Premise: Dom Teotónio by Maria Elsa da Rocha, translated from Portuguese by Paul Melo e Castro reviewed by Helga do Rosário Gomes

Dom Teotónio by Maria Elsa da Rocha

Translated from Portuguese by Paul Melo e Castro 

Reviewed by Helga do Rosário Gomes

Much has been written of the Indo-Portuguese culture of Goa and of the Goan, who grapples with the complexity of being raised in a Catholic and Portuguese-like environment, a culture that only be described as a divergent child of the original Hindu culture. Embedded in a deep-seated caste system and consequent glaring socio-economic differences, separated from her Hindu brethren by partially adopted European habits, the Goan Catholic straddles, melds but often also forcibly creates divides for herself. 

Starting from the early nineteenth century, a slew of Indo Portuguese writers has attempted to elucidate these conflicting identities, but none have woven such warm, flawed, struggling, often bigoted and yet quintessentially Goan characters as my aunt, Maria Elsa da Rocha. So many things favoured Maria Elsa’s becoming a writer of stories that were so different from those of her peers. Stories that deceptively flowed like the long rivers of Goa and lulled you into a ‘sossegado’ (peaceful) state until an undercurrent woke you gasping for breath. In life as in her stories, Maria Elsa duelled with her privileged status and large land holdings while so many were scratching the earth. As a young woman, she joined the legions of teachers of the Escola Primária (a network of Government run primary schools) and was posted to distant and seemingly quiet villages and dusty towns and even to Damão, a Portuguese enclave in Gujarat. But, even in the strait-laced society of that time, a bright and observant young woman could still wield the proverbial mighty sword, to spin a kaleidoscope of stories of superstitions, disease but also furtive romances and bandit-ridden roads. Raised in a family where dusks were spent lounging in spacious balções (as the extended porches of Goan homes are known), her ears tingled with long and tall tales offered by those with endless time on their hands. From here, springs ‘Dom Teotónio’ based on a narrative by her maternal uncle of the wedding of his father to the daughter of a Viscount. While Maria Elsa spins us into a world of opulence, luxurious palanquins, brilliant chandeliers and Zardosi panu-baju, she also exposes the meanness and bigotry of Dom Teotonio which furiously surfaces when the artisan Raiu fails to deliver the tiara that his bride will wear at their wedding. Here we see the disdain and disrespect that upper class Catholics held towards working class Hindus where they could desecrate a home or a place of worship with meat, a tainted legacy of conversions and the infamous Inquisition. 

While in the digitally connected world of today it is it is hard to imagine that women’s voices and stories were heard then, Goa afforded Maria Elsa many platforms. She narrated her stories to a multitude of listeners of the Portuguese radio program Renascença (Renaissance) aired by the All India Radio. Families gobbled their dinner so that the clank of crockery and cutlery would not mar Prof. Rocha’s powerful narration in Portuguese interspersed with Konkani. In the town of Margão, Maria Elsa was given free rein to contribute to the homespun newspapers that upper crust families produced. 

Maria Elsa’s stories, so true in their excellent translations by Paul Melo e Castro can serve as a blueprint for preserving the Goan way of life at a time when it faces relentless assault while also impressing the need to discard the sins of bigotry and economic injustices. 

Read Maria Elsa da Rocha’s Dom Teotónio translated from Portuguese by Paul Melo e Castro in Out of Print 38, December 2019.

Reviewer Helga do Rosário Gomes is author Maria Elsa da Rocha’s niece who authorised the story and is able to contextualise the historic references from the perspective of their family history.

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Out of Print 38

Out of Print 38 has been released.

If we were to identify a common theme that runs through the stories in the issue, it would be the idea of being taken to or pushed to an edge where you are faced with the untenable. These stories each deal with that precipice in different ways: by acts of heroism, withdrawal, resignation, hope or simply by entering an other, more tenable, reality.

‘Moon Mountain’ by Bangladeshi writer Shaheen Akhtar is an intense, complex and beautifully paced examination of the lingering generational tragedy that results from uprooting and displacing a people. It is set in the  besieged Chittagong Hill Tracts. A young boatman confronts the submergence of his ancestral village lying below him as he ferries ignorant, self-absorbed tourists through the beautiful green waters of the Kaptai Dam. Translated elegantly from Bangla by Kabita Chakma, who is herself from the region, we are honoured to feature it.

Three stories come to their culmination by skirting confrontation in different unexpected ways. Anuradha Kumar’s ‘All the Way to the Twelfth Floor’ is told through the voice of Gauri, the domestic help at the home of an elderly gentleman who lives alone in the adjacent apartment building. The narrative brings the reader back, again and again to the dilemma she faces the moment she feels not his gaze but ‘his wrinkled gnarled hands scaly on her skin’. We follow her up and down the endless steps in the stairwell where she withdraws when crisis hits, an extraordinary escape into the self. ‘The Voice from the Garbage Chute’ by Tanvi Saraf is set in a terrifying dystopian extension of the present pandemic realities. The world is shutting down, the measures of the economy have shifted, those who are still alive are incarcerated in their homes, it is illegal to produce children and extinction is a very real possibility. The main protagonist and her husband have found ways to lead a life, a strange but steady life in this scenario when her equanimity is shaken upon hearing a voice. ‘Young, raw, real. It was coming out of the garbage chute.’ How will she react? The next story ‘Umrao’ by Gatha is set in Delhi, where the police have ‘ended their implicit agreement with vampires and started killing them en masse.’ Mrinal has responded to her mother, Umrao’s frightened plea, ‘there are no humans here’ to protect her, and returned home. The story explores the complexity of an acutely difficult mother-daughter relationship, fraught, cruel, unrelenting yet, sometimes tender, whose emotional intensities drive the protagonists into behaving with both petty and profound meanness.

We feature three stories where the narratives drive the main character over an edge into wild, bizarre, seemingly uncharacteristic extreme behaviour. Suhit Kelkar’s, ‘There’s Another Way’, explores an illicit love affair at the very beginning of its existence. The emotional pressures that each of the characters feels, compounded by the lies and secrecy surrounding their meeting, and most of all, the schism in their expectations leads to a dramatic escalation in his response to the situation. In Michelle D’costa’s examination of the loneliness, the resident hopefulness, and the burgeoning interest in body and sexuality of an earnest and relatively naive young woman, the reader is taken to a festival in a women’s college in Bangalore. Titled ‘The Guy Who Could Dance’, the passing, often deliberate small cruelties that are directed at a newcomer, an outsider to the fold and the inherent anxieties that beset her – ‘He will find out you are a virgin, you haven’t even kissed a guy’ – culminate in a response that she does not know she has in her. ‘Dom Teotónio’ is a historical story, set in Goa by Maria Elsa Da Rocha, one of the last writers who wrote in Portuguese, and translated by Paul Melo e Castro. It recounts the preparation for and wedding of a young nobleman. Opening a window both into the lives of the privileged Portuguese gentry of the past and the relationship between different communities in the region, it ends in a dramatic confrontation evoking satisfying sounds of the crashing of swords and the shattering of glass.

Two of the remaining stories in the issue deal with the limit by not quite arriving at it. Saritha Rao-Rayachoti gives us a story of separation, and the potential of reunion told from the point of view of a young woman looking back at her childhood. The power of this story – that conjures aromas as triggers of memory so strongly that the reader can almost experience them – is that it steers clear of drama and draws the reader towards the edge of emotional fulfilment without quite getting there. Mariya Salim’s ‘Burning’ is a story of domestic abuse and marital rape. The protagonist, the abused wife, never quite confronts the abuse or her abuser for what it is. Rather, she circles, like many in our society, around the situation, justifying the actions of her husband and making excuses for him. Will her understanding of the balance of society ever tip?

The last story in this issue of Out of Print 38, ‘Piece of the Moon’ by Vismay Harani is an unlikely one of adventure and heroism. Young love, an errant lover distracted by his telescope, an ultimatum – a demand for a ‘piece of the moon’ as a proof of true love are the ingredients that make up this warm, sweet, human tale of love.

The extraordinary artwork, a 2015 site specific intervention using gold leaf in Shyam Bazaar, Dhaka, that speaks to every story in the issue, is by Ayesha Sulatana.