It was a warm Sunday morning in Panaji, with the sun beaming down, and the sky clear. The calm winds carried the verses of
the morning mass, emanating from the Church of the Immaculate Conception. I
stood before the great church, clicking pictures and adoring its beauty, as
devotees kept rushing past me to reach in time for mass. The 9:15 a.m. English mass
boasted of full attendance, as did the one in Konkani which followed it. What
I, and twenty odd octogenarians were waiting for outside, was the one at 10:30.
The mass in the language of the Viceroys, who held sway here for 456 long
years, the noble language that is Portuguese.
As I first approached the
golden-agers, the first words which I could hear between the laughs and guffaws
sounded very familiar. I mustered the courage to converse (in my very limited
and broken Portuguese) with the first gentleman next to me: ‘Bom Dia! Fala
portugues?’ The reaction was ecstatic. He grabbed me by my arm and dragged
me to the center of a big group of aged people, and exclaimed (in Portuguese, which
I could comprehend because of my familiarity with Spanish), ‘Here’s a young guy
who is one of us! He speaks our tongue!’ In a few seconds, I was swarmed and
bombarded with greetings and questions: ‘Bom Dia!’, ‘De onde é?’,
‘Do Brasil/Portugal?’ were the ones which I could decipher, others
simply lost in translation. Some hearts were broken when I told them that I had
not a drop of Iberian blood (sangue azul) in me, and that I was nothing
more than a Spanish aficionado who hailed from Nashik. Nevertheless, several
hung on and continued talking to me. The joy of having a new entrant in their
group who knew their language was too alluring, perhaps. The discussion I had
with that group was absolutely marvelous.
These people, aged seventy/eighty
plus, had nothing much in common with each other, apart from the fact that they
all spoke Portuguese, some who had Portuguese ancestry, and that all of them were
proud of Goa’s colonial traditions. All of them had had primary education in
Portuguese. Several still had family in Portugal. Two of them spoke fluent
Spanish, with whom I had a hearty discussion about their lives. As the church
bell struck, all of us entered the magnificent building to attend mass, the
building structure being an architectural marvel in its own right. One of the
Spanish speakers sat next to me so that he could help me understand the
Portuguese words. A very kind gesture, but it hardly helped. For me, or for any
other Spanish student, to understand Portuguese being spoken is highly
difficult, as easy it is for us to understand the language in its written form.
After a grueling 30 odd minutes, the mass ended and all of us departed the
building.
Once outside, all of them again
ganged up to talk about the past week, laughing, cracking jokes, all in
Portuguese, of course. After a good chat session of about half an hour, they
left, slowly descending the crisscross stairs that form the entrance to this
grand church.
Soon after they dispersed, I saw
the foreground being replaced with an increasing traffic of tourists; taking
selfies, completely oblivious of the existence of these octogenarians. It
dawned upon me, that in our quest to define our present and map our future, as
a society, we have chosen to forget our past. Whether we like it or not,
colonial values, whether Portuguese or British, have and will continue to shape
our lives.
With a final glance of the church
edifice, I left with memories that would last for a lifetime.
Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception Church, Altinho, Panaji
Regular Portuguese mass visitor #1
Regular Portuguese mass visitor #2
