Of Feasts & Four-anna Feiras By Valmiki Faleiro
Today's the feast of the Holy Ghost. That's how the third member of Catholicism's Holy Trinity was known when I was a child. We kids were sure scared of *ghosts,* as all kinds of unholy ghosts made our nightmares. Heaven must have heard our prayers. The Vatican rechristened the Holy Ghost with a kindlier nomenclature: Holy SPIRIT -- by whatever name, a critical article of faith of the Christian doctrine. White Sunday, Whitsunday, or Pentecost (actually a Jewish thanksgiving feast for the wheat harvest, but associated with the handing down of the 10 Laws to Moses at Mount Sinai) -- the 50th day after Easter -- is a major Church festival that marks the Holy Spirit's gift of languages to Christ's apostles. And the beginning of their mission to the world, signified by baptism. The *White* is after the white garments worn during baptism. That's the story of the Holy Spirit. I liked sprits, still do. From the innocently innocuous ones of a carefree childhood, to the more sinful ones of adult life ... like J.W.'s Black Label, my favourite (and if you save an altogether different genre, cognac, I'll any day skip Royal Salute, Blue Label and J.W.'s rarer versions for a hearty swig or three of the Black!) I was born and bred, literally if also metaphorically, in the shadow of the Holy Spirit ... in the form of Margao's imposing and oldest church, Salcete's second oldest, actually. One of very few in the world's legion of churches dedicated to that member of the Trinity, as my pious paternal spinster aunt never tired reminding me. I'd tease her saying forget a church in Goa, they have a mere hospital named after the Holy Spirit in Bombay. Her frown of disapproval is still vivid, her soul be blessed! Like how a foetus of age must snap the umbilical cord as it moves out of the womb and into the big bad world, my own umbilical with the Holy Spirit withered somewhere down the years of growing up and stepping out into the wide wicked world. Memories and emotions, though, remain, thank goodness. The Holy Spirit feast (and, lesser by only a degree of significance, that of the Immaculate Conception, another of Christianity's challenging article of faith, on Dec 8) spring all kinds of happy memories ... too many, in fact, for the space of this column. I'll touch just one: the Feira (fair) of the *festa* and my 4-anna tryst with thrill. Four annas (*tangas*) in the fledgeling 1960s is what I got on each of those feast days -- a princely sum, which bought you a couple of toys (nothing comparable to today's), crushed ice popsicles in many coloured fruity flavours and maybe a pound (*Raat,* in Konkani) of the traditional sweets. The 4-annas came round only twice a year, on Festa, the day of the finest home food and desserts, followed by three days of being a *Badshah,* or till the four annas lasted. That's because my father, a doctor in the then Indian Army Medical Corps -- who joined the Creator precisely this day 34 years ago -- was a disciplinarian who believed kids should not handle money. No question of *pocket money,* a concept I had picked from peers at primary school. Whatever we wanted the pocket money for, invariably appeared home the next day. The only exception was ice cream, at times made at home (in a wooden pail packed with ice and salt, the tub in its midst continuously churned by rotating a handle), but often relished at *Penguin* (then known by another name that escapes memory.) And later at *Himalayas,* near the Rajendra Prasad stadium, started by Goa's truly pioneering entrepreneur, Ratnakar Rau, a Mangalorean who set up, among other things, power plants, ice plants, rice and oil mills, even the famous *Kakoda Farms.* Feast day was the only occasion coins actually jingled in my pocket. Times change, eras yield, life itself evolves. The toys of yore have altogether vanished, *Khajekars* and *Chonekars* all but just have. Mobbed and vastly outnumbered by a tribe that cannot even speak the local lingo. *Purumento* provisions are now dwarfed by readymade Garments and what have you. The number of strangers setting up the Feira shop multiplied. They encroached upon the precincts of the church ground, on whose periphery wended the feast procession. The 3-day fair gradually extended to five days, then an entire week or more ... an utterly frustrating weeklong bottleneck at Margao's arterial entry from the north. Until someone in Government -- Digambar Kamat, if I err not -- mercifully ordered this anachronism of a *Feira* shifted away from the Old Market and Margao's earliest habitation zone around the church, a few years ago. Ever since, I breathe free. The joys of feast day survive in other ways, but I *enjoy* the fair only from the rear verandahs of my new house. I do not visit it anymore -- because I cannot haggle over prices in Kannada, Urdu, Tamil, and Telugu. And because the 4-annas are history. (ENDS) The Valmiki Faleiro weekly column at: http://www.goanet.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=330 ============================================================================== The above article appeared in the June 4, 2006 edition of the Herald, Goa _____________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. Goanet mailing list (Goanet@goanet.org)
