The Konkans

by Tony D'Souza

  I could feel all those people looking at me. When I would lift my eyes to look at them, they were looking at me with their mustaches and folded arms in a circle around us. I held my father’s hand tightly. Then my father took us through the crowd while men carried our bags on their heads.

  In the Ambassador cab, my father said to the driver, “The Christian Colony.”

  The driver looked at us in his mirror. He said, “This is your son?”

  “This is my son,” my father said, and looked at the man in the mirror.

  We passed through a dusty place crowded with people. There were cows there. The cows’ horns were painted blue. The women wore colored saris. My father pointed at the passing things. He said, “That was your mother’s house.”

  In India, I was always kept inside my grandfather’s house, because I was the firstborn son of a firstborn son of a first-born son, all the way back to the beginning. Also, I was an American boy, and nobody wanted me to get hurt in India. I was dressed in a suit all of that time, except when my father and I would go to bed in the room that had been his when he’d been my age, and we would undress from the day, and my father would wrap me in a checkered lungi. The windows of the house were hung with black drapes because my grandfather was dying. There were votive candles in every corner, and the servants moved about silently. The relatives were quiet and sad when they came, and my grandmother covered her face with her sari so that I cannot remember even seeing it.

  Sometimes my father would burst into tears as he sat on the edge of the bed. Then I would also cry. My father’s body would shake as he covered his face with his hands and cried, and I would hold his elbow in my hand and cry as I watched him. Then my father would stop his crying and look at me, and then he would gather me up in his arms and hold me tightly to him and rock us together, not saying anything. I could hear crickets. Someone was always clearing his throat in the night in one of the other rooms of the house. In the mornings, my father and I bathed with hot water from the buckets the servants heated and brought for us. It was dark in the bathing room, and my father scoured my body with a rag when he soaped me.

  “I washed myself in here every day as a boy,” my father told me.

  “Uncle Sam lived here, too,” I said.

  “This is where your uncle Sam and I were children.”

  My father had made all of us get dressed up for a picture before we’d left America, and our family was on one side of the couch in our living room, me in my father’s lap, my sister in my mother’s, and my uncle Sam and Aunt Asha beside us.

  “Let’s do a few where we smile,” the photographer had said, and then the camera flashed, and then he said, “And let’s do a few where we don’t.”

  My father had picked one of the ones where we weren’t smiling, and now it was framed in glass and hanging on the wall beside my grandfather’s diploma from the Britishers’ police school and his citation from the king of England. When my Indian uncles came to look at the picture in their suits, they squinted at it and said, “The Americans.”

  Everyone wanted to talk to my father, and my father spent all of those days talking to them. My father sat back in my grandfather’s chair in a lungi, and the men would lean toward him from their folding chairs as they talked. They drank the bottle of Beefeater that my grandfather’s uncle had given to him. They dusted it with a rag as they laughed and opened it. Then they set small glasses on the floor and poured the glasses full as they talked. The men wore suits and slicked-back hair, and they all smelled like India. For a moment, when each one came, my father would push me toward them so that I had to shake their hands.

  “Very fair.” The men would pat my head and hold my face in their hands to look at me, and then they would say, “Babu’s firstborn son is handsome and fair.”

  Sometimes my father would bark Konkani at the servants from my grandfather’s chair, and the servants would hurry inside and take me out to the yard by the hand. There were other people in the bright yard with the wall all around it with glass shards on the top to keep the bad people out. If there were dogs there, they would hit the dogs’ heads so that they yelped and went away. All of these people were Indians and dark, in lungis and saris, cooking pots of curry at the fires, and they could not speak English. They all looked at me and smiled and did not talk, and then they talked a long time and laughed. They made me sit on a stool in my suit, and they brought me things and put them at my feet. There were yellow fruits with spines on them, there were flowers. There were sticks with blue strings tied around them, and Indian coins. Then there were yellow balls on a metal tray. A man came and smiled at me, and his teeth were red when he did. He stooped and lifted one of the yellow balls for me to eat. Then he took one of the sticks, lit it with a match, and smoked it.

  “I am your friend, small boy,” he told me.

  The man puffed out white smoke and stooped to me and winked. All of those other people watched. He said something to me that I did not understand. He said something to me again, and I did not understand it again, because I could not speak Konkani and he knew that. Then he took a string of the flowers and put them around my neck. They were pink and white against my suit.

  The man said something in Konkani and everyone was quiet. He touched his finger to my chest and said my name, “Francisco.”

  The man said the Konkani words slowly. He said, “Tu . . . jay . . . now . . . ka . . . lay.” Then he said my name again.

  “Tujay now kalay?” the man said softly, and smiled.

  I said, “Francisco.”

  Everyone smiled and clapped.

  “Tujay now kalay?”

  “Francisco.”

  “Say to me.”

  “Tujay now kalay?”

  “Ciprian,” the man said, and shook my hand as he smiled and smoked. Then he took me by the hand to all of those people and I said, “Tujay now kalay?” to all of them, and they all told me their names and touched my face. Then the man put me on the stool and lifted a yellow ball to my mouth. When I took a bite from it, he blew out smoke from the side of his mouth, petted my face with his rough hand, and said, “You are Konkan.”

  Then they brought a white chicken, and Ciprian stepped on its neck and chopped off its head with a knife. The body fluttered around the yard while the head panted on the ground. Everyone watched what I would do. Then my father came into the yard and shouted at them in Konkani. He took the flowers from around my neck and dropped them on the pile on the ground. He brushed off the pollen from my suit, and carried me inside on his shoulder.

  “Did they tease you, my son?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Then we will deal with them.”

  I was put on the chair beside my grandmother with her covered face, and for a long time my grandmother did not say anything to me. Then she touched my face with the gold bangles ringing on her wrist and said to me, “I see your mother in your face. But I also see us.

  “What is your name?”

  “Francisco.”

  My grandmother pinched my wrist so hard that I pulled it from her. She said to me, “What is your name?”

  “Francisco.”

  She pinched my wrist. She said to me, “Don’t you know that you have no name? Don’t you know that you are a first-born son?”

  “I am Francisco.”

  “You are Babu’s son and you are Santan’s son. You don’t have any other name than that. Don’t you know? You are the firstborn son.”

  “I am Francisco.”

  “You have no name. Don’t you know that you are the firstborn son? You are the firstborn son of the firstborn son. You don’t need any name but that. You are the firstborn son. That will always be your only name. Don’t you know that we have all lived so that you could be this? You belong to us only. You are our firstborn son.”

  Then one of my uncles came in his suit, and he pinched my face. He and my grandmother laughed. He said to me, “Are you a Konkan boy or only a white, tell me?”

  When I didn’t s
ay anything, he said again, “Are you a Konkan boy or only a white?”

  He held my face tightly in his hand and looked at me. My Indian uncle wagged his finger close to my face. He made his face dark and he said to me, “Don’t you ever dare to be ashamed of us.”

  “He is the firstborn son.”

  “He is the firstborn white son of a Konkan.”

  “I want Mom,” I told my father that night, and my father untied the laces of my shoes as I stood before him and he said, “Your mother says that she loved this place. That this was the only place where she was happy and that we all should have stayed here and lived in this place forever. What do you think of that, my son?”

  “I want to go home to my mom.”

  “Now you know something of all of this.”

  Then my grandfather was going to die, and Ciprian and the servants pushed aside the heavy table that my grandfather had bled on when he’d been shot, and the Indian priest in his black robe and glasses and white beard came and said a Mass for us in Konkani, and the voices of the people echoed in the room in the light of the candles. For a long time, the priest read from the Konkan Bible, and I looked at his lips moving in his white beard. Then he closed the Bible and turned his face to the ceiling and said something at it, and the people turned their faces to the ceiling and said something back, and he said something, and they said something back. The priest gave them Communion on their tongues. Then he went into my grandfather’s room.

  “What is he doing with Grandfather?” I whispered to my father on his lap as we and the quiet people sat in the chairs lined against the wall. My father whispered back, “He is administering the Last Rites.”

  “What is that?”

  “He is giving Grandfather his last Communion so that he will go to heaven.”

  The priest came out of my grandfather’s room, and we all stood up. My father held my hand. The people lowered their heads and prayed again. Then the priest sprinkled us all with holy water, and we crossed ourselves and said, “Amen.”

  My grandmother came to my father and held his hands. She moaned in Konkani quietly to him from her covered face. One of my uncles touched my back and began to push me and he said, “You must go into that room with Babu.”

  My grandfather’s room was lit with candles, and my grandfather was in the bed. He looked like a great bird in his bones. He rolled his face toward me, and I could see the bones in it, too. My father took me forward.

  My grandfather said to my father in English, “Is he a Konkan?”

  “Father, he is a Konkan.”

  My grandfather reached out his arm from the sheet, touched my face with his fingers. He said, “You must surpass us.”

  Then he spoke in Konkani to my father, and my father said, “Woyee, Papa. Woyee, Papa.” My father lifted my grandfather’s hand to his lips and kissed it. Then my grandfather held his hand to me, and I kissed it.

  In our room, my father held me and both of us were crying. Then my father set me down and kneeled down to me and he said, “Your grandfather was a great man. You must be greater still. Will you be a great man, Francisco? Promise me that you will be.”

  “I promise.”

  My grandfather died in the night. We knew when he did because the women began their wailing. In the morning, my grandfather was in a long casket on the table, and there were candles and flowers on the floor all around the table, and my grandfather was sleeping in the casket in a suit. They had folded a red-and-white-and-blue Britishers’ flag under his hands, and wrapped his hands with a black rosary like tying them. When it was our turn at the casket, my father kissed my grandfather’s forehead, and then he lifted me up and I kissed it. All day and all night, people came to kneel before my grandfather in the casket. They left money in piles on the floor where they had kneeled.

  My father held me in bed until I slept, and when I woke, he was not there. Ciprian came and carried me downstairs and washed me in the dark room as he smoked. Then he dried and dressed me. He pulled my tie tight around my neck. He said, “Now he goes in the ground,” and led me by the hand to where they all were.

  The money was gone, the servants were lifting the closed casket from the table and onto the shoulders of my uncles and my father. My father was in the front of them with the casket on his shoulder in his suit, and they took it out of the house and into the bright day through the gate and out on the street, where many people waited for us. The men wore tall black hats and black suits and held canes, and the women wore dark saris. The priest was there in his robe with a golden crucifix on a long golden staff, and two boys in white robes were beside him, and four old men in brown uniforms carried rifles on their shoulders. The old men in the uniforms marched before my father and uncles and the casket, kicking up their legs so their heavy boots clopped on the street, and the priest went first with the crucifix, and then everyone began to walk. All behind us came the Konkans. When we left the Christian Colony, there were people in lungis who parted to let us pass, and as we did, they began to hiss and shout. Then I knew they were the Hindus.

  All the way to the cemetery, the Hindus hissed and shouted at my grandfather’s casket, and old men ran alongside where my father and uncles carried the casket on their shoulders, and they hissed and shouted at the casket as they ran, and some ran ahead and spit on the road so that the priest and the officers and my father and uncles and all of us had to walk over their spit.

  Then we were at the cemetery and the priest unlocked the iron gates with his long key, and the officers stood and saluted with their rifles at their sides. My father and uncles took my grandfather’s casket through the officers and the gates, and then we were all in the cemetery with the white graves around us. Men without shirts were smoking by the hole, and they pulled two more men out of the hole in their muddy lungis when we came to it, and they put their shovels in the pile of dirt.

  The priest said something to everyone as we gathered around the hole, and everyone was serious and quiet, and the Hindus climbed up and hung their arms over the walls of the cemetery to hiss and shout while the priest sprinkled my grandfather’s casket with holy water. Then the priest said a prayer and everyone said, “Amen,” in one loud voice.

  When the gravediggers began to lower my grandfather’s casket into the hole with the ropes, the Hindus began to whistle. The priest said, “Amen,” and the Konkans said, “Amen.” My father wiped his eyes with his white handkerchief. The officers lifted their rifles to their shoulders to fire shot after shot in the air.

  But at that time in America, it was Halloween, and people were dressing their children as ghouls and goblins and devils and demons, things the children were not, but were allowed to pretend to be on this one day. My uncle brought four ripe pumpkins to my father’s house, and my mother spread newspaper over the kitchen table. Then they carved three of them, saving the last for my return. My sister sat on the table and pulled out the pulp. The seeds they washed for the oven. Then they lit candles in the faces they’d made, and the light from them was frightening and warm in the darkened kitchen at the same time.

  People had set out jack-o’-lanterns all over Ridge Lawn, and laughing monsters flocked the streets. My mother and uncle took my sister out to it, and they were happy in it, too. They’d dressed my sister in a clown’s motley suit, though neither of them knew what that meant, either. Then my mother put my sister to sleep in her crib.

  In her room, my mother shut the door. My uncle was already in there, and she went to him. The world surrounded them, the universe. My uncle’s hands on my mother’s white skin seemed even darker to him than they were. He stayed until the morning, and then he went out to his car. Dawn was breaking. The last birds were waking in the branches of the elm trees before they would begin their journey south.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts, whose fellowship made the researching and writing of this book possible.

  I used many sources for the historical elements of the book.
I’m heavily indebted to Dr. T. R. de Souza’s Details of the Goan Inquisition. Also Memoirs of Goa by Alfredo De Mello, the writings of Kanchan Gupta, The Hindu Holocaust Records maintained by Aravindan Neelakandan, The Last Days of British India by Michael Edwardes, and various Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica articles, notably on da Gama, Xavier, the Jesuits, and the Goan Inquisition.

  Thanks to Carrie Roby, who gave me a place to write parts 1 and 2.

  Thanks to Barry Spacks, first reader, and Joel Dunsany, proofreader.

  Thanks to Jack Rolls, who rescued the manuscript from the Thunderbird Lodge, Redding, California, where I hid and forgot it on tour.

  Greatest thanks to my agent, Liz Darhansoff, to Michele Mortimer, and everyone at the agency. Also greatest thanks to my editor, Tina Pohlman, who pushed me beyond. Thank you. Thanks to my publicist Michelle Blankenship, Lee Kravetz, Lindsey Smith, my copy editor Marian Ryan, David Hough, and everyone at Harcourt. Thanks as always to Merle Rubine, who put us all together.

  A debt of gratitude to Marc Behr’s fine book The Smell of Apples, which I pillaged for the first kernel of Francisco’s voice. Thanks to Frank Nigro for the fact-check here, and for the German check in Whiteman. Thanks to Matt Walsh and Will Marquess for helping me out with Burlington, Vermont. There are too many people to thank gracefully . . . Please know I’m grateful.

  Thanks to the readers.

  Thanks and love to my mother and her wife, Irene, for putting me up from time to time and being managers. Thanks to Jessyka. Finally, thanks to my sister and family.

  Phoenix and London, 2006

  About the Author

  TONY D’SOUZA is the author of three novels, including the award-winning Whiteman. He has contributed to The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, Outside, Salon, Granta, McSweeney’s, O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Fantasy, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Sue Kaufman Prize, Florida Gold and Silver Medals for fiction, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and the NEA, Tony was nominated for a National Magazine Award for coverage of Nicaragua’s Eric Volz murder trial and spent three years in Africa with the Peace Corps.