home,” Couto remarks. As a result, she goes on to say, de Bragança Cunha “[met] a quality of mind and spirit in Portuguese jails which made his life within bars far more enjoyable than when he was free but compelled to live in exile.”

Goa: A Daughter’s Story recounts such episodes of Goan deliberations over identity and emancipation to establish that aspirations for liberty came from Goa’s own people, even if the end of Portuguese rule was achieved with the Indian army’s use of force in 1961. Fourteen years after the rest of India awoke to freedom, Nehru gave the order that would bring to a close 451 years of Portuguese colonization in Goa. Even as Couto narrates episodes of self-determination, she observes that following Liberation “... there was both jubilation and consternation within Goa. Worry about change, hope for the future ... Change is seldom welcome; it is even less welcome when fraught with so many imponderables.”

I often wonder why the Goan author who began writing about the midnight child abandoned his novel. Did the writer believe that child could not be the herald of freedom if India was liberated but Goa was not? There is clearly more to the story of this child. I would like to think that it continues to look for Goa at midnight, seeking its many people, distributed across the globe like a fragmented map. There is so much for this child that is imponderable, as Couto muses. Among what is most imponderable is all that is yet to come, for freedom is ever-evolving. The magic of midnight is that one is never certain whether it is the end of an old day or the start of a new one.

***

Goa is Not Here

Europe was looking for Goa, even though they did not know it then. Six years after Columbus’ 1492 voyage for the Indies that would instead lead to the discovery of the “New World” and the decimation of its native peoples, Vasco da Gama found himself on the shores of Calicut. His voyage to Asia would not have been possible without the knowledge of navigators in Malindi on East Africa’s coast in present day Kenya. African familiarity with the sea routes to Asia came from trade between the two continents, evidencing contact between the locations well before European colonization. Following da Gama’s entree into South Asia, Affonso de Albuquerque won Goa for the Portuguese on 25 November, 1510.

What followed was a nearly half-millennium long colonial saga that would see the Inquisition, the bringing of African slaves to Goa, religious conversion, and the exodus of persecuted peoples. None of this happened without the participation of some Goans themselves, it must be stated, for the business of colonization requires collaborators. At some point in this history, as previously noted, Bombay became the gift that Portugal bestowed upon England. It also became a conduit for Goans between the two empires in India. From British India, many Goans found their way to other British colonies, East Africa included.

When she left Goa, did Felicidade know she would be laid to rest in another country, so far from her own native land? Or that her children and grandchildren would journey even farther afield? In 1993 her youngest daughter, my mother, emigrated to the United States along with her family, under an African quota. I was to enter the new country of my residence because of Kenya, a place I had never known. In 2008, it finally became untenable for me to continue to hold on to my Indian citizenship. That year, I voted in my first U.S. election, bringing to power a man of part-Kenyan origin, America’s first black president.

Just before the historic election, I had the opportunity to visit Kisumu, where the Obama family is from. The 44th U.S. President’s Kenyan origins had, until recently, been the reason why there was so much suspicion about his birthright to that office. I also visited the sites of my family’s own history in Kenya, including Felicidade’s last resting place in Mombasa. Since living in the United States, I have not been to Kuwait. My last time there was during a transit stop on our voyage as immigrants to California, which was to become our new domicile. Northern California and South London see most of my time currently, though I routinely visit my family who once again live in Goa. Given my past, to this day, and maybe forever, there is a question that will always confuse me: “Where are you from?” Is there solace in knowing that even the President of the United States has himself been repeatedly asked that question?

The question of origin places the diasporic of Goan origin at the moment of midnight, disorientalized and looking for Goa. In this quest, there is no map, only a fragmented cartography. There is an inherent paradox to maps: They orient a seeker, not unlike the colonial quest for Goa, promising a kind of knowledge of discovery; even so, what is a map if not a conglomeration of lacunae? The indeterminate can only be ascertained upon the actual journey and there is no guarantee against going astray, as Columbus’ excursion attests. The diasporic disoriental loses sense of direction, becoming Goan not through a sense of place but by its loss. For the diasporic Goan, being Goan is not about Goa. It is about Goa. Around it. Such a configuration does not preclude Goa; it additionally sets it beyond the apparent parameters. An example of this is the aforementioned transnational influence that informed the liberation of Goa.

Fundamentally, there still needs be a difference between the diasporic disoriental and the marauding colonial explorer. It is a difference that must go deeper than cosmetic multiculturalism. Selma Carvalho’s Into the Diaspora Wilderness (2010) narrates the cultural history of the Goan diaspora. The author includes an anecdote about a group of postcolonially exiled, middle class Goan East Africans she was acquainted with. While on the one hand “[their] Africa belonged to colonial Britain,” there was no denying the African cultural influences they had imbibed, though they might be unlikely to acknowledge them. Among the various places in the diaspora Carvalho has found herself, East Africa is not one of them. This notwithstanding, in revealing the influence of that region upon the displaced Goan East Africans, she also reveals its influence in the formation of her sense of self as a diasporic Goan when she writes:

It was only when I grew up that I realised Malaika wasn’t a song about Goa, but an outpouring of [the exiles’] love for Africa. The Kenyan song, meaning angel in Swahili and Arabic, echoed the social struggles felt by native Africans at the time. Whether any East African Goan ever shed a tear for the social unrest, poverty and turmoil of indigenous Africans is difficult to say.

The histories of modern Africa and South Asia have run parallel and often intersected because of colonization, even when the colonized could not see the similarities they shared with other oppressed people.
Undoubtedly, Africa has influenced the formation of a Goan sense of self within and without Goa and even at the hour of Liberation. As Couto relates,

Nehru’s military action was the result of many compulsions, not least the pressure brought on him by freedom fighters in the African colonies. Furthermore, the action was crucial for the morale of African nationalists. Goa provided the precedent. It fuelled the intensity of their struggle for independence.

Freedom, it would seem, is a contagious thing. It cannot be constrained to the location of its birth, leaping forth to disorient and negate captivity elsewhere. All the same, disorientation cannot simply mean placelessness; it cannot preclude a sense of responsibility for the locations in which one finds themselves. In The Location of Culture (2008) Homi Bhabha critiques the “kind of global cosmopolitanism ... that configures the planet as a concentric world of national societies extending to global villages,” creating a veneer of multicultural harmony that involves diasporic subjects. These are the kinds of places, I would add, where “social unrest, poverty and turmoil” may exist, but for which no one “[sheds] a tear” because they see themselves, ironically, as residents who are conveniently extra-territorial and therefore not responsible for the plight of others. Liberation comes in many forms, but one cannot be free when witness to the captivity of others.

Goa is in the many places of the diaspora, just as the reverse is true. The broken topography that connects midnight’s other children connotes loss. But this is only because what is gained is often indiscernible - much like freedom itself, which can so easily be taken for granted. In my disorientation, I hear Goa in the African songs my mother sang to me as a child and in the names that were passed down from one generation to the next. I see it in the dust of my grandmothers’ graves, in Mombasa and Aldona. It is in the passports I was not allowed to have and in a novel that remains unwritten. It is waiting to be found at the midnight hour. 

These are my map to Goa where I was not born. For I was free before I was born.    
 




Semana de Cultura (2011) is currently only available in print.