The Age of Kali

by William Dalrymple

  Today the best view of the old metropolis can be had from the Chapel of Our Lady of the Mount. To get there you must climb a long flight of steps, once a passeggiata for the Goan gentry, now a deserted forest path frequented only by babbler birds, peacocks and monkeys.

  Scarlet flamboya trees corkscrew out of the cobbles. Bushes block the magnificent gateways in to now collapsed convents and overgrown aristocratic palaces. The architrave of a perfect Renaissance arch has rotted to the texture of an old peach-stone. Roots spiral over corniches; tubers grip the armorial shields of long-forgotten Goan dynasties. As you near the chapel, its façade now half-submerged under a web of vines and creepers, there is no sound but for the creak of old timber and the eerie rustle of palms.

  The panorama from the chapel’s front steps is astonishing. The odd spire, a vault, a cupola, a broken pediment can be seen poking out of the forest canopy. You look down past the domes and spires of the churches and monasteries, and see the evening light pick out the wandering course of the Mandovi river beyond.

  The river is empty now: the docks are deserted; the galleons long sunk. Of one of the greatest cities of the Renaissance world, almost nothing now remains.

  ‘But of course, despite everything they hung on,’ said Donna Georgina, leaning back on her wickerwork divan. ‘Despite the loss of the trading empire, they ruled us for another three hundred years. They were in Goa for a full two and a half centuries before you British conquered a single inch of Indian soil; and they were still here in 1960, more than a decade after you all went home again.’

  ‘Until Nehru threw them out at the liberation of Goa in 1961.’

  ‘Liberation?’ said Donna Georgina, her face clouding over as quickly as a Goan sky at the height of the monsoon. ‘Did you say liberation? Botheration more like!’

  I had clearly said the wrong thing, and Donna Georgina Figueiredo was now sitting bolt-upright on her divan, rigid with indignation. We were talking in her eighteenth-century ancestral mansion, not by any means the largest of the Indo-Portuguese colonial estancias that still dot Goa, but certainly one of the most perfectly preserved. I had driven to Donna Georgina’s village, Lutolim, along a lagoon edged by coconut groves, breadfruit trees and flowering hibiscus. At the centre of the village was the large white baroque church. In front of it stood a small piazza; to one side was the school, on the other side the taverna, the Good Shepherd Bar. In it, appropriately enough, the village priest was sitting at a table in a white cassock, reading the daily paper. Scattered around the vicinity were the grand houses of the village, and the grandest of them all was the Estancia Donna Georgina.

  Inside, a servant had ushered me in to the formal drawing room. On one side, next to an eighteenth-century Indo-Portuguese tallboy, stood a superb tall Satsuma vase. On the walls hung dark ancestral portraits. Other treasures – Macau porcelain, superb statuary, Mannerist devotional images – were dotted around the wooden galleries.

  As she entered the room, Donna Georgina clapped her hands. Within seconds another barefoot servant came running down the passage from the kitchen.

  ‘Francis, Bring Mr Dalrymple a glass of chilled mango juice. I will have a cup of tea.’

  The servant padded off down the bare wooden floorboards. It was not long afterwards that I made my gaffe about the liberation of Goa.

  Donna Georgina clasped her hands and raised her eyes to heaven.

  ‘Now, understand thees, young man,’ she said in an accent heavy with Southern European vowels. ‘When the Indians came to Goa in 1961 it was 100 per cent an invasion. From what were they supposed to be liberating us? Not the Portuguese, because the Portuguese never oppressed us. Let me tell you exactly what it was the Indians were freeing us from. They were kindly liberating us from peace and from security.’

  Donna Georgina had fearsome beady black eyes and her hair was arranged in a tight quiff. She wore a flowery Portuguese blouse bought in Lisbon, offset by a severe black skirt. She nodded her head vigorously.

  ‘We were ruled from Portugal for exactly 451 years and twenty-three days!’ she said. ‘The result of this is that we are completely different from Indians – completely different! We Goans have a different mentality, a different language, a different culture. Although we are now under Indian occupation, I feel awkward when I cross the border in to India … everything changes: the food, the landscape, the buildings, the people, the way of life …’

  Donna Georgina stared over my shoulder towards the open window: ‘In the Portuguese days we never had to lock our houses at night. Now we can never be sure we are safe even during the day. And you know who we fear most? The Indian politicians. Absolutely unscrupulous people. They have razed our forests, ransacked our properties. They have made life impossible for everyone – particularly all us landowners. They offer our land to the people in their election promises: never give anything that belongs to them – oh no, not a pin – but they never think twice about offering people what belongs to others. Oh yes. That’s very easy for them.’

  What Donna Georgina said reflected stories I had heard repeated all over Goa. The sheer length of time that the Portuguese had hung on in their little Indian colony – some four and a half centuries of intermingling and intermarriage – had forged uniquely close bonds between the colonisers and the colonised. As a result most Goans still consider their state a place apart: a cultured Mediterranean island, quite distinct from the rest of India. As they quickly let you know, they eat bread, not chapattis; drink in tavernas, not tea-shops; many of them are Roman Catholic, not Hindu; and their musicians play guitars and sing fados. None of them, they assure you, can stand the sound of sitars or shenai.

  Moreover, like Donna Georgina, many educated Goans still talk about ‘those Indians’ and ‘crossing the border to India’, while happily describing their last visit ‘home’ to their cousins in the Algarve or their brothers in Cintra. Absorption in to a wider India, they would admit, had certainly brought prosperity to the previously stagnant colony – but at a price. Public life had become corrupted, and the distinct identity of Goa was being forcibly and deliberately eroded.

  Portuguese, for example, was no longer taught in Goan schools; Portuguese place-names were everywhere being Sanskritised; the superb colonial buildings in Panjim were being systematically pulled down to make way for anonymous Indian concrete: the mansion of the Count of Menem, the last of the great Panjim aristocratic townhouses, was destroyed only in 1986 to make way for a six-storey block of flats.

  There were, it was true, still some last remaining corners left: the haphazard, narrow cobbled lanes of Fontainhas, for example, the oldest quarter of Panjim. Fontainhas looks like a small chunk of Portugal washed up on the shores of the Indian Ocean. Old spinsters in flowery dresses sit on their verandahs reading the evening papers, chatting to each other in Portuguese. Wandering through the quarter in the evening you come across scenes impossible to imagine anywhere else in India: violinists practise Villa-Lobos at open windows; caged birds sit chirping on ornate art nouveau balconies looking out over small red-tiled piazzas. As you watch, old men in pressed linen trousers and Homburg hats spill out of the tavernas, walking-sticks in hand, and make their way unsteadily across the cobbles, past the lines of battered 1950s Volkswagen Beetles slowly rusting in to oblivion. A Mediterranean douceur hangs palpably, almost visibly, over the streets.

  But such corners, insisted Donna Georgina, were becoming harder and harder to find. For twenty minutes my hostess listed the now familiar litany of complaints.

  ‘We could not fight the Indians in 1961,’ she said. ‘They were too many. Goa was a small place and could not defend itself. Even today we are only one million people. What can we do against nine hundred million Indians? But their seizure of Goa was an act of force. The majority here were opposed to the Indian invasion. That was why they had to come with their army, their air force and their navy. That day we all cried bitterly. It was the end of the good old days.’

  Donna Georgina brought out a
small handkerchief and dabbed her eyes.

  ‘In fact, since 1961 we’ve had two invasions. First it was the Indians. They plundered Goa: cut down our forests and took away our woods. Their politicians created havoc. Then after that it was the turn of the hippies. Disgusting. That’s what those people were. Dees-gusting. All that nudism. And sexual acts: on the beach, on the roads – even in Panjim. Panjim! Imagine: kissing in public and I don’t know what else. Disgusting.’

  The previous afternoon I had seen what remained of Goa’s once-vibrant hippy community. At Anjuna Beach, instead of the rusting Volkswagens of Fontainhas, a line of Enfield Bullet motorbikes were parked beneath the palm trees. The weekly flea market was packing up as I arrived: a German holy man was returning his stock of Hindu charms to his bag, while under the next palm tree a Mexican bootlegger was putting his remaining cans of imported lager back in to his knapsack. On the dunes by the shore, a bonfire was roaring, and what appeared to be a topless six-a-side female football team – an odd sight anywhere in the world, but an astonishing one in India – was kicking a ball around. A group of bangled backpackers was cheering them on while passing a ten-inch joint from hand to hand.

  ‘Shoot!’

  ‘Intergalactic!’

  ‘Cos-mic!’

  In the sixties, Anjuna had been the goal of every self-respecting hippy in Asia. From Hampstead and Berlin, from the barricades of Paris to the opium dens of San Francisco, streams of tie-dyed teenagers crossed Asia to reach this shore and make love by the breakers. Whole nomad communities formed around the beaches: Anjuna, Chapora, Colva and Calangute, previously backwaters barely known even to the sophisticates of Panjim, became mantras on the lips of fashion-conscious acid-heads across Europe and the United States.

  But in time, as the sixties turned in to the long hangover of the seventies, the hippies either died of overdoses or went home. The young who come today are mostly students, generally a pretty affluent middle-class bunch who in due course will no doubt cut off their ponytails and become merchant bankers or commodity brokers.

  Very few of the genuine diehard flower children of ’67 still remain. Some have become very rich – it doesn’t take much imagination to work out what trade their fortunes have come from – but most of the stayers-on are good-natured old freaks who grow their own, flap around in flared denim, hold forth on dragon lines, the Gaia theory and world harmony, and make ends meet by selling chocolate hash-brownies, aromatherapy oils and Indian waistcoats to the backpackers. This fossilised relic of Haight-Ashbury is actually pretty tame stuff, but you would never guess that from talking to Donna Georgina.

  ‘Of course, it’s because of drugs that their behaviour is like it is,’ hissed my hostess. ‘Disgusting people. Drugs and sexual acts and I don’t know what else. I don’t know which is worse: those hippies or our modern Indian politicians. The Portuguese wouldn’t have allowed either.’

  Donna Georgina sipped her tea defiantly. ‘Mr Salazar would have known what to do with those hippies. He wouldn’t have let them behave the way they did.’

  The old lady took me around the house. She showed me the great ballroom, where they held the last ball in 1936, and the sunken cloister where she grew all the essential ingredients for her kitchen – chillies and asparagus, coconut and lemon-grass, tea rose, papaya and balsam.

  ‘Despite the hippies and the politicians, you seem at least to have maintained your house,’ I said, looking around at the succession of perfectly preserved colonial Portuguese rooms that surrounded us.

  ‘Thanks to hard work,’ said Donna Georgina. ‘Hard labour, I might call it. I’m currently fighting twenty-five lawsuits in an effort to keep the family property intact. That’s right: twenty-five of them. Then there are the monkeys: big monkeys who jump on the roof and try to tear it apart. And as for preparing for the monsoon rains, it’s worse than a wedding. The amount of work: checking the drains, making sure nothing leaks … But let me tell you this: it is my duty so to do. It is my duty to my ancestors, to myself and to society.’

  We ended up in front of the ancient oratoria: a cupboard-like object which opened up like a tabernacle to reveal ranks of devotional images, crucifixes, sacred hearts and flickering candles. Twice every day, the household met there to say a decade of the rosary. On the wall beside it, Donna Georgina had hung a pen-and-ink drawing of the Holy Family.

  ‘I drew it myself,’ she explained, seeing where I was looking. ‘The baby is Jesus and the lamb that he is feeding symbolises humanity. The old lady is St Anne, Jesus’s grandmama. All the ancient families of Goa have St Anne as their patron saint.’

  Donna Georgina paused, leaving the last phrase hanging in the air.

  ‘It’s entirely through St Anne’s intercession and God’s protection that this house is standing and that I am still alive. People always ask me: “Living alone, you must have someone to look after you. Who is it?” To which I reply: “God Almighty, Jesus Christ and St Anne.”

  ‘And, young man, let me tell you this. Between them they are doing a very good job.’

  Up the Tiger Path

  JAFFNA, SRI LANKA, 1990

  The band had been playing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ before the helicopter gunship appeared over the crest of the hill. The noise of the rotor blades drowned out the pipes and drums, and throbbed down over the last commandos as they boarded the troopships. The hot dust rose in whirling eddies and the Generals’ medals chinked against one another as they brought their handkerchiefs up to cover their faces. After hovering for a few seconds over the departing army, the gunship passed on. It flew out across the bay, over the aircraft carrier and the destroyers, joining the four other helicopters which were criss-crossing the harbour – a formation of giant dragonflies hovering over the waters.

  The ceremony had been going on for two hours. It was an indulgent display of speeches and marches-past and brass bands, designed to show that the occupying troops were going to take their time leaving, that they were not – heaven forbid – being thrown out, that the third-biggest army in the world was not withdrawing with its tail between its legs.

  The speeches droned on, medals were awarded – but there was no disguising the tension which hung over the jetty. Somewhere around the bay, hidden under the jungle canopy, the Tamil Tigers were taking up their positions. Everyone was expecting a parting shot, a farewell mortar attack or the explosion of a last artfully disguised landmine, and all the way through the ceremony the Indian helicopters scoured the surrounding hills and clearings for the first burst of machine-gun fire, or the telltale flash of a rocket-launcher glinting in the sun.

  It was the end of March 1990, and I had been sent south from Delhi to cover the withdrawal of the Indian Army from Sri Lanka. Although the event was getting little coverage in the Western press, it was, in its way, as extraordinary an event as the Russian retreat from Kabul, or, before that, the fall of Saigon. Once again, as in Afghanistan and Vietnam, a superpower army – India has 1.3 million men under arms – had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a small but dedicated guerrilla group. It was a remarkable achievement – at times the Tigers had been outnumbered seventy to one – but while half the journalists in London seemed to have been in to Afghanistan with the Mujahedin, and there were enough films about Vietnam to stock a fair-sized video library, the Tamil Tigers remained faceless, unsung, unknown. One reason for this was that the Tigers strongly discouraged journalists. As a result there was little in the cuttings libraries to fill me in. There were only hints, and they made me want to know more.

  Firstly, it was clear that the Tigers were almost fanatically disciplined. Smoking and drinking were banned on pain of expulsion; adultery was punishable by death. It sounded an unlikely collision between the Maoist guerrilla principles of Che Guevara and the monastic ideals of the Desert Fathers; but it was clearly an effective mixture: there were few internal disputes within the Tigers, and certainly none of the petty power squabbles which fatally divided the Afghan Mujahedin. Instead the Tigers w
ere a centralised, autocratic, almost fascistic organisation, with the senior Tiger commander, Prabhakaran, receiving a near-religious obedience from his fighters.

  Secondly, the Tigers were suicidally brave. In more than a decade of continuous fighting, remarkably few of them had been taken alive. Every guerrilla carried around his or her neck a tiny phial of cyanide crystals: trapped by government troops, whole camps of Tigers had been known to swallow their phials and end their lives in two minutes of inconceivable agony.

  Finally, and no less intriguingly, the Tigers were clearly completely ruthless. In the course of their campaigns they had been responsible for some of the worst atrocities against civilians in recent Asian history. Their massacres had been compared to the most revolting excesses of the Viet Cong, even of the Khmer Rouge. Car-bombs had been left outside nursery schools; whole villages had been systematically liquidated; political rivals had been hunted down and exterminated with a terrible, single-minded savagery. It was as if the Tigers actually enjoyed killing, as if to them it was a hobby, or even an art form. Yet this unpleasant cocktail of qualities has turned the Tigers in to arguably the most efficient and successful guerrilla group operating anywhere in the world today.

  As I watched the last Indian troopship pull out of China Bay, I made up my mind to extend my stay in Sri Lanka, and to try to discover a little more about the Tigers. With the Indians out of the country, their war was temporarily over. They now controlled the north and east of the island, the Tamil heartland, and were beginning to make noises about talks with the Sri Lankan government and democratic elections: maybe they would look on journalists more kindly than before. I returned to Colombo and extended my visa for another month.

  The next day I rang a Tamil-speaking driver, George, and together we set off for Anuradhapura.

  Anuradhapura is where the story begins – doubly so.