An extract from 'Filomena's Journeys'

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For Filomena and Chico’s nineteen grandchildren

prologue Picture her, aged seventy, standing at the heavily curtained window of an apartment in North London on a winter evening. She marvels at the Edwardian furniture which her daughter has tried to transform into something less formal and European with touches of handloom, bamboo, bidri and mirror work. But Filomena loves the original period look. It reminds her of the graceful antique furniture of her homes in Raia and Margão, a long time ago. Several worlds away.

Earlier in the afternoon she had marvelled at the stately chestnut trees, at eye level from the second-floor window— the breathtaking sight of autumn yellow merging with rust and red. She has never seen anything like it. The trees she remembers best are the trees of her childhood, which she climbed for fruit, or merely for adventure. But those were always green, many shades of green. ‘Look at them long and hard,’ her grandchildren laugh, when she tells them about the strange colours of the English trees. ‘The leaves will soon be a carpet for you to walk on. We’ll take you down and you can pick up the leaves to take back. Though they may rot and stink in the suitcase, be careful, Avo!’ The three children chatter around her in English, which she understands but speaks with some difficulty. ‘Talk slowly, and not all of you together. Help me to learn, you silly children . . . voces falam tam rapidamente, eu sou velha baba,’ she laughs. They love her laugh. It is quick and spontaneous, childlike, and full of pleasure. It makes them feel she is one of them.

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There are times when she is cooking something special for her grandchildren and her mind wanders to Dharwar, where she raised her seven children. She recalls the tiny kitchen there and her sighs of long ago as she crouched, in ways to which she was not used, to blow at the firewood, squinting through the smoke that rose when the wood burnt badly. She fiddles with the knobs of the electric stove in her daughter’s London kitchen and marvels at the ease, the comfort. Back in Dharwar, she had often found solace in memories of her life in Raia, in a childhood and an effortless security lost forever.

‘Tell us about Raia,’ her grandchildren urge her. ‘How can I explain to you when you have never seen a village?’ she says to them. ‘Even now it is so different from your life—and in those days we had no electricity, no cars, no telephones. We did not even have a radio.’ The children gasp at this. ‘But how much we sang!’ she continues. ‘We made music in church, at home, while walking in the fields or sitting by the river in the evening. At home there was a piano; we had friends who played the violin and one neighbour who liked to play the trumpet and another who pretended to be a drummer while beating a wooden box with a stick! This was when I was about ten years old. My avo sang very well. She taught us songs for church and songs for our games . . . It was all so long ago, but I remember it as if it was yesterday. And I feel sad because I rarely hear anyone sing here. All you children want is your tape recorders and TV and a lot of noise . . .’

She delights in her grandchildren. She can talk to them for hours. But then they ask about their grandfather and her words dry up. ‘Tell us about Avô Chico, please.’ ‘Not now,’ she says.

‘Some other time. He loved music. He was strict with the children, very strict. No more questions now, don’t you know I’m old? Old people need to sleep early.’ ~

filomena’s journeys

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The life of my mother, Filomena Borges, born in 1909, is legendary among people whose lives she touched and transformed, and among those who witnessed her graceful acceptance of her destiny and her quiet resolve to rise above it.

Novices who were trained to be priests at the Rachol Seminary, near Raia, used to pause in prayer, distracted by her inner grace. She was a woman of rare substance, who drew strength from ancient traditions and family and was yet an independent spirit. She triumphed, and yet nothing was ever a personal victory.

I am the eldest of Filomena’s seven children, and the trajectory of her life has haunted me through my own journey, from young woman to wife, then mother and grandmother. I have tried to understand her endurance, her faith and compassion, her sense of humour and her poise. From experiences that could have broken her, she emerged stronger, and yet, even as she held things together with heroic effort, she seemed fragile, though never vulnerable. What storms did she weather in her heart? I can only guess, for she never spoke of them. She was our anchor. With her, life was lived wholly, encompassing family, prayer, the rituals of births, marriages and funerals, and the celebrations of feasts and festivals. This, then, was the miracle: Filomena seemed to live with and yet float above the dire realities from which she protected her young children.

There is an old saying in Konkani, that sons when they grow old become like their fathers and daughters like their mothers.

Freudian contraries get resolved in old age. Is this true for my mother and me? I’m not sure. I have been seeking for years the space that my mother inhabited. We, her children, took a lot from her, but she had a capacity for joy that we still seek, long after she has passed away.

I live in a village in North Goa, more than fifty miles away from Raia in South Goa where Filomena grew up. Yet, each day the smell of rain-washed earth, birdsong from rafters, windowsills and beyond, the croaking of frogs and the cry of