The Konkans

by Tony D'Souza

  Vasco da Gama and St. Francis Xavier looked at each other and grinned. They stood up and looked the old king right in his eye, and they said, “You have made us knights of the Lord. We are brave and ready. We will face all the terrors of the sea, just as our people have faced and defeated the Moors. We will sail to India and plant your flag and the cross of our Lord on its shore, and the people that come to us from the trees of that shore we will take into our arms and teach them all the things that they do not know. Then they will become a great Catholic people of the world, and they will forever sing the praises of you, our king, who had the goodness to send us to them.”

  Vasco da Gama and St. Francis Xavier were great friends, my uncle told me. The day they were to set sail, all of Lisbon came to see them off. The city was draped in colorful banners that waved in the wind, young women threw flowers down onto them from their windows as the pair rode in procession on their groomed horses to the port of Belem. Behind them came the king and queen in the royal carriage, and at the port, the soldiers had to hold the people back with the points of their lances. All of the people wanted to touch the captain and the priest and wish them good luck, and they showered them with coins and rice. On board the Saint Gabriel, the ship that would carry them to India, Vasco da Gama stood beside St. Francis Xavier on the captain’s deck, and the one hundred soldiers and sailors who had been chosen to go with them were dressed in their new uniforms of white and purple. The wind blew their curly hair. Then St. Francis Xavier raised his staff with the crucifix on it, and the people kneeled as one. Vasco da Gama with his sword at his side, the king and queen in their crowns and robes, the soldiers, the court officials, the merchants of the city, even the peasants who had come in from the fields. The crucifix shone in the sun. St. Francis Xavier said, “May the good Lord protect us on our journey, just as He has always protected Portugal.” All the people said, “Amen.”

  The king cut the last tether tying the Saint Gabriel to the pier with his sword, and the ship left the port of Belem, with its sails rippling to a cheer from the multitude. All along the bank of the River Tagus, boys ran after it. Then the sea was there, and Vasco da Gama and St. Francis Xavier stood together and looked at it. Vasco da Gama’s beard was long and brown, and St. Francis Xavier’s was short and black. “Do you think we’ll really make it all the way to India?” Vasco da Gama asked St. Francis Xavier, and St. Francis Xavier said back, “If you believe in your heart that our mission is just, my captain, then there is no doubt that we will.”

  “I believe it, Francis.”

  “Then I believe it, too, Vasco.”

  They sailed for many months along the coast of Africa. For months and months and months. The sailors and soldiers were afraid sea monsters would swallow the ship if they strayed too far from the shore, and all along the beaches of Africa, naked savages as black as night came out of the jungle to howl and throw spears at them. Everyone on the ship grew lean and tired. They grew homesick for the golden fields of Portugal. They were not used to the heat in the tropics, and they went crazy from the brightness of the sun. Some of them dove into the sea to cool themselves, where they drowned and died. Others quarreled with each other over the smallest things, and they stabbed each other with knives. Still others fell ill because the food had rotted, and their gums began to bleed and their teeth dropped out of their heads. One by one, they died, and their bodies were thrown into the sea like wood. For weeks, sharks followed the ship to eat the bodies of the dead, and the men could see the fins and teeth of the sharks as they thrashed and tore at the bodies in the water. The men had nightmares about those sharks in their hammocks at night, and the ship was loud with their shouts. Because of those nightmares, no one could ever rest. No one had imagined how terrible that voyage would be.

  When they reached the tip of Africa, where the sea foamed and crashed in the gorges, the last of the men wanted to turn around for home. They knew the ship would be smashed to pieces in those gorges, and that they’d never see Portugal again. They drew out their swords to kill the captain and priest. But there were also loyal men left on the ship, and they drew out their swords as well. The loyal men fought the mutineers from the captain’s deck like the Catholics had fought the Moors. Vasco da Gama fired his guns while St. Francis Xavier kneeled and prayed. The ship became shrouded in gun smoke, the decks slippery with blood. The battle lasted all through the day to the setting of the sun, and the captain and his loyal men didn’t stop fighting until every last one of the mutineers was killed and their bodies thrown to the sharks. St. Francis Xavier led them in a prayer of thanks, and they passed through the gorges in the night as though God Himself had guided them with His hand. By morning, they had rounded Africa.

  There were barely enough men left to sail the ship now, and even the captain, even the priest, had to take their turns climbing the rigging to the crow’s nest to look out for Muslim ships, because the Muslims controlled the waters of the east coast of Africa from their castles in Zanzibar. The Muslims had a rich trade in silks and spices, and they did not want Vasco da Gama to discover how much wealth they had. The African tribesmen who had seen the small Portuguese ship making its way along their coast sent runners to Zanzibar to tell the Muslims that a European ship was coming, and the sultan clenched his fists on his throne and sent out his fleet to destroy Vasco da Gama.

  For some days, Vasco da Gama and St. Francis Xavier and the men still alive on the Saint Gabriel sailed up the coast in peace. They washed the deck and repaired the ship, and at night the captain let the men drink rum and sing the songs of Portugal. What more were they than a small Catholic ship on the great big ocean impossibly far from home? All they wanted to do was reach India, meet the people that were waiting for them, and give them the gifts of religion, language, numbers, and writing. Then one morning, Vasco da Gama looked through his glass and saw the masts and sails of the Muslim armada stretching from one horizon to the other. He called St. Francis Xavier, and he looked through the glass, too.

  “This is the end for us, Francis,” Vasco da Gama said. “We will die here and sink forever to the bottom of the sea, and the people who wait for us on the coast of India will never know how hard we tried to reach them.”

  “Did we not fight the Moors for seven hundred years?” the great saint said to the great captain. “And how many times were the battlefields red with our blood? Did we despair? Did we turn our back on our God and what He wanted us to do?”

  “We did not,” Vasco da Gama said.

  “Then why would we turn our backs on our God now?”

  By midday, the masts of the Muslim ships loomed around them like a forest. They could see the Muslim sailors in their turbans tamping charges into their cannons. The men on the Saint Gabriel were haggard, exhausted, frightened, and thin. Some of them looked like skeletons, as though they were dead already. St. Francis Xavier in his black robes looked down at them with Vasco da Gama in his helmet beside him. He said, “Do you see that the Muslims’ sails close in about us now like smoke?”

  “We see it, Father,” the trembling sailors and soldiers said.

  “Does any one of you believe that we will not now achieve our dream of reaching India?”

  The men looked around at each other. So many had been lost, so many of those who remained were nearly dead. They did not know what to say with the Muslims’ battleships closing ranks around them. Then they looked up at their brave captain, who had toiled just as hard as they had, at their brave priest, who had endured every difficulty of the journey with them. They began to murmur, and the murmur turned into a cheer, and then they began to holler just as the Catholic knights had hollered before they launched themselves in the assault on the last Moorish castle in Europe, and they said, “We will reach India! Every last one of us believes in our hearts that we will step ashore in India to plant the cross and flag of our God and king!”

  St. Francis Xavier raised his crucifix, and the men kneeled. Even Vasco da Gama kneeled. St. Francis Xavier led them through t
he Lord’s Prayer, and each man prayed as he never had before. Then St. Francis Xavier kneeled, his eyes closed, and he kissed the staff as he held it and he whispered, “My Lord God, I beseech You, come to us in our hour of need. Look into our hearts and see our pure love for You. Take us to the coast of India, where a people are waiting for us to bring Your Church to them.”

  As St. Francis Xavier and Captain Vasco da Gama and all the last sailors of that little ship closed their eyes and prayed, dark clouds rolled into the sky and covered the sun, and a tremendous thunderclap broke above them, and when they opened their eyes, they saw darkness where before had been light, and they felt the first sprinklings of rain on their upturned palms. A cold fog rolled in from the coast of Africa until the Saint Gabriel was concealed in it and the Muslim ships could not be seen. The sultan of Zanzibar watched from the tower of his castle in disbelief, and he threw down his robes and tore out his hair. The Muslim warships became lost in that mist, and they crashed into each other and sank until not one was left.

  Vasco da Gama turned the ship toward India, and the men let up a cheer. In two more weeks, they saw palm fronds and coconuts floating in the water, and then tall white birds with long yellow legs such as they had never seen before alighted on the rigging of the ship like angels. Vasco da Gama opened his glass, and through it he saw a palm-lined coast. He passed the glass to St. Francis Xavier, who looked through it, too. Then they folded the glass away, and hugged each other and smiled. Tears streamed from their eyes. Then Vasco da Gama wiped his tears away, looked down to his men, and said, “Listen to me, every one of you. We have accomplished a great feat. With the help of our Lord God, we have done something which has not been done by men. Our journey has come to an end. Tomorrow we will stand on the shore of India.” The men cheered as though there were thousands of them.

  My uncle Sam would pause then to see if I was asleep. If I wasn’t, I would reach up to pet his smooth chin and say, “And then what happened?” I had heard the story a hundred times, told in that many different ways. But the next part of the story was the most important, and I knew I was supposed to ask him that, and I did.

  “In the morning, Francisco, Vasco da Gama and St. Francis Xavier washed themselves with fresh water, put on the clean clothing that they’d kept in the bottoms of their trunks all through the voyage, and then they combed their hair. They dropped anchor near Velha Goa, which means Old Goa in Konkani, and then lowered a rowboat from the Saint Gabriel to the water. Vasco da Gama and St. Francis Xavier stood in the bow while the men at the oars pulled them toward shore. Their hair flew like ribbons in the wind, the wind rippled in their shirts. All along the shore, a great mass of people dressed in white began to come out of the trees. The people smiled and pressed their palms together in welcome, and Vasco da Gama and St. Francis Xavier raised their hands to them. The little boat ran up through the surf and onto the shore, and Vasco da Gama leapt onto the beach, drew out his sword, and planted it in the sand to claim India for Portugal. St. Francis Xavier planted his staff beside it. The sun shone on the crucifix like gold, and the people came to it in their sacred linen wraps and kneeled. St. Francis Xavier raised his hand and made the sign of the cross and said, ‘I baptize you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, man and woman, parent and child, every single one.’

  “‘Who are you?’ Vasco da Gama said to them, and the oldest one, with a long white beard, stood up and looked the great captain in his eyes and smiled. ‘Vasco da Gama, we have been waiting for you since the beginning of time. We are your people. We are the Konkans.’”

  My uncle Sam discovered that my aunt Asha was doing more in the world than just wearing saris and bindis when he came home on a Tuesday evening that new summer, and not only was the house dark and empty, but his Sita-devi was also not in any room of it. My uncle set his keys on the kitchen table, went in and out of the bedroom twice, yanked open the shower curtain in the bathroom, and looked around in the backyard. There was nothing back there but the rows of his garden, the plants unfurling their green leaves. Where in the world was Asha? Then the thought that she had hanged herself came to him, and he hurried to the bedroom closet.

  The winter had been terrible for my aunt. The incredible cold and gloom of Chicago compounded her boredom and loneliness day by miserable day, stuck in the house with nothing to do as she always was, so much so that she had even given up her letter-writing campaign. Maybe this had had to do with the fact, which my uncle had noted, that no letter covered in stamps from India had ever arrived in their mailbox, her father promising in it that he would come and rescue her from her awful husband. What arrived instead were occasional aerograms from her mother full of the banal news of the family. Everyone hoped she was happy and well in her marriage, her mother wrote, which had made every member of their extended clan proud of her. And also, could her husband not send them a little money for medicine for her arthritis? Her father had spent extravagantly on her wedding after all. It was with these thoughts that my uncle pulled open the closet door. Shirts, pants, jackets, coats all dangled from the bar. But not his Sita-devi. There was something else that wasn’t hanging from that wooden bar: the Calvin Klein jeans he had bought for her when they’d first come back.

  Konkan men aren’t especially advanced in the world when it comes to dealing with women, and despite the influence of my mother and the other women he had known in America, when it came to his Indian wife, my uncle wasn’t much developed either. To him as he had been raised, marriage was a contract between two fathers in their desire to settle debts, strengthen ties between families, apologize for old wrongs, gain prestige, or set the stage for better business. A wife was little more than a stranger encountered for the first time in any real way on the wedding night, and the only thing expected of that was the bloodstained sheet hung on a nail beside the door of the house for all to see that the contract had been sealed. My uncle had accomplished that quickly in the weeks that he’d been in India for his marriage. But now that they were alone together in America, my uncle Sam did not know what he was supposed to do with his Sita-devi at all.

  Yes, in the shine of the party lights in his father’s courtyard, in the endless congratulations from the men of both families, in the rouse that covered him, laughing, head to toe in flour and eggs, in the raucous choruses of “E puri kon achi?,” the food, the drink, and the claps on the back until he was intoxicated with it, he had felt sure that he would love his bride. But back in America, Sita-devi in her sari and helplessness revealed herself to him for what she really was: a young Indian girl with few other skills than singing the poems and dancing the stories, someone he didn’t know at all, someone he was beholden to in a way he’d never been to anyone. When my aunt would nag him in those first months to take her out into the world that was America, my uncle would look at her in her sari and try to imagine her on the streets of Chicago. Where could he take her dressed like that but Devon Avenue? All that he had to say to her shrill voice when no one else was there was, “Yes, yes. Tomorrow, Sita-devi. Tomorrow I will show you everything,” and all that she had to say back was, “You are ruining my life, Samuel. Why did you marry in India when an Indian wife was not what you wanted? I myself don’t even want to stay in this place any longer. I will write to my father and he will take me home.”

  “So write to him, what in the hell do you think I care? You, Sita-devi, what do you do but sit and complain?”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  “But I am Rama and you are my Sita. Isn’t that what your poems say?”

  “Why do you have to ruin every little thing?”

  “I am not ruining this dinner that I am cooking for myself. I am not ruining my job that pays for this house and the food that you eat here. You want to write to your father? Go into the bedroom and write to him. Do you think that I need a Sita-devi here? My life was full of gopis before you came.”

  My aunt Asha would storm into the bedroom and slam the door at the mention of gopis, and in there she would set p
aper on the dresser from the drawer, sit in the chair, and write to her father. The times when my uncle worried about what this might bring, he thought about the facts of Konkan matchmaking and gift giving and honor exchanges and marriage. Konkan marriages were never broken. No matter what she was writing to her father, wasn’t his Sita-devi here to stay?

  This is who my aunt Asha was: the prettiest girl of a clan of Konkans who owned a small but respectable coconut plantation called Mendonça Station, her family name, on the bank of Mulki River north of Mangalore. Her father worked at the port of Mangalore, and was not so much a father in the bounce-the-children-on-his-knee sort of way, but another of the men in their mustaches and lungis of the extended clan in the cluster of painted houses along the riverbank, and her family was not so much a unit unto itself, but a part of the larger group, as the Konkans of that very Konkan region were. She ran in a gaggle of cousins in her youth who were each as known and close to her as any sibling, and she swam with them naked in the river as another of their fathers poled past in his dugout canoe to set nets in the mangroves for bangadee mackerel and crabs. She climbed the mango trees to knock down the dangling fruit with a stick, she threw rotten figs from the grove at the others in their game of the Ramayana wars, went home again with them to be scolded, just as they were by their mothers, for the fig seeds plastered in her hair.

  Her favorite times were the early mornings when their fathers would come home from the mangroves in their canoes. This was on weekends, when their fathers were home from their jobs in the city and could practice this ancient Konkan art to both keep the tradition alive, as well as for the pleasure of being out on the water in the dark. Their fathers spent all of their weekend nights in the shadows of the mangrove maze, each one staking out a place, baiting his nets with fish-gut offal, as the Mulki Konkans have always done, and then they would sit in their canoes under the starry night, taking sips from their bottles of Old Monk XXX rum or Two Horses cashew fenny, and pass that quiet time with the telling of stories of Vasco da Gama and St. Francis Xavier to whatever son they’d decided to take with them that night. When the morning star rose on the horizon, they’d reel in their nets and pluck off the crabs that hung from them like crimson ornaments. The crabs would skitter all through the canoes and nip the men’s bare ankles with their pincers, but even this was a pleasure. Back on the bank, the sons would toss the crabs onto the shore with bailing buckets. They would holler their arrival into the dark houses, and lamps would then be lit and the children would run out from their dreams to catch the angry crabs, to collect piles of them like money.