‘What have you done, you wretched creature! What sort of madness is this? Imagine building a temple in these troubled times, they’ll kill you for this!’ Demu hissed. He grabbed his sickle and hacked at the walls prising out one of the stakes so that the whole structure collapsed in a heap. He tossed the basket on to that heap and spread some dry grass over it. The glowing coals in the basket set the grass aflame. Demu hoisted the black stone on his shoulder and tossed it into a ravine.
Bamu Gurav watched all this in silence, his face and eyes seemed carved in stone. That night Bamu Gurav Ferrao hanged himself from a tree in the forest because his own brother had destroyed the temple he had built.
Shabi’s grandfather, Devu, had rushed back home when Guna, Raya and Shabi, accompanied by their families, had fled the village. He pottered about the house in a stubborn and eccentric fashion, stoking the fire in the hearth and taking pleasure in the bubbling sounds as the rice boiled in the pot. Sometimes, when no one was around, he’d pluck some ridge gourd or snake gourd or brinjal from someone’s vegetable patch and roast it in the embers, to eat with the payz. If some woman caught him in the act, he’d wave his stick angrily and scream, ‘You woman of loose morals! Accusing me of theft? Can you declare with your hand on your heart, that all your children have been fathered by your husband?’ The poor woman would be forced to retreat, spluttering in anger. This old man, shrivelled of skin and bent at the waist … what a vile tongue he has!
‘The whole village is a Christian one. How long can I be isolated, like a pregnant rabbit … I went to the Kalapur church and they sprinkled water on me and made me a Christian too,’ he declared one day. But soon enough the villagers saw him pouring pitchers of water over the tulsi plant on its broken pedestal outside his door. One day he hobbled to the Barmo shrine and sat there stroking the idol like a little child.
The roof of Devu’s house had not been thatched the previous year so the cross beams were rotten and there were holes in the thatch. He dragged himself about on his haunches, sticking his face out at the door, ‘Have those people taken their God-on-the-Cross and gone away?’ he asked someone who passed by.
‘They won’t go without making a Christian of you, Devu ajja,’ the passer by retorted.
‘But I’ve converted already!’ he said sometimes. At other times he’d get irritated, ‘Their fathers will have to come down from the skies to convert me!’ he’d snap.
The sound of potters beating the wet clay and the blacksmiths striking iron at the forge could be heard faintly that morning. A herd of stray cattle entered the settlement … someone yelled loudly to drive the cattle away … there was the sound of scampering hooves and the air resounded with the noise … but there was no sound in Devu ajja’s house. He didn’t emerge leaning on his stick, nor was he seated at the door.
Balsu Nayak’s house was close by and Balsu’s wife, Mogu, would often ask, ‘Devu mam, is your payz ready?’ when she spied him at the door.
‘The payz is done, but I have nothing to eat with the rice,’ he’d say.
Mogu would have liked to give some of the curry she had cooked to the old man, but she was scared that he’d abuse her for being a convert. But there was no sign of the man today. When there was no sign of Devu the next morning too, Mogu grew worried. She went up to his house and called out to him, but there was no response. Where had the old man gone! The door seemed unlatched but she didn’t want to step in, it was a Hindu’s home, after all. Who knew if he had really become a Christian, despite all that he said? In a matter of minutes, the news spread all over the settlement and some twenty people gathered outside Devu’s house.
They called out to him but there was no response. The roof had collapsed in parts so it was dark inside and they couldn’t see anything through the windows. Some people climbed on to the verandah and pushed the door open with a stick. Devu ajja was sprawled face-down on the ground, the foam and spit that had emerged from his mouth had dried and was caked about his nose and face. Devu ajja is dead, they declared.
Everyone fell silent, what would happen now? Who would perform the rituals of death? Was this a Hindu corpse or a Christian one? No one knew. There was no cross at the door, no one had seen a Christian priest blessing the house. How could they believe his child-like rants about having converted to Christianity? If they, who were Christians now, entered a Hindu home and touched a Hindu’s corpse, they would be committing a sin. Defiling a Hindu home and turning the family into outcastes when they were alive, was acceptable. But desecrating a Hindu’s corpse, was a terrible sin for which no retribution would be great enough!
‘What do we do with the corpse? Death is a serious matter, who knows what we’ll face when we reach that kingdom of Darkness? We’re Christians, so we’ll be buried when we die. But this poor wretch, should he be buried or cremated?’ Ventu Dias exclaimed.
Everyone stared at Ventu Dias in fear. Finally he said to Puttu Dias and Balsu Dias, ‘Go to the soldier’s camp and ask the priest if he knows whether Devu had become a Christian. Tell him to check his records.’
The priest scanned the list of new converts in his book. Each person’s name, age, caste, the area in which he lived and the new Christian name they received was noted in this book. But Devu Nayak of Shirvaddo didn’t feature in this list.
‘He’s an infidel from another faith. Don’t take part in any rituals of death. It’s against the law to cremate a corpse in this village,’ the priest declared.
‘His house is in the middle of the settlement, the corpse will rot and begin to stink. The old man has no family,’ Balsu said.
‘Drag it away and leave it in the forest.’
‘It’s not right to let wild animals tear at the corpse.’
‘Do whatever you want then. But this is the last time. Only Christians will be allowed to stay in the village from now on,’ the priest declared.
Puttu and Balsu Nayak Dias returned to the settlement and the discussion started all over again.
‘Who knows when he died! If we wait till tomorrow the corpse will bloat and the limbs will tear off if we try to drag it away.’
‘He is one of our clan after all, someone who has no family to mourn for him. We’ve forsaken our religion, shall we forsake our duties and the ties of blood too?’ Saaton Nayak asked.
Ventu Dias glanced at the wood and logs that Devu’s son and grandson had piled beside the house. ‘Take these logs and stack them in the clearing in the forest,’ he declared. ‘Do what I say. Or Devu will turn into a ghost and sit on your doorstep tonight.’
Ten or twelve men carried the logs to the site. Ventu and the others entered the house. They spread a thick blanket on the ground and placed the corpse on it. They bound the blanket with ropes and passed a stout pole through the knots. They performed no rituals as four men hoisted the pole and carried the corpse to the heap of logs that had been stacked under a tree.
‘What rituals can we perform? Consider yourself fortunate that we’re cremating you,’ Ventu said as though he were addressing Devu’s spirit.
An uneasy calm settled on the crowd as the corpse was placed on the pyre. Who would set it alight? Whoever did so would be sucked into a sequence of rituals and would have to maintain ritual purity or the soul would not attain freedom. Shiva turned to Ventu Dias hesitantly, ‘Who will light the pyre, Ventu bhavo?’
‘Will you do it, Shiva?’
‘No. I don’t want to get involved in all that.’
‘All right. So we won’t light the pyre. We’ll set the wild grass in the forest alight’ Ventu declared.
Everyone was amazed, what was this man saying! It was late in the evening and darkness was creeping about the trees and bushes. The dark shadow of death seemed to settle on the site.
‘The whole area is overgrown with wild grass. Let us scatter dry grass on the pyre. We’ll set the wild grass alight at a distance. If Devu is fortunate the fire will spread up to the pyre and the dry logs will begin to burn,’ Ventu explained.
&nbs
p; Ventu asked someone to spray some inflammable oil on the pyre. He untied a bundle of hay and dry grass and spread it all around. He walked ten or twelve feet from the pyre scattering dry grass in a long trail. Striking a flint, he set the wild forest grass alight at this point, and everyone walked away without a backward glance.
Ventu Nayak sat by his window all night. He could see the glow of the leaping flames and heard the sound of something exploding in the distance.
At least forty prisoners had pleaded guilty and begged for pardon on the Day of Judgement and had escaped being burnt at the stake. Padre Simao Peres was one of them. Four days later, they were herded into the large hall where the Chief Inquisitor, Castel Mendonca, and the secretary, Gonsal Nunez, sat at the large desk. Each prisoner was summoned up to them and told how he was to behave in the civil jail, what his duties were and what the punishment was if he were to behave in an inappropriate fashion.
The Chief Inquisitor turned to Padre Simao Peres. ‘You will serve the five years of your punishment in the civil jail and you will work in the shipbuilding factory. They will not consider your background when they assign duties for all prisoners are treated in the same way. You must follow a few rules. One, you must confess your sins to the priest on the last Sunday of each month and pray for pardon. This must be done without fail for three years. Two, you must attend Mass and listen to the sermon on Sundays and on festivals. Three, you must pray to God, His son Jesus and Holy Mother Mary five times a day and revere the five wounds on the body of Jesus Christ. Four, you will not strike up friendship with anyone who betrays the Christian faith. And five, you will not discuss or criticize what you have seen or heard or experienced during the process of the Inquisition. If you violate any of these rules, the officials of the Inquisition will arrest you and you will be burnt at the stake on the next Day of Judgement. No appeals will be heard and there will be no pardon.’
Padre Simao Peres had to sign on a sheet of paper and swear on the Bible that he would follow the rules carefully.
Once all the prisoners had been taken through this process they were given the items that had been confiscated at the time of their arrest. Each man clutched a bundle under his arm, but Padre Simao Peres had nothing. When his bodyguard, Tomas, reacted violently the officials had merely bound the priest with a rope and dragged him away.
The prisoners were taken out of the Big House and made to walk in a row to the Civil Jail. They were accompanied by two armed guards, but each man laughed and talked delightedly, as though elated by the open sky and sparkling sunshine. After three or four years of confinement, this was their first exposure to the open sky and for the moment, at least, their worries had been pushed aside.
Padre Simao Peres, however, was silent and aloof as he stumbled along with his eyes almost shut. The darkness within his soul seemed to have seeped into his surroundings, the bright sky above still seemed dark. He turned to the prisoner beside him and asked, ‘Is it morning now, or is it still night, will you look up and tell me, please?’
The prisoner stared at him closely. This frail, old man has undergone much penance and become a holy ascetic, he thought, but he didn’t say a word.
The conditions in the Civil Jail, which was dirty and shabby, were quite different from what they had known in the Big House. Eight prisoners were cooped up in a single cell and there was dirty water and rubbish strewn all around. It was a long, squat building with ten or twelve cells and a large kitchen on one side. There were fifteen earthen ovens on which groups of four prisoners were expected to cook their meals. Each group was given provisions and a mud pot, a saucer and a large spoon. Scraps of leftover food, water and other waste littered the kitchen floor and became a breeding ground for mosquitos that plagued them all night.
The prisoners were herded to the shipbuilding factory at eight in the morning and were brought back at one. They resumed work at three and continued till it was dark. Padre Simao Peres accompanied them, but the other prisoners ensured that he didn’t have to work. When the foreman came to check on the work they’d whisper, ‘He’s a priest. What can he do?’ And the foreman would remain silent.
There was a young prisoner called Camil in the padre’s group, who insisted that the priest stay away from the cooking duties too. Everyone addressed him as Padre bappa, but they did so in such a low tone that no one heard what they said. One day Simao Peres asked Camil how he had landed in jail.
‘I assaulted my father-in-law one day. Broke one of his ribs.’
‘But why?’
‘My wife kept running off to her parents’ house complaining that I had beaten her. When I went to fetch her back, my father-in-law rushed at me with a stick in his hand. I grabbed that stick and turned on him.’
‘Why did the Inquisition arrest you then?’
‘My father-in-law complained to the authorities that I’d planted a tulsi sapling at my door and asked my wife to water it every day. When she refused I beat her, he said.’
Padre Simao Peres remained silent. These days, his feelings were in a turmoil. He felt insulted when he sensed that the others were taking pity on him. His spirit cried out against the base situation in which he found himself and at the physical, mental and spiritual harassment he had faced throughout his life. He was furious at the injustice of it all, yet he was soft-hearted too and this was the cause of his turmoil. He regretted having begged for pardon and this regret seemed to gnaw at his soul. He craved death at this moment – why, then, had he begged them to spare his life?
There was a foreman called Zaporin at the shipbuilding unit. His mother was a Muslim woman and his father was a Portuguese soldier. This man would constantly yell at the workers and beat them with his stick. One day, Zaporin saw that Simao Peres was lagging behind the others, so he prodded him with his stick. The priest turned around and stared at him with narrowed eyes, ‘You should have been an official of the Inquisition. You’d get to pluck people’s flesh with a pair of tongs. You’d have enjoyed being on duty in the confession room – you’d have laughed as you dragged the rough rope through people’s wounds. You might even have lit the fire on the Day of Judgement,’ he said.
The prisoners who witnessed this scene were terrified, so they quickly dragged the priest away. The foreman was quite taken aback too. How did this elderly foreigner dare to speak so openly about such matters?
It was three months since the prisoners had arrived at the Civil Jail. As he lay in the cell, Simao Peres would often get excitable and launch into a disjointed tirade, ‘Why should I be bound to the stake? Why should I be burnt to death when I have done no wrong? I tell you again, there was no divinity in that stone structure. The divine cross is embossed on my heart, cut me open and it will burst forth! You burnt Sukhdo Dias’s bones. You won’t find any of my bones, I assure you. The Pope ordained me as a priest. The King of Portugal can’t harm me. That woman kept protesting that she hadn’t worshipped the cow, but…’
As Simao Peres’s voice grew louder, the prison guards moved towards his cell, but the other prisoners clamped their hands over the priest’s mouth and shut him up.
Mass was celebrated in the chapel every Sunday and Padre Timothy Morais would come from the main church to deliver the sermon. The authorities made a note of all the prisoners who skipped Mass. Simao Peres had missed the service for two consecutive weeks because of ill health, but on the next Sunday Mass would be followed by Confession and everyone would have to be present. The other prisoners got him dressed and took him to the chapel where he listened to the sermon with his eyes closed.
‘You were not present during the last two weeks. Do you mean to disobey the rules of the Inquisition or don’t you have faith in the Christian religion?’ Padre Timothy Morais asked, angrily.
Simao Peres shook his head slowly and stared at the priest. ‘You are very young, Padre, and your sermon is immature. If I were to deliver a sermon, rays of light would cut through the darkness. The rule book of the Inquisition is your Bible – you have no knowledge
of the holy book, the Bible. Did you ever hear the Holy Pope deliver the sermon in the Vatican? Did he give you the priestly robes when you were ordained?’
The priest was standing at the altar with the holy staff in his hand, so he maintained a dignified silence, but his body shook with suppressed rage. The prisoners moved forward and confessed their sins. When it was Simao Peres’s turn, he knelt before the priest, ‘I am being punished for a crime I did not commit. How can I confess to something I haven’t done? Jesus is my witness,’ he said.
There was a moment of tense silence as the priest who heard the confession grappled with his rage. Finally, he waved Simao Peres away.
The next day, an Inquisition official in full regalia, with the signs and badges of his office displayed on his chest, arrested Simao Peres and took him away. He would be confined to his cell in the Inquisition prison till the next Day of Judgement when he would be burnt at the stake.
P.S.
Insights Interviews & More…
A Saga of Choice and Faith
Vidya Pai
‘My Imagination was Fired by Unwritten Stories’: In Conversation with Mahabaleshwar Sail
Vidya Pai
Afterword
Vidya Pai
A Saga of Choice and Faith
Vidya Pai
Around twelve years ago when I was doing the rounds of publishers’ offices with my translation of a Konkani novel, the first hurdle I encountered was a singular lack of knowledge. Here I was, an unknown translator, trying to place an unknown book by an unknown writer, but the problem was that no one had heard of Konkani. That translation got published eventually (as have three others over the last decade), but the lack of information persists. So, before we look at Yug Sanvaar (2004), Mahabaleshwar Sail’s historical novel, we need to look at Konkani, the language in which it is written.
Age of Frenzy Page 27