Tree & Leaf

DR MANOEL AGOSTINHO DE HEREDIA (1870-1937) ~ installment #4

Chapter IV

THE SOCIABLE MAN

Between demands of his profession and his business interests Manoel Agostinho’s hands were full enough for him to have excused himself from the social circuit of his time and place, with the plea "I cannot spare the time". But he was one who, in the poet’s words, "prized laughter and the love of friends." He drew congenial souls to his home like a magnet.

His earliest and staunchest friends were Francisco (Tio Fancu) Gomes Pereira, Nicolau Manuel (Manu) D’Sa, and Matias Xavier (Tio Motishair). Manu was in the service of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (G.I.P.) retiring as Superintendent in the General Manager’s Office at Bori Bunder (Victoria Terminus). Tio Fancu and Tio Motishair were employed in the Eastern Telegraph Company - forerunner of today’s Overseas Communications Service (OCS). All three were natives of Divar, therefore compatriots of Manoel Agostinho. They were devoted to Manoel Agostinho and Ángela Mericia, at whose home they were frequent, and always welcome, visitors. Bachelors all, there was a sort of artless, innocent gaiety in everything they did and said. Their kind would be uncomprehended in today’s supercharged world if they could have existed within such a world untouched by it. During Manoel Agostinho’s lifetime they had led untroubled, useful lives. Manu D’Sa was the mainstay of a demanding English General Manager’s office, and besides, an exceptionally competent churchwarden. They were never the same after Manoel Agostinho’s death.

Besides these three, whose personalities are remembered because they took an avuncular interest in Manoel Agostinho’s younger children, there were a host of friends whose names only come to mind fifty years after his death: Ottaviano Ferreira, whose father raised paddy on a vast scale, for export to Bombay and Africa, on a river island (Corjuem) of which he was sole proprietor; Dr Florencino Ribeiro, (uncle of the famous Julio Ribeiro, Director General of the Punjab Police), who was the friend to whom he entrusted the local direction of the Bardez Electric Supply Co.; António Maria da Cunha, Editor of the Goa daily “O Heraldo”; Meyer Nissim, suave, always dapperly dressed, financier and confidant of the great Baghdadi Jewish houses of Sassoon and Kadoorie; Ambalal Sarabhai, founder of the Ahmedabad Spinning and Calico Manufacturing Co. (Calico Mills), - whose brilliant son Vikram set up the National Physical Laboratory, the Ahmedabad Textile Industry’s Research Association, the Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad) and was Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission when he died; and Caetano Paulo da Cunha, in his heyday a leading solicitor of Bombay.

A Brazilian from Sao Paulo, Dr. Horacio Neves, had visited India to buy hessian (required for bagging coffee), and humped cattle called ’zebu’ in Brazil (for cross breeding with his native cattle in order to make them resistant to drought). Neves came to Bombay and made Manoel Agostinho’s acquaintance through the Spanish Consulate. Enamoured with India, Neves was able through Manoel Agostinho’s efforts, to attend a Goan Saraswat Hindu wedding, for which he arrayed himself in the traditional gala dress of a Saraswat. Neves conceived a high regard for Manoel Agostinho’s personality and talents. After returning to Brazil, he brought about Manoel Agostinho’s appointment as Honorary Consul for Brazil at Bombay, in the year 1923. As a member of the Consular Corps, his attendance at Government House balls and dinners became more frequent.

It is difficult to say who enjoyed those glittering social events more - he, for whom they afforded opportunities for conversing with persons of equal mental calibre and shared interests, or Ángela Mericia, who loved music, enjoyed dancing - the quadrilles especially - and who appreciated the musical entertainment.

A man in Manoel Agostinho’s position received numerous invitations to weddings, many of which he attended, despite other demands on his time. The lower the social status of the newly-wedded couple, the more likely that one or other partner would be a patient of his and therefore entitled to special consideration. He was much in demand for raising the bridal toast, and while his addresses were quite free from the broad humour and bombast that was customary on such occasions he was capable of holding attention and touching hearts with the simple directness of his utterances. His tact was unfailing. When, contrary to the pattern, a bridegroom began sobbing on his mother’s shoulder, during a reference in the toast to the parents’ sorrow at parting with a daughter leaving home as a bride, Manoel Agostinho quelled an incipient explosion of laughter by speaking of the constancy of a mother’s love, and extolling a son who could remember it, even on his wedding day. On another occasion, the collapse of a tiered wedding cake, cut too forcefully by the bridal pair, provoked a gathering storm of coarse jests, which he stilled by instantly commencing his toast, and characterising the event as a happy augury for the couple’s future successes in overcoming life’s obstacles.

His sociability was most apparent to house guests, to whom his home was a welcome staging post on their journeys to and from Goa. Most were, of course, kinsfolk, relatives by marriage in the main, for he numbered only brothers among his siblings, only one of whom married. All the sons of Ángela Mericia’s uncle, Julio da Costa, who were in the East African Government service, regularly stayed over with their cousins when travelling on home leave. The eldest, António Vicente, was the favourite cousin; his biennial or triennial visits were eagerly anticipated by the younger children especially, for he never failed to take them out for a cinema show and an ice-cream treat. But quite a few house guests were neither kinsfolk nor friends, they were mere acquaintances, coming with a recommendatory introduction from a relative or a close friend.

Love of music, so characteristic of Goans, drew many to Manoel Agostinho’s home for performances of classical music, in which his eldest girls took part, being fairly accomplished in the piano, the violin and the vox humana. Performers who later gained international fame, like Olga Craen (née Athaide) participated in these cosy concerts.

Uncharacteristically, refreshments offered on such and most occasions, at Manoel Agostinho’s home, were non-alcoholic drinks like orchata, and Xarope de brindão; he was abstemious, perhaps because his vigorous physiology and sanguine temperament needed no stimulant.

Transplanted, of course of his own wish, at the age of thirty, Manoel Agostinho bore flower and fruit in Bombay’s hot house environment, but what the social world saw always was quite essentially Goan, a sanguine, sociable and deeply religious man.