As children when we were taken for holidays to Goa with my parents, and that's when we made some of the fondest memories of Pilerne, Goa. Dad loved the place and was able to drive a similar love into me. Inspite of piggy toilets and horrid primus stoves ( my poor Mum!).
“It’s our home -- generations of Furtados grew here. My Dad went away to Africa to make his fortune, but he came back. He never turned his back on his heritage. He came back and built the posher part of the house and the chapel on the other side of the road to match it. He came home rich and built us the grand homes in Bangalore, BUT he never forgot his roots,” was Dads reason for spending all his spare cash on the house.
Throughout his life Dad spent long days going to Goa when he could, even after we all got married and flew the coop. He had a bag kept near Mum’s dressing table called his “ Goa bag” into which all his Goa papers were kept. He also liked to keep everything nice, which he took to the house. Infact we still use his non stick pan and the cutlery set he hid from Mum, which my sister Christine brought from Australia. We just got rid of his rusted gas burner and petromax, leaving it in the gas shop, when we went to fill the gas for our 10 day trip.
Most of all, my two older boys spent long months in the village, with their grandpa who fed them and a pack of wild friends. In Fact there is a line of beer bottles out the back which Steven says Grandpa and grandsons bought ice cold and drank from the famous bar --” Talk of the Town”!
Over the years I have bought sheets and curtains, and plastic table cloths to cover the table, and fridge, pictures on the walls and we still sleep on mattresses with plastic covers, because we are there just for 10 days and they need to be saved from the rats for the rest of the year! All the stuff is taken out of the cupboard and then placed back carefully in plastic to weather the punishing humidity. This time we had to oil up the wall clock one of our sons gave for the house.
When we were kids our meals were ordered from Jack, round the corner from us. Regular home cooked meals with boiled rice and fish curry, tenli vegetable smothered in coconut and either a fried cutlet or a piece of fried fish. Today Jack is dead and I prefer to cook or we go out to eat --- OR we collect paninis from the Candolim Tinto, stuffed with delicious beef steak, fried crisp and smothered in a secret sauce and a salad.
Today the onus of keeping the house going, is on me and my husband. Only my sister and brother in Australia pay towards it upkeep with me and on this shoestring budget of 25 k (each) a year we firefight keeping the roof up and trying to work with saving the rest of the property.
The village knows me as the traditional ‘son’ who loves the house and the village like Dad. The panchayat smiles when we come to pay the taxes. As soon as we arrive in the village, the travelling statue of Our Lady comes to the house and all the village people troop in to pray and bless us. It’s a good feeling being told you have the blessings of your ancestors, by the village folk. We get advice from all sides, as we help in return. A property which we could not enclose, is enclosed now with a gate and the marauding cousin has stepped back, as the village is on my side. We also enclosed properties that he has tried to steal, making our ownership clear to the village, with concrete stakes. We also used a certified surveyor before staking our claim. Takes time and patience, lots of run around in the heat, but we do it.
This time we could not do much as the rains were upon us. We cleared the head high grass to avoid snakes coming into the house. We got the roof rafters pummeled and shaken off all the mounds of mud by the white ants. We cleared the front and side of overgrown trees and weeds as well. And the men enjoyed painting the gates and the window grills of the homestead. I fed all the plants fish waste, especially the new Alphonso mango trees planted.
And I cooked on a single burner which was hard, but once I fixed my routine it was easy. This time I gathered up courage to use the fabulous skillet my sister bought and kept in the cupboard. I got to sit out on the porch on Dad’s favourite bench, which is my fav bench now and sip hot chai and eat a heavily buttered poi.
Next trip we have to wait for the dry season, to open up the roof and repair it. We have been lathering the beams with cashew oil, which holds off the wite ant horde for a bit, before they make a meal of them. We are ageing and refuse to live in the house now through the dirt of repairs. So we wait for our new and tiny studio apartment, which we have invested in, in the Pilerne on the other side of Marra and the panchayat. Then we will open the whole roof and maybe change all the beams if we can collectively afford it.
We love Goa and for us all, my brother Mark and sister Christine, Goa is Pilerne. My sons love it too, BUT they have ‘foreigner kids’ now who will definitely not. I agree, it's hard sharing the bathroom with millipedes, a poisonous frog and a lizard as large as a small dinosaur. Mice rattle in the tiles above, as we slip in new tiles and remove the broken ones. A snake zips past my open foot, as I take the trash out to be collected. A spider falls from the electric meter as the man comes to read it. And I worry what may bite me, as I put my hand in to shut down the incoming water, near the wet water meter. But that’s Goa for me.
The next generation has to decide what must be done, meanwhile we keep Dad's promise of looking after his beloved ancestral home, which is our duty and responsibility now. The ancestors now include Mum and Dad too on the walls, besides GrandFather and young cousin Fausta, which Dad's sisters swear I am a carbon copy of. Cool if I am.
Your humble origins are never to be forgotten and as the villagers tell me and I swell with pride -- your family was one of the first in the village and one of the most respected. Furtavaddo was once full of Furtado’s, not any more, but it’s a good feeling to belong.
