The Tender Goan night

At a precise intersection in Nuvem, two roads slide past the white-washed

Igreja Mae dos Pobres; one road leads to Panjim, the other to Majorda. The
church is quite magnificent; its steeple dwarfs everything else, snaking
into the sky, telling stories of Empire, of seaworthy Portuguese men who
travelled half-way across the world in their caravelas with a map in one
hand and a sword in the other, fighting Arabs along the East Coast of Africa
until the fury of the wind-Gods drove them up the Indian ocean.

Of the Church, I don't know much, although I intend to find out some day (if it's not demolished by then for unfortunately heritage conservation is still in its infancy in Goa and many monuments are lost due to neglect or ignorance) but every November it celebrates the Mae Dos Pobres feast. The feast is preceded by daily novenas which take place in the evening and finish just as night falls. In Nuvem, in November, night falls hurriedly, restlessly; a deep dark embracing the sky. When a moon finally emerges from its folds of velvet black it smiles with all the benevolence of a child amidst a multitude of stars hanging over the land.

In those days, when the pealing bells signaled the end of the novena

service, young girls with thickly-pleated dresses cascading to their knees
and men with prime moustaches and light cotton shirts would file out of
Church and form a long, snake-line queue leading to an old doddery woman
making the best bhajias this side of the Zuari. We didn't quite know where
Uma came from; I suppose there must have been people who knew her but there
she was every winter like the returning chill in the wind. She sat
squat-like on the red laterite earth with a kerosene stove in front of her
and worked like a whirling dervish dropping little formless balls of watery
batter with onions and chillies into a bubbling pot of oil and scooped them
out with all the precision of a magician performing tricks.

Brown balls of the most delicious doughy tenderness would melt in our mouths
but we could never afford more than a paper funnel-full and all of us girls,
little girls and luscious older girls would walk home with Uma's bhajias in
our hands and the wolf-whistles of young roadside Romeos ringing in our
ears. Older men, as is the custom in the villages, would trail behind the
women, some on foot, others on Raleigh bicycles, keeping a warden-like eye
on the goings-on and ensuring everyone's safety.  As nightfall deepened, the
sounds of the night spread a whimsical ghostly dread through the
candle-carrying procession of girly-giggles and manly bravado walking home
over the narrow stretch of land which ran through the paddy fields.

Sometimes now, when I return home to Nuvem, I lie awake at night,
uncomforted by sleep trying to discern those singular strands of sounds so
familiar in my childhood; a throng of crickets in the grass, the nasally
cries of bulbuls, the rustling of the hibiscus flowering red in the garden
and in the distance over the paddy fields, past the deathly quiet of the
cemetery, the foul weeping of foxes. But I can't find them anymore. I hear
instead the occasional honk of an out-of-state truck on the NH1 highway, the
drip-drip of public water-taps which go unattended through the night and
some unmindful neighbour playing his stereo. The government promises to make
this stretch of the road into a four-lane highway. Every organism, gnarled
trees, grand-old houses, gauda hamlets, which have lived peacefully by its
wayside for centuries will be destroyed by this flatulence of modernity. I
wonder what Uma would think of all this? Would she continue frying her
bhajias unmindful of the desecration wrought onto the land or would she
clasp her hands to her emaciated chest and weep?