"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.

"Avoid the Mansion" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (21 June 2014)

I had visited Hong Kong for the first time shortly before the British were to return the city-state to China. There was a palpable sense of uncertainty on the island. I wondered if this is how it had been in Goa in 1961 as the enclave lingered between Portugal and India. My layover in Hong Kong was on the return journey from what had been my first visit back to Goa after I had emigrated to California. Already, I missed being with family and friends. 

Seeking a sense of familiarity, I followed the spice route – or at least the fragrance of spices – in the narrow hallways of the building in which I was rooming and arrived at a tiny Indian eating place. It was so nondescript, it could not even be called a restaurant. Mostly incongruous because it was nestled in a skyscraper, it fit right in with the other eateries and little guest houses crammed into the many floors of the building. Throughout this Kowloon landmark, backpackers, entrepreneurs, and clients from across the globe made up its hustle and bustle. Infamously captured in a Wong Kar Wai film, the ground floor shopping area had been reduced to nothing more than a seedy underworld. There was much comfort to be had in this world within, ensconced as I was among these fellow migrants of similar hue. It was the best Indian meal I have ever eaten. True, I do not even recall, now, what the dish was. All that mattered was that it was eye-wateringly pungent and that the South Indian waiter, who nodded a welcome, had filled my plate with more food than that of any of the other patrons there. 

Nearly twenty years on, at a dessert cafe in a back alley that can only be described as a hipster paradise because we are seated by the side of trashcans and the weekend crowd we are engulfed in would not have frequented this neighbourhood in times past, I tell the people I am with that I had been to the now-Chinese territory before. They are a group of expatriate architects that I meet because of the conference I am attending in Hong Kong. “I’m sorry,” one of them scoffs when I say the name of the place where I had resided. He recapitulates quickly upon not receiving the reaction he had expected. “They’ve cleaned it up lots, I believe,” he equivocates. 

Certainly, when I stopped by the building a few hours prior, I had noticed the changes. An anthropologist colleague had accompanied me to the iconic building which she had read about in Gordon Mathews’ book, Ghetto at the Center of the World. There, we found what we had scoured the entire city for – a pair of dolls from the Disney movie Frozen. The popularity of the film had caused the toys to fly off shelves and appear on eBay at several times their original value. “My daughter will be so thrilled,” the anthropologist said as she studied the knock-offs. “And when she’s old enough, there’ll be even more of the story to tell her because I got them here,” she mused, as we walked around the warren of shops. The place had not changed to the point of being unrecognizable. Somehow, in this ultramodern city, it had managed to retain its unsanitised history – a hive of multiculturality, at once retrograde and the very definition of globalised modernity. 

Just before leaving for Hong Kong on that maiden voyage two decades prior, a European student who was on holiday in Goa gave me some advice on traveling to the then colony. “Whatever you do,” she warned, “do not stay at the Chunking Mansion.” I remember staring up at the sign outside the building after I had gotten a room there, and I had thought to myself how amusingly inappropriate the name was.

An online version of this piece as it appears in print can be seen here.

   

"The Matchmaker" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (24 May 2014)

Although I am told we had met, I have no recollection of my paternal grandfather for whom I am named. Indeed, growing up, most of the accounts I heard of him were less than pleasant ones. For example, if I was being naughty, I would be informed of how lucky I was that João Santana Benedito Ferrão was not alive to witness the mischief his namesake had gotten up to. Apparently, my father and his siblings were subjected to elaborately gothic punishments if they were caught being errant. Once, the senior Benedito had his two youngest children kneel outdoors on rock salt in the afternoon sun, because they had returned home late from school. Well, at least that is the way my dad and his sister remember their childhood. We have all heard those tall tales from our elders, surely, wherein youthful suffering is embellished and its sweetness doubled.

Upon moving to Australia a few months ago, I was put in touch with a Goan family in Melbourne. I was delighted to discover that they had known my family in Goa, and more so that they had known my grandfather. As it turns out, my grandfather had been responsible for setting up their parents. I tried picturing it – the stern Advogado Ferrão as matchmaker. It is an image I find hard to reconcile with the stories I had heard about the man from when I was younger. “But I wonder how he could do it,” the oldest sister remarked. “Your grandfather and my father were very good friends, but my mother was so many years younger than her husband-to-be.” In that day, proposals of this nature were not uncommon. Certainly gendered – it was not often that older women were paired up with younger men – one could muse that it was because of low life expectancy. Or, perhaps, practicality. “She had had it rough,” the Goan Australian woman said, reminiscing about her mother. The young bride my grandfather was responsible for matching up with his friend had survived the 1942 trek out of Burma.

As chronicled in Songs of the Survivors (2007), edited by Yvonne Vaz Ezdani, the Japanese occupied what is now Myanamar, beginning with an attack on Rangoon in December 1941. It was a couple of days before Christmas and a fortnight after Pearl Harbour, and there was no celebration to be had as the year came to a close in great uncertainty. World War II was well under way. In what came to be known as The Great Burma Trek, half a million people made the perilous journey through mountains and jungles to India as refugees. Among them was the Goan community that had called Burma home under the aegis of the British. Many died en route.

Earlier this month, my new Goan Australian friends journeyed to the homeland to celebrate a family wedding in Candolim. The groom and I knew each other as childhood friends in Kuwait where we had both grown up. His grandmother, the Goan woman from Burma whom my grandfather had set up with his compadre, was not to be there for his special day having passed on exactly a year ago. It was a bittersweet return for the family. “She’d had a good innings,” one of her daughters had said to me before she left for the family gathering in Goa.

After all these years, I had not expected to “find” my grandfather in Australia. When I was old enough to travel, my parents brought me to Goa to see my grandparents in Aldona. Before we left to return to Kuwait, my father remembers, Benedito Ferrão took the child that had been named after him into his arms and whispered, “This will be the last time I see you.”

My thanks to Frederick Noronha of Goa 1556 for loaning me a copy of Songs of the Survivors on short notice. An online version of this piece as it appears in print can be seen here.

"Tracking Down History" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (26 April 2014)

“[Their] … naturalization as British citizens moved the location of identity for Goans from Portugal to Britain. Geographically though, they lived in Africa.” In so saying, A Railway Runs Through: Goans of British East Africa, 1865-1980 (2014), Selma Carvalho’s latest book, encapsulates the complex socio-cultural and political identities of Goans in a history spanning Asia, Africa, and Europe. Because of my own familial connections with once-British Kenya, it has often been a source of wonderment that a community as small as the Goan one has not only found itself in so many parts of the world, but also been enmeshed in global histories. East Africa is so embedded in Goan cultural memory that even for those not connected with that diasporic history, the Swahili song “Malaika” is one that forms part of the “Goan soundtrack” – that aural legacy that continues to be heard at family and village celebrations, like stories of relatives in far off places. Bearing witness to the importance of oral accounts, Railway successfully transits from interviews to written sources to record a storied past.

In comparison to her previous book Into the Diaspora Wilderness (2010), Carvalho is far more attuned to the formation of racialized Goan identities in East Africa in Railway. This is apparent in her analysis of how Luis Antonio de Andrade, born in 1865 of mixed Portuguese and Goan origins, prospered in Zanzibar in the early 20^th century. A shrewd businessman, Andrade capitalized on his position “[a]s medical assistant to Sultan Sayyid Ali Bin Sayid,” while “never […] compartmentalis[ing] his identity. He was a Portuguese man; […] a member of the European clubs […]. But that did not preclude him from being an intrinsic part of Goan society” in Zanzibar. “Photographed on occasion wearing an African-styled fez,” Andrade was awarded the Brilliant Star of Zanzibar and honoured as a Chevalier of the Order of the Immaculate Conception by Portugal. 

 Yet, this analysis may have been extended by comparing someone as high profile as Andrade with such other transnational figures as the Goan cooks who also traveled between Asia and Africa. How might we understand their racialization as cosmopolitan figures who traversed continents and empires, even? This is not to imply that Railway does not address issues of class and caste. One notable area where it does so is in speaking of the 1936 “break-away and founding of the Goan Gymkhana” in Kenya, which “made a faction of upper-caste Goans even more insular and exclusivist.” However, even in highlighting the peculiar nature of political rifts in the community, it is still the history of the elite that dominates, further obscuring subalterns.

Because most of the oral history the book relies on emerges from interviews with East African Goans now resident in Britain, Railway eschews how those accounts might have been “coloured,” had

Africans also been interviewed. Apart from a reference to Joseph Zuzarte Murumbe, decolonized Kenya’s second Vice President – a man of Goan and Masai heritage – there is little other mention of the names of black Africans. Nonetheless, Carvalho effectively explores intersectionality in the making of identities in East Africa. For example, note her observation of how “[t]he unsung African-Asian partnership was pivotal in the emancipation of Goan women and the development of a middle class.” This astutely demonstrates how colonialism may have subverted entrenched notions of gender and class, but did so by participating in a larger system of racial difference. Accordingly, Railway is a useful text not only for those with an interest in postcolonial studies, but also for those wishing to explore the multiple tracks of global Goan history.  

An online version of this piece as it appears in print can be seen here. For more on the Histories of British-Goans Project, visit their website.