A Stranger at My Table. Ivo de Figueiredo
to the Portuguese dishes they now adopted.
I look at the photograph of Aleixo; so stiff and formal in his white shirt and black waistcoat under his dark grey jacket. The medal, the bowtie, the high collar. And beneath it all, his brown body, which was markedly light, a feature much valued among the Goans. An Indian in a suit, Aleixo was a descendent of converts from the highest caste – the Brahmins, who, for generations, had adopted as much European culture as the Portuguese chose to share with them – a creole people, shaped not only by the meeting between Portugal and India, but also by what the Portuguese brought from their vast territories that stretched from Brazil to China. Aleixo’s people, Dad’s people, my ancestors, were a new, yet simultaneously ancient people.
And, one might add, an “unclean” people, in the view of others, at least. How else could you describe a Catholic Brahmin who drank alcohol and ate beef, and who not only adopted a European fondness for pork, but built a hatch behind his toilet where the pigs could feed, before being eaten by human beings – a lifecycle in its crudest form. The Portuguese and converted Goans were the only people who did not observe the laws of cleanliness that were otherwise prevalent in Indian culture; Catholics ate anything and everything. In the towns and villages around Goa, the Catholic Goans lived much as they always had, but now they lived in whitewashed houses with awnings over cool terraces, decorative oyster-shell windows, and azure or sea-green shutters; a sight that for any Western visitor must have conjured thoughts of the Mediterranean, rather than India. Where others saw an unclean people, the Goans donned their Sunday best each week – the men clean-shaven and in suits, the women in white dresses – and walked to church along the road between rice fields and coconut palms.
And the centuries ticked by.
Eventually as new powers took control in the Indian Ocean, the power of the Portuguese came under threat. The Dutch arrived first, then the mighty British Empire laid its milky-white hand over large parts of Asia and Africa. But with the exception of a short-lived British occupation in the early 1800s, the Portuguese maintained control, but their decline was already written on the wall. In 1775 malaria and cholera epidemics in the capital had forced the governing powers to evacuate their people to Panjim at the mouth of the Mandovi River. Once Asia’s center of Christianity, the now abandoned city would become known as Velha Goa, Old Goa. The jungle threatened to invade its cathedrals and grand villas. A sweet slumber settled over the country. No significant modernization took place; any industry was modest. There was little for future generations to hope for. The better-off still managed to live a comfortable life in their spacious houses and secure government posts; they spoke Portuguese and sent their sons to the best university in Lisbon. Anyone else was left to wade ankle-deep in the paddy fields. The only alternative was to emigrate.
Some time at the end of the 19th century Aleixo must have made a decision. He’d recently married a village girl, Ermelinda Fernandez, and if they were going to forge a future together, they had to leave their homeland. They boarded the steamboat in Panjim that sailed along the coastline before heading north to Bombay. Great Grandfather must have been about twenty-five, Great Grandmother eight years younger.
Doubtless they weren’t the only ones on that boat from their village. From their region alone, that of Bardez, nearly a quarter of the population would leave, most of them Catholics, and many of them Brahmins. They were among the village elite. And not only that, but the colonists had instilled them with the Portuguese culture and way of life, and tempted them with ambitions for a future that far exceeded anything that Goa might offer. What could be more natural than to emigrate, especially when the Portuguese were encouraging them to leave and administrate colonies elsewhere in the world.
They were not refugees. They were not escaping a disaster zone. They were leaving to improve their lives. To climb up, rather than to sink. To live, rather than to merely survive.
In Bombay, Aleixo and Ermelinda probably stayed in one of the Goan hostels that were found throughout the city at the time. Here they probably enjoyed a final moment of village camaraderie before their journey continued over the ocean. While some emigrants traveled to Portuguese Africa, Angola and Mozambique, others headed for the new imperial power, Britain, and its colonies and protectorates on the same continent. Like so many other emigrants, Aleixo and Ermelinda headed for Zanzibar. Unlike most others, however, they did not settle here, but continued on to the small, lush-green island of Pemba about ten miles north of the mother-island Zanzibar. The island had become a British protectorate some years earlier, so when Aleixo was made postmaster in the modest cluster of buildings that constituted Pemba’s capital Chake Chake, he indirectly became a subject of the British Empire.
My family’s fate was cast.
Aleixo and Ermelinda were the first in the family to break out of the cycle of rural life, leaving the only place to which they truly belonged, where their family had lived for so long in a harmonious pact with their forebears, the earth, the church and Portugal. Everything that had been woven together over centuries was about to be ripped apart. Aleixo left the sleepy Portuguese empire for a defeated Arab sultanate where he would serve the British Empire that would itself only survive him by a few years. Toward the end of his life Aleixo would return to Saligão – the ties of origin are not broken in the span of one man’s life. But for those who followed, the circle had been broken, and homelessness was the inheritance they were left by Aleixo. He had been the first to leave his homeland, and he was the last to return. It is here, with Great Grandfather, that my family’s journey through the era of dying empires begins.
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