Letters from Portugal: Monsoon Nostalgia

A couple of years ago, when I announced to a Portugal-familiar friend that I was soon to leave for Portugal, arriving there in September, he looked at me as if I had lost my mind. ‘But why September? You do realize it’s going to be raining cats and dogs then?’ He had a point, as, captured in the Portuguese proverb,’Chuvas verdadeiras, em Setembro as primeiras’, September marks the end of the Portuguese summer, and as if on clockwork, it pours come the first weeks of September.

This letter is not going to be about the Portuguese summer, there will be other times for that happy season. Though terribly out of sync with the calendar, this letter is to be about the autumn rains of September that draw watery curtains down on the holiday month of August. For a couple of years now,  while the rest of Portugal  sighs, folds away their summer clothes and begins to air their winter clothes,  the south Asian peasant heart that beats in my chest begins to trill its monsoon song. 

If you have invested a sufficient amount of energy in those romantic poetic tropes, that celebrate the weariness of the Indian summer and the dramatic break of the monsoon, then you know that once one is so invested, there is no way you can suffer the monsoon without also looking forward with increasing expectation for the monsoon to slake both earth and our fevered brains. The drilling beat of the monsoon rains is as much part of the experience as the cool that the sheets of water bring.

Sometimes I wonder if I would ever be able to encounter Portugal’s autumn rains on terms other than sub-continental. The sweet coolness that these rains bring after the not-to-be-laughed-at baking  summer afternoons evoke in this turned-towards-the-Atlantic-planted-garden sweet memories of monsoons in Bangalore. The rains are still warm, but the caress of the breeze cool and soft to the touch, and one could still run around with one’s shirt sleeves rolled up, the dread of heavy winter woolens still far, far away. Indeed if one is lucky, one can also smell the very same eucalyptus, that were planted as mistakenly in Portugal as they were across India, and especially in Bangalore.

Encountering the rains (Portuguese or otherwise) in a South Asian manner also involves greeting them with song.  From out of the internet and personal archives then come the Malhar and the Des raags, the songs of Khusro, and the sawaan geet of the North. To these South Asian choices however a couple of mood and monsoon appropriate fados have also now made their way. And as the rain lashes down, drenching the earth, saudades is reinvented to mean not the South Asian’s longing for a Portuguese metropole, but a Portuguese metropolitan’s longing for South Asia.

Romance however can only take you so far. Some hours of the music, more than a couple of weeks of the rain, the setting in of winter, and the rains begin to lose the charm with which they flounced in at the start of September.  It is then, that this tropical South Asian begins to clamour for the sun, yearns to be buffeted by the warm winds that coast off the Arabian sea, and thinks to himself; ‘Yes, it is about time we bought that ticket back home for Christmas.’

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo dtd 5 Feb 2012)

Save the Frog, Save Goa: Midweek notes on an unlikely cultural mascot

I am not normally one to fall prey or encourage the use of nationalistic slogans such as ‘Save Goa’. Which Goa I am tempted to ask? Save what? From whom? For whom? And yet when I heard of the ‘Save the Frog’ campaign, the formula above suggested itself to me as peculiarly appropriate.

What is so wonderful about Goa, is that within the larger context of India’s taboos and hyper-sensibilities, it very often offers mascots and symbols that elsewhere others shirk from. It is no doubt this relative freedom from social restrictions that makes Goa such a wonderful breath of fresh air in an otherwise stuffy sub-continent. The frog would be an unlikely mascot for any threatened culture, and yet peculiarly and thankfully, a concerted action in favour of this threatened amphibian would result in a possibly addressing a number of Goa’s contemporary material and ethical dilemmas.

One of the major threats that the frogs face is the destruction of their habitat, the fields, and hills of Goa. On the one hand the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers in our fields works to slowly poison them. These poisons subsequently build up in those who eat frog meat, posing a serious long term health risk. More crucially however, the building over of these fields and hills, results in a sure destruction of these amphibian habitats. What impact this will have on the environment we cannot yet tell, and yet we can be sure of a significant negative ripple effect on our environment. Joining the ‘Save the Frog’ campaign would in this manner not only push us toward more sustainable and healthy agriculture, but also save the fields and hills that so many of us would hate to see gone.

The immediate action that we are encouraged toward this monsoon however is, to not eat frog legs (or jumping chicken) this season, and not hunt them. And yet when eating frog legs (like wild mushrooms) is part of the monsoon culture of Goa; how can this abstention from frog legs still be argued as an action in support of ‘saving’ Goan culture? The Save the Frog campaign offers us a peculiar option; by putting us in apparent, and possibly temporary conflict with a manifestation of Goan culture, it could actually allow us to save it in the long run.

To begin with, Goan ‘culture’ itself seems to have morphed. Whereas in earlier times bands of young men would head out in the dead of night to hunt bull-frogs (they wouldn’t touch a female of the species), this is not the case anymore. Frogs are being hunted indiscriminately. Secondly, while the hunting in former times met a domestic consumption, hunting these days, caters to a few restaurants that serve ‘jumping chicken’ despite a legal ban on its consumption. A commercialization of frog hunting has set in, that leaves frog populations doubly vulnerable. It would be logically and ethically incorrect therefore, to argue that consumption of frog legs alone is Goan culture. An integral part of that culture is the process and the ethics of that hunting. Disassociate the ethics and process of the hunt from the consumption, and we will only compromise the ability of future generations to engage in this very Goan monsoon event. A case of Goa today, Gone Tomorrow.

Recognizing the connection between the hunt and the consumption, would allow us to also recognize the connection between the material base and culture of Goans and the disappearance of Goan culture. While there is no doubt that there are more ‘non-Goans’ in the territory today, we will realize that the change in the material life of the Goan is itself leading to the disappearance and destruction of Goan culture. The authentic Goan is disappearing like Alice’s Cheshire Cat. But it seems that like the Cheshire Cat, the Goan is arranging his own disappearance and grinning while at it! If this cat is to not disappear, we need to either rethink our relationship to our material base, or accept that the symbols of Goan culture are going irrevocably change by our own hand.

The Bebo (frog) is a symbol of the average Goan. An earthy Goan, who goes on nocturnal frog hunts, swigging feni to warm himself from the cold of the rain. This is the Goan who also slogs in the fields to cultivate them, the Goan who slogs on board ships and in kitchens across the world. The Goan, who sweats and is connected in a very material way to the soil. It is not a symbol of those who merely eat the meat that others have hunted for them. These are merely consumers of a product, they could be Goan, Punjabi or British, and they could be anywhere, consuming any kind of exotic meat.

Our country’s ‘Project Tiger’ project tried to present the Tiger as the pinnacle of a natural pyramid. Conserve the Tiger and we would conserve the entire eco-system it argued. Unfortunately however, the Project pitted man against the Tiger. The ‘Save the Frog’ campaign however incorporates the Goan in every sense into its campaign. Saving the frog involves saving the lifestyles and landscapes that we recognize as an integral part of our being Goan. Lifestyle and landscape has been the core component of the Goan fitna that we have in the past months been both witness to and participant in. In addition, our abstention from frog meat today, would also allow the opportunity of frog meat for future generations of Goans.

Adopting the frog as our mascot opens up for us a world of pro-life politics and therefore the slogan; Save the Frog, Save Goa!

Abstain from frog meat this monsoon.

(First published in the Gomantak Times 27 May 2009)

(Carried in The Goan Review Vol. 20, No.4, July-August 2009, p. 49)