The Konkans

by Tony D'Souza

  “I hired a good kid today.”

  “Good for you, Lawrence. I bet Marshall will be happy.”

  “This kid is different, Denise. He’s a black kid.”

  My mother looked at my father. She said, “You did that?”

  “I did.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Because he is a good kid.”

  Now my father picked up Charles’s file and took it into his office. More than anything, he was confused, and he read the memo clipped to the stack of papers. Habitually late, the memo said, and beneath that was a long list of dates and the times Charles had come into the office late, two pages of them dating back three years: July 2, 1976: 9:14; July 11, 1976: 9:21; July 17, 1976: 9:09; all the way up to August 19,1979: 9:22, just the week before. My father knew that Charles had this problem, had once mentioned it to him. And while it was something that my father never would have accepted from himself, it was also something that he had always felt to be very minor.

  But of course there had always been that other thing about Charles. That same thing about him that had attracted my father to him had at times also made my father nervous. My father turned to look out his window at the stone and glass of the building across the way. There were the times that Charles hadn’t shown up at company social events. There were the drinks he didn’t have with any of them after work.

  “It’s good to let people know who you are,” my father had said to Charles.

  Charles had smiled and said back, “They will know who I am when they read the quarterly balance sheets, Mr. D’Sai.”

  “Paper things are not enough.”

  “I know that’s true. I’ll try again. But I’m not sure I can do all of those things the way that you do.”

  And recently, they had been alone together in the elevator.

  “How is your family, Mr. D’Sai?”

  “My family is good, Charles. How is yours?”

  “They are good, too.”

  Then they were quiet, looking up at the lighting numbers. Finally, Charles had said, “Sometimes I don’t like what they do here.”

  “What do they do, Charles?”

  “We don’t get promoted at the same rate.”

  “We don’t have the East Coast degrees.”

  “It’s not just that.”

  Then the doors had opened to release them into the bustling atrium of people going home from work. Charles had held up his briefcase to my father in parting. He smiled and said, “Mr. D’Sai, we’ll talk another time. I’m home to the wife. Thank you for being a mentor to me, by the way.”

  My father had held up his hand, stopped, and looked at the young man. “My pleasure,” my father had said.

  My father took Charles’s file home with him that night, sat down with it at his desk in his study after dinner. He leafed through the pages, touching his forefinger to his tongue now and again to turn the pages easier, as was my father’s way. Was he looking for an answer in those papers? There was nothing more in the file than what there was. My father switched off the green lamp above his desk, went upstairs, and sat beside my mother on the edge of the bed. My mother was propped on her pillows, reading Stephen King. She set the book on her lap when my father came in.

  After a moment, my father said, “They want me to fire Charles Curtain.”

  “What did Charles do?”

  My father shook his head. “He complains too much.”

  “He’s right to complain.”

  “The world doesn’t work that way, Denise.”

  “Why did they give it to you to do?”

  “They’ve been giving these things to me ever since they moved me up.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “I am not.”

  “That’s awful.”

  My father didn’t say anything.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Then my father went down to his basement.

  My father thought about it all of that week. On Friday afternoon, he went into Marshall Caldwaller’s office. He didn’t sit. He said to his boss, “What if I told you I can’t fire him?”

  Caldwaller sighed. He dropped his pen on his desk. He pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed it. Then he said, “Lawrence, do you think I haven’t had to do things I didn’t like? Things that made me feel ill about myself? He’s gone. He’s out. They don’t want him. Why let him take you down with him?”

  “It doesn’t feel right.”

  “Kids. House. Career. Family. What more is there to think about than that?”

  That Saturday night, we went to the Bings’. The girls were put to bed, and Jason and I wrestled in his room. Then we went downstairs in our socks to spy on our parents from behind the sofa. Soon enough, our mothers came and found us, and put us to sleep in Jason’s bed. Just before we fell asleep in the dark room, the shouts of our fathers called us downstairs again.

  Mr. Bing was smiling as he shouted at my father, “You know what? I paid fifteen dollars for this chair. It’s my fucking chair.” Then he picked the chair up and whacked it on the floor. The chair broke into pieces. “Everything in this house is mine. All of this shit is mine. I can do whatever the fuck I want with it. I earned it. Smash that chair, Lawrence. Smash that fucking chair.” Then my dad got up and he smashed his chair. Then our mothers stood up, and our dads grabbed our mothers’ chairs and smashed them, too, and then our mothers came inside and found us while our fathers smashed things on the porch. Jason and I jumped into our mothers’ outstretched arms, and they hushed us on their shoulders as they carried us up the stairs. Then my mother made me walk while she carried my sister on her shoulder downstairs, and Jason and Jenny and Mrs. Bing came with us, and we all went out to the car. My father was breaking things on the porch with Mr. Bing. I looked at them as my mother pulled me out the front door. Our fathers held the legs of those chairs in their hands like clubs as they beat them on the table, trying to kill something out there in the dark, trying to make something die.

  My father tightened his tie that Monday morning, took the Metra commuter train downtown. He read the front page of the Tribune, and then he read the financials. He walked in a throng of people like him and pressed the buttons on the elevator that took him upstairs. There was work to do in his office, and he did it. Then he pressed the buttons to take the elevator downstairs for his appointment with Charles Curtain at Nick’s Fishmarket in the First National Bank Plaza, a restaurant my father liked.

  My father ordered the salmon, and Charles ordered a strip steak. “Have a martini,” my father told him. Charles shook his head.

  “It’s because I wrote a letter to Marsh after they gave Paul Saunders the new ADM account when everyone knew it should have gone to me,” Charles said.

  My father shook his head. He said, “It’s because you let them do it by being late.”

  Then my father handed Charles the papers and fired him.

  The Americans

  They’ve taken to telling me the stories again in these years after my father’s death. It’s as though they know that it’s time to get them right. When I call my uncle in Chicago, he always asks after my mother, after my sister, whom he loves like a daughter. Then he turns to the past:

  “Have I told you about when your mother and I went to pick up Winston in Vermont? He wasn’t even wearing a coat. Can you believe that? From India to Vermont without a coat. How your mother and I have laughed about that. I know your father knew what we did even then. But your father never wanted to get involved in any of those things.

  “There were elephants in the coffee mountains the years I lived there, have I told you that, Francisco? How I loved to look at the elephants. What is it about an elephant that can make one feel so sad? Up there, how it could rain. Everything was dark and green. One time I followed a trail to a tree, and all of its branches were covered in glass bangles. I took one. I worried all night about what I had done, and then I had a fever. As soon as I put tha
t bangle back on its holy place, I was well again. Why did I think to do that, you know, my son? We had a difficult time respecting those people.”

  My mother is retired in Florida. Late one night, when we were exhausted from talking and the stories had come to an end, I said to her, “I have these memories.”

  “What do you think you remember, Francisco?”

  “When I was very young. Memories about you. Memories about my uncle Sam.”

  My mother pursed her lips, looked carefully at the wine in her glass as we sat at her kitchen table. “Are they good memories?”

  “They are good memories.”

  My mother never stopped looking at the wine in her glass. She said, “I think we remember what we need to. That each of us keeps our memories just as we need them to be. If your memories of what we did are good, let yourself remember them as good. And if they are bad, let them be that, too. Of all of our children, know that it’s something that belongs to you.”

  “Didn’t you worry about hurting them?”

  “We only managed to hurt ourselves.”

  “And then you ended it.”

  “Our children began to grow.”

  “So you made a decision to be unhappy people.”

  “Not unhappy people at all, Francisco. Only people. People who understood that there were others in this world whom we cared about who had to share this life with us.”

  “Tell me the story.”

  My mother shook her head. We were quiet together in a real way for the first time that night. The story had come into the room with us.

  Then my mother blushed. She lowered her eyes, smiled, and then she said, “Don’t I get to keep anything for myself?

  “What I remember is all that snow in Vermont. Your uncle was so skinny. We stayed in an awful motel in Burlington. I felt so happy.”

  This is what really happened: Vasco da Gama landed in Calicut, India, in May 1498, with three ships, the first European captain to reach India by sea.

  The voyage was grueling, da Gama spent longer in the open ocean than Columbus had. The Portuguese had no idea about the riches changing hands in the Indian Ocean: pearls, ivory, silk, spices; the cheap trinkets and scarves they’d brought as trade goods led to ridicule and attack nearly everywhere they went. Scurvy began to kill off the men, and the humiliated Portuguese turned their sails for home.

  Four years later, Vasco da Gama came back.

  This time, da Gama commanded twenty warships bristling with weaponry the likes of which no one in the Indian Ocean had ever seen. He smashed the Arabs, he smashed the Africans, he smashed the Indians, every one. He established a direct European control of India that would last until the end of the British Raj in 1947.

  And what about his friend, Francis Xavier? The two men never met.

  Francisco de Jasso y Azpilcueta was born in 1506 in Spain; he would go on to win more souls for Catholicism than any other person since St. Paul. In August of 1534, Xavier, Ignatius Loyola, and five others founded the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits, “those who say Jesu too much,” the “footsoldiers of the Pope.” They took vows of poverty and chastity, and simplified their names.

  In 1540, Francis Xavier was ordered by the Catholic Church to India on King John III of Portugal’s request for missionaries. From Goa, Xavier served as Apostolic Nuncio, converting masses up and down the Konkan Coast. Xavier made journey after journey to places few Europeans had been to at a time when sea travel killed most men quickly. He was beatified in 1619, and on March 12, 1622, he was sainted.

  While acting as Apostolic Nuncio in Goa, the future saint wrote a letter to the Portuguese king asking for permission to install the Inquisition in India. He wrote that Hindu idols and temples specifically should be eradicated. Xavier himself had seen the beginning of the destruction of Goa’s Hindu temples during his tenure as Nuncio, Catholic cathedrals built on the temples’ sites with the rubble from their walls. The Goan Inquisition began in 1560, lasted until 1812.

  The priests of the Goan Inquisition set up headquarters in the former sultan’s palace. They immediately outlawed Hinduism. Sacred Hindu texts were burned, Hindu music, clothing, and foods were banned. Hindu marriage was outlawed. Violators were burned at the stake in groups in a ceremony known as the auto-da-fe, “act of faith.” The strictures of the Inquisition spanned 230 pages. Hindus who confessed their crimes were granted strangulation before they were burned. So many adults were killed that orphans abounded on the Konkan Coast. The Catholic Church raised these children Catholic.

  African slaves were imported to the colony. Led in gangs first by Jesuits, and later by Franciscans, the slaves descended on villages, capturing Hindus, rubbing raw pork in their mouths, thereby rendering the people outcasts from their own religion. The priests conducted a mass baptism of these untouchables on January 25 of each year, the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul.

  People who refused to convert were brought to the palace, interrogated until they confessed to heresy. Once they did, they were tried and convicted before the Inquisition’s three judges. There was no possibility of appeal. The punishment was burning.

  But before anyone could be burned, the necessary confessions often took torture to extract. The Inquisition had a forty-one-point manual for this. There was flogging, whipping, scalding, pressing. Fingernails were pulled out. Eyelids sliced off. Fingers and toes were removed one by one. The ears, the nose, the lips were all cut off. Legs and arms were amputated joint by joint until nothing was left but the torso, and the living head. Then the slow dismemberment began. Jews who had fled the Inquisition in Spain discovered that the Inquisition had come to India and found them.

  The Goan Inquisition evolved during its 252-year length. In 1570, it was decreed that Hindus who converted freely to Catholicism didn’t have to pay taxes for fifteen years. Also that year, Hindu names were made illegal. In 1684, the Konkan language was banned, Portuguese made compulsory. All books and documents written in the Konkan language were burned. In time, the original language itself would be lost. By 1812, Portuguese military power had waned, and the British invaded Goa, ostensibly to end the Goan Inquisition. At the same time, Goa was a good port from which to exploit the riches of India.

  What remained on the western coast of India running from Goa south to Mangalore where the Jesuits and Franciscans executed their Inquisition was a new people forged by it. Most Konkans have never heard of the Goan Inquisition, do not know that their language is a pidgin, that their family names were adopted out of fear, that their Catholic faith was born of torture and fire. They also don’t know why they like to eat pork.

  But long before I knew any of that, I was a boy who loved my parents. I loved my uncle even more. We were growing pumpkins, and all of the Saturdays that fall, I helped him tend them, lifting them onto pieces of carpeting foam as they fattened, which somebody had told him would keep them from being blemished by the ground. Sometimes my mother helped us weed the garden while my sister played with dirt, and sometimes she simply sat on the grass of my uncle’s yard. She’d play pat-a-cake with Elizabeth, and Elizabeth would laugh at the clapping and the sounds. My sister could say “juju,” she could say “gapes.” My own formal education would begin the following year at Mary, Seat of Wisdom Catholic Elementary School.

  But that would be next year. Now we were watching the pumpkins grow, and my mother told me that the pumpkins grew because the leaves and vines filled them with the light they caught from the sun, and my uncle said the pumpkins’ roots took their food from the soil. Either way, each time we pulled up to my uncle’s house, I would run around to the garden to see if the pumpkins had grown in the week I’d been away. They had. We were going to carve them into jack-o’- lanterns, my mother promised, and I was going to be a pirate, with a beard, an eye patch, and a sword. Those things were waiting for me in my closet, ready for Halloween. Then my grandmother wrote that my grandfather was sick, and my father and I flew to India to watch my grandfather die.

 
India was hot and loud and yellow. There was dust, and people yelling. I gripped my father’s hand as we walked through crowds of people, and people spit everywhere. In our hotel room, my father turned the air conditioner on high and wiped my face with his handkerchief. Then he wiped his forehead. He lifted me up, and we looked down from the window at all the people, at the black cars, at the men in the red turbans cleaning out people’s ears with long metal pins. The big stone archway, my father told me, was the Gateway of India. The British army had come marching through that gate to conquer the whole country and make it their jewel. Men came and shined my father’s shoes on their knees outside the door, they took the shirt my father had worn on the plane, and bowed, and brought it back pressed and wrapped in tissue. My father and I ate fish and chips in the hotel restaurant later, and the waiter smiled and bowed in his white jacket and said to my father in a soft voice, “Sir, is this your son?”

  My father set down his fork and looked at the waiter. He said, “This is my son.”

  “Sir, he is handsome.”

  On the bus in the night, a man coughed and coughed. He coughed like that until the morning. We stopped on the side of the road in the dark, and insects whirled in the lights of the bus while everyone went into the grass to pee. There were stars over everything. In the bus, I leaned my head on my father’s shoulder as I looked out the window at the stars and the dark. My father caressed my face.

  “Do you miss home, my son?” he asked me.

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Then I want you to sleep.”

  In the morning, gangs of men banged on the sides of the bus with their hands as we pulled into the station. My father drank tea from a clay cup while all the people at the bus station gathered about us to look at me, and my father held my hand, and when he was done drinking, he threw the cup on the ground so that it broke into pieces. “That is what we do here,” my father told me.