THIS IS MY OWN

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
'This is my own, my native land!'

          ~ Walter Scott

She turned over the frail, yellowed pages of letters sixty years old, and read there of unsuspected drama bound up with the visits of much loved grandparents, and years in which her family enjoyed the company of a beloved uncle.

But her story had old roots. There was her father’s father, fleeing imprisonment at the least, by the Portuguese who ruled Goa; escaping by canoe, and on foot through the forest, into the safety of British India.

During the Freedom Struggle, Sarojini Naidu, addressing a public meeting of Christians on the grounds of the Catholic Gymkhana, remarked that if Christians dressed like Indians rather than like the British, their patriotism would not be doubted as it generally was. It was a meeting well attended by Goan Catholics, and her aunts and cousins were soon regally draped in that much admired Indian garment, the sari.

When India won Independence, the country had assured France of special status for the French enclaves, protection of their individual culture, language and identity. Satisfied, France had ceded these territories. Portugal was offered the same assurances for its colonies, and responded in true Fascist style, with brutal suppression of Goan and Damanese aspirations to be one with free India: imprisonment, torture, killings, and every punishment to break mind and spirit.

Her father’s eldest brother was a vocal and influential leader of the Goan Liberation movement which followed. Learning that Brazil intended to dismiss him, their Consul in Bombay, for his stand against a coloniser from whom Brazil itself had won freedom with some bloodshed, her uncle had resigned pre-empting this move, and released to the press his letter of reasoned argument which ended with his resignation. India appreciated him, but Brazil made itself ridiculous with several attempts to punish him, while Portugal tried him in absentia, and sentenced him to life imprisonment for “treason against the mother country” on the grounds that he was born in Goa of Portuguese parents. Since everyone inside and outside Goa recognised the falseness of the first ground and the absurdity of the second, the Portuguese Government was exposed as a tyranny on its way to madness.

Portuguese secret police carried off her mother’s first cousin, then a student in Portugal, and he was never seen thereafter. A doctor friend of her mother’s family, dignified, highly respected, was reported to have expressed a seditious sentiment. He was beaten on his palms with a specially devised bamboo baton, as a warning, leaving him too broken to ever practice again.

Another, most dear friend of her grandparents in Goa, singing opera with them in Margão’s elite club; a Professor of Medicine, microbiologist and leprologist who earned world-wide recognition; yet also a literary man who wrote a book on Rabindranath Tagore, whom he visited in Shantiniketan; elected from Goa to the new Portuguese Parliament for the years 1945-1949, where his speeches drew the Sauron-eye and hostility of Salazar, was forced in 1951 to leave with his family for South America before he came to grief. A clinching reason? At the wedding of a white Portuguese with a Goan lady, the literary, Tagore-loving doctor had raised a toast to the confluence of an Occidental culture hundreds of years old with an Oriental culture thousands of years old. It was an unbearable insult to the rulers. White inferior to brown?

But as it is always with human beings, there was plenty of treachery – to gratify envy, to satisfy vengefulness, to lay to rest Portugal’s paranoid suspicions, to gain advantages, or from sheer malevolence.

Thus it was that her mother’s father, a doctor of repute and Mayor of Margão, yearned for the liberation of Goa. But he spoke of it to few, softly, and only after the thick wooden floor-to-ceiling shutters had been set against every window and door that faced the streets. For the breadth alone of one of those streets separated his house from the prison, and cries from that evil place, piercing even the wooden shutters, kept her mother awake of nights.

Her mother had a brother, a brilliant student of medicine, that beloved uncle at the start of this story, Tio Doutor (Uncle Doctor). He was recklessly outspoken - remembering his murdered cousin and other atrocities - about how he would leave for India as soon as he had his diploma, and never return. His father pointed out the imprudence. “Wait until you have the diploma in your hands,” he said, and his exhortation was supported by her own father, an Indian civil servant.

Examiners held back the diploma for five months, releasing it only in April 1955. Her uncle applied to the Indian Consul for permits for himself and his parents to enter India. He was sent home with a message that the Consul wished to speak with the young man’s father. But, meanwhile, her grandfather had sent his resignation from the mayoralty to the Governor. Retaliation was immediate. His resignation was refused. While the authorities plotted tactics to have him found guilty of misconduct and dishonesty in the management of municipal affairs, a friend brought word to him of this threat.

Her father, learning of the situation from his brother-in-law, the newly qualified doctor, hastened to seek assistance from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). He wrote: “the Portuguese, apparently quite aware of the effect on public opinion in Goa and elsewhere of my father-in-law’s resignation and departure for India, are preparing to subject him to the full pressure of Fascist methods for dealing with opposition. For my father-in-law to enter our Consulate at this stage, when the non-acceptance of his resignation leaves him subject to regulations governing the conduct of officials, would be to invite arrest and further unpleasant consequences. I have advised my brother-in-law to meet our Consul, to explain the whole situation to him, and to seek his assistance in evacuating the entire family to India.” That “evacuating” was a word which stirred in her a fear decades old, first felt when she was in Goa in 1961, but to return to the story. . .

In correspondence marked ‘Secret’, a representative of the MEA offered to arrange for delivery of letters by safe means, and to get her uncle out of Goa; if possible, her grandparents as well.

By June, her grandfather had approached his infamous brother-in-law, a Deputy, appealing to their ties of kinship. He got a villainous reply: “neither he nor his family would ever be allowed to leave Goa.” Her father, using the secret mail service, advised the old gentleman to seek an interview with the Governor, to find out what was decided about his resignation, and to cite his wife’s illness which required surgery available only in India, together with his own knee problem requiring specialised treatment, as reasons for the application to leave Goa.

And then she smiled as she read on in her father’s letter to the man from the MEA: “In the event of his receiving a negative reply from the Governor, I feel that my brother-in-law should get out of Goa anyway. I hope you will be able to help in that case. As for my parents-in-law, I have a recourse in mind, regarding which I shall let you know later.”

That sentence led her thoughts to another plan, an ingenious plan, which only a man with a soldier’s experience, a capacity for imaginative action and meticulous organisation, a man of courage besides, could have devised. It was a story she must tell another day.

Her uncle, warned by an old friend who was in the local police, that the order had been given for his arrest, escaped according to the arrangements already in place and came safely away. Eventually, late in 1956, her grandparents also got permits to leave for India on medical grounds. Since neither they nor their son made any public statement against the Portuguese regarding the affair, and since the old people, at any rate, returned to Goa as they had promised to, they were permitted to visit their daughter once more, in December 1957.

In May 1961 her mother was allowed into Goa with her children because the old gentleman had inoperable cancer. At the Portuguese customs inspection shed she boiled over with indignation. Footwear the family was bringing had been wrapped in pieces of newspaper, Indian newspaper, naturally. The officials were removing these scraps which might foment sedition. Between scorn and some concern – for these creatures were so clearly ignorant brutes – she asked her mother if they would confiscate her books, a Selected Scott, a Selected Dickens, and Little Women. Indeed, they leafed suspiciously through the books, whereupon the mother pointed out colour plates and illustrations that could not possibly be found in seditious material, and hustled her out of the shed. After that, it was impressed on her that she was an enemy alien and must hold her tongue and school her face. The jail across the road onto which their bedroom windows looked was sufficient reminder.

In October her grandfather was dying. On this occasion the Governor was human enough to permit another visit by her mother and the children, this time with her Indian civil servant husband. (How the word ‘Indian’ still rings in her years, spoken with such hostility and contempt by many Goans who rated liberty lower than the imported creature comforts their colonisation offered - rancid tinned butter, tinned cheese, tinned fruit and vegetables, tinned ham - delicacies indeed.)

Her loved grandfather died two months and two days before the liberation of Goa. As with the British in India, not all Portuguese were villains, not even under Salazar. Of this she had been persuaded even during that fraught month of May, when she met a teacher and his wife who were friends of her grandparents. In their pell-mell flight from Goa, the military, the police and officials took priority over civilians like the unassuming teacher. Now it was he who was in detention, and her grandmother sought her Indian son-in-law’s assistance. The poor frightened Portuguese teacher was released, and left for his country. “Come to Portugal,” he urged the widowed old lady. “You will be treated well there.” “Maybe,” she replied, “but even if my house were falling in ruin about my ears, it would still be my home.” And she never regretted her choice.

***

She remembered all these things with pride and sadness. It was well that they were gone, those admired people who loved their country, gone into that “great Ring of pure and endless light” where she would join them some day. Sighing, she folded away her memories.

The Indian civil servant

'Tio Doutor'