"I Never Lived Here" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (23 August 2014)

All the contents of this house have been boxed up, sold, or given away. In a short while, the rental company will relieve me of the keys. I don’t live here anymore. But this was never mine to begin with. That is not to say that I did not inhabit this home, or that I do not wonder what lies in its future. I will have memories long after I leave this country, but they are momentary in the wider span of the histories that precede mine and legacies that will extend far after I have moved on from this place. Already, the agent has been showing the house to prospective tenants. The time will come when, like the rest of this gentrifying neighbourhood, this old house will give way to some postmodern condominium development: at once a conglomeration of the like-minded and -monied and, yet, each unknown to the next in their atomisation. As one form of lifestyle dwelling replaces the other, what else will be lost?

They call this region the Yarra. But even as it harks back to the past, it is not a name that can be relegated to the mists of time. When I first got to Australia, I was struck by the acknowledgment of Aboriginal history at most public events. As preamble to their own presentations, speakers pay deference to indigenous genealogy, noting the traditional ownership of the land and of Aboriginal elders past and present. In my experience, such awareness of Native peoples in the United States is something that is not generally part of public rhetoric, as is much the case in Goa. Nonetheless, I began to introspect on the effect of such vocalisations of Aboriginal awareness as in the Australian case and, moreover, how such performances participate in the continued effacement of the present realities of indigenous peoples.

When the tribal identities of Goa’s First Peoples are recognised, it is often in the service of usurping the cultural expressions of these marginalised groups for the purpose of promoting the notion of Goan authenticity or tourism culture – and, really, one would be hard pressed to differentiate between these practices of cultural consumption. For instance, note the ubiquity of the so-called ‘Kunbi dance’ performed both at public functions in Goa and the diaspora, but also on the Panjim cruise boats catering to tourists. It is such performances of multiculturalism that need to be questioned for their insidiousness. Accordingly, as much as one might think themselves conversant with indigenous traditions or in a position to be deferential to Aboriginal legacies, such efforts are always fraught with consigning indigeneity to the past while still consuming the traditions of those very peoples as if they no longer exist.

Consider Aboriginal feminist writer Celeste Liddle’s distrust of Australia’s Recognise programme, which she describes as “a government-sponsored ad campaign removed from grassroots Indigenous opinion.” In a blog entry this month, Liddle features a photograph of the symbol of the Recognise campaign as it appears on the side of a Qantas jet, right by the national carrier’s own kangaroo logo. She reveals the cynicism of the manipulative PR at play, saying:  “Yet another gigantic corporate entity decides to show mob just how much it wants us to be Recognised. Doesn't that just give you those warm and fuzzy feelings?” Indeed, what Liddle queries is how ineffectively rhetoric and performance translates to change on the ground.

This ground that I was privileged to occupy belongs to the Wurundjeri people of the Yarra region. I come away from it the richer by not possessing it, by knowing it was never mine. For there is a history far greater than this moment, and I am still learning how to belong to it.

To see the print version of this post as it appears online, visit here.

"Windows Between Worlds" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (19 July 2014)

Save for their shape, the little panels of mother-of-pearl looked like the ones in the windows in my grandmother’s house. As a child, I had always marveled at the beauty of the delicate translucence of those windows. My uncle responded to my question by saying that mother-of-pearl was used before glass became more readily available and because, for Goans, the sea gave them shells to make windows with. Because the milky pearl-like shingles let in light but not sight, he added, old Goan homes could also do without curtains. This was certainly true in the Mandarin’s House in Macau, which I visited last month. Its naked windows were a display of wooden geometric shapes that, in lieu of glass, held captive nacreous bits that I learned had come from Goa.

The Mandarin’s House, thought to have been built in the late 19^th century, was recently restored and its doors thrown open to the public in the last few years. Its 21^st century renovation was overseen by the Chinese government, perhaps in an attempt to highlight Macau’s pre-colonial cultural ties to the mainland. That notwithstanding, the Mandarin’s House clearly demonstrates architectural traits that are not solely East Asian. As with Goa, Macau was a Portuguese territory; it was handed over to China in 1999. In various parts of the city-state, Lusitan influence is still apparent postcolonially. This is evident in the names of streets such as Avenida da Amizade and Rua da Madeira, as also in the fact that Portuguese is still an officially used language. In the Mandarin’s House, European design elements come into relief alongside Chinese ones, but as the use of the Goan opaline shards in the windows attests, there are other cultural factors to consider.  

In Goa, it is not exactly rare to see both chinoiserie and pottery of Chinese origin dating back to the colonial period. While blue and white pots punctuate the furnishings of the Mandarin’s House, bathed in the refracted light that filters through the iridescent window panes, the counterpart would be the family heirlooms and objet d’art of East Asian origin that are sometimes to be found in Goan homes or other institutions. They may take the form of vases and crockery in the colour scheme of azulejos, itself an Iberian art form borne of Moorish and orientalist imitation. 

The itinerary of these various objects – opalescent glass, blue and white tile, and china – suggests the cultural circuits of colonial trade that gave shape to class-inflected taste. But what do we know of the labour that fashioned and transported these items or of the colonial consumption of such articles that exceeded the specificity of a given household or institutional milieu? How did the travels of these pieces impact multiculturality within and across Portuguese colonies, to say nothing of the metropole in relation to these outposts? 

In other words, if a shared coloniality made for the appearance of the prized crockery in my grandmother’s home in Goa, do the windows in my ancestral home open onto another former Portuguese colony, one that shares the same kind of portals even if they are shaped differently? Did it mean the same thing to have “Goan” windows in Macau as it did to have “china” in Goa? Even as the Mandarin’s House takes pride of place in recently Chinese Macau, its legacy would seem to be a window into many other worlds, but not just those of times gone by.

To see the print version of this piece as it appears online, visit here.

"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.