Anthony Gonsalves Lives
One day, having run out of reading material, I idly leafed through the Goa telephone directory. It turned out to be a treasure trove of resoundingly Lusitanian names—Joao de Brito Filomena Pedro Lopez, Abel Angelo da Piedade Noronha and Caetano Joaqim Mario Caldeira. The names seemed to belong to Portuguese grandees rather than to ordinary middle-class Indians hassling over mundane things like gas connections and college admissions. Some names were richly sonorous, like Terezinho Aduzinela Noronha. Others were snappily alliterative, like Concesao Caetano Coutinho. Yet others seemed amusing, if not downright quirky, like Perpetual Fernandes, Resurrection Coutinho, Elcy Rocy Fernandes and Ariceto alias Annuncio Silveira.
And then there were the ones named, curiously, after famous personalities: Adolf Noronha, Mussolini Gomes, Napoleon Monteiro, Nelson Dias, Caesar Cabral and Bismarck Alfonso (not forgetting Churchill Alemao). The Hindu names were no less singular, like Vissu Virgincar, Tucarama Lolienkar and Pundlik Yesso Paryekar. Recalling the number of Shahs in the Mumbai directory, I then thought I’d find out what the most common Goan name was. The answer: Fernandes. (Yes, there are 4,849 Fernandes’s listed, 1,531 D’Souzas, 1,182 Rodrigues’s and 1,058 Pereiras). From there, it was just a small, logical step to want to know exactly how many Anthony Gonsalveses there are in Goa, and I’m happy to report that I discovered no less than five (plus another five Antonio Gonsalveses).
On some juvenile whim, I phoned up a couple of them and quizzed them on their relationship with Amitabh Bachchan, but after a while, they got irritated and hung up. I then spent the rest of the day repeatedly watching Bachchan’s brilliantly inane Anthony Gonsalves number on YouTube, in an attempt to decipher those fiendishly cryptic English words once and for all.
I’m proud to share with you the fruits of my research:
“You see, the whole country of the system
Is juxtaposition by the haemoglobin in the atmosphere
Because you are a sophisticated rhetorician
Intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity!”
I can’t imagine myself wasting my time so utterly anywhere else but in Goa. But that’s the charm of the place.
Ellroy Comes To Anjuna
What’s happening in Goa? Someone called it the “rape capital of the world” not long ago. Someone else stated that the drug mafia could assassinate the CM if it wanted to. The significant thing is that the former was a minister, and the latter an MLA. Some years ago, I’d written a script for a TV serial (which never got produced). It was supposed to be a slick detective thriller set in Goa—a kind of ‘Raymond-Chandler-comes-to-Candolim’ affair. The hero was a cynical, prematurely retired Mumbai cop, who comes back to Goa to run a private security agency, and is confronted with a juicy new crime to solve every week: missing blonde tourists, blackmailed holidaying CEOs, that kind of thing.
But that script was about the innocent Goa we knew ten years ago. In today’s hard-edged, criminalised Goa, the missing blonde would turn out to have been raped and strangled by some political thug; the holidaying CEO would have been silenced by a Russian hit man. And as for my Inspector Bhende, tough as he may have seemed back then, he wouldn’t have survived more than four weekly episodes: he’d either end up getting hit by a convenient lorry on some lonely village road, or being bribed with a couple of crores to hang his principles and move to Coonoor or somewhere instead.
A strange coincidence: one of the episodes of the serial was about the unmasking of a Nazi war criminal settled in Goa—a plausible story, given the cosy relationship between Salazar’s Goa and Nazi Germany. And, that of course, by some freak chance, was almost the exact plot of that delightful hoax played on the media by some journalists two years ago.
The Mobile Brass Band
My aunt Habiba lives in a wonderful 350-year-old family house, where the kitchen is big enough to swallow up a Mumbai apartment. How did people travel around in the Portuguese days, I asked her (having just driven 45 minutes on a terrible road). “Well, there was a pretty good bus service,” she replied, “with those old brass buses”. “Brass buses?” “Yes, a bit like America’s metallic Greyhound buses, but made of brass, so they wouldn’t corrode in Goa’s salty sea air.” You live and learn.
Tipping Point
At a restaurant I got chatting with the waiter, who had a well-practised, professional charm, unhindered by his limited English vocabulary. In the process, I discovered an interesting life story: Venkat hails from a village in Andhra Pradesh. He spends the tourist season in Goa, where the tips are good. Off-season, he has a second job in Mumbai. But he prudently makes sure neither employer knows about the other. In the harvest season, he goes back to his village to help on the family farm. He doesn’t like Russians: “Don’t know how to tip,” he scowls.
