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GRANDFATHER'S CLOCK by Victor Rangel-Ribeiro In my grandfather's house, where I lived as a child, I remember a clock striking the hours and half hours. At night the mellow yet resonant chimes echoed through the house, but the clock would not strike without first producing a prolonged whirrr, like a rattlesnake warning of danger. No danger lurked in that house when I was a child, but it was a different story altogether when my grandfather was alive. In those days, Ranes were frequent visitors, Rauji Rane among them, because my grandfather edited and published a weekly newspaper in this very house, and the paper---the "Correo de Goa"--was very much pro-Goan. An almost complete file exists in the Central Library in Panjim; the only missing copies are the ones that I suspect the Government found so offensive that they confiscated them, shutting down the Correo twice. Some years ago I was allowed to browse through those files. In one editorial, Hipolito Caetano Pinto complains about the calibre of the newest appointee to be Governor-General of Goa; it seems, he says, that Lisbon thinks so little of us that any absolute nonentity can be sent to rule over us, even a lowly lieutenant in the navy. And in desperation he cries out: "In the name of God, leave us alone!" Family tradition tells us that the Portuguese would not leave him alone. Every now and then the mundkars would come running to our house, to warn him: "Bhatkara, godde etat!" But when the horsemen who had been sent to arrest him cantered up to our gate and strode up our steps, Hipolito Caetano Pinto was nowhere to be found. Once, after searching the entire house and getting no answers from my grandmother, an officer sat my mother, then a child of five, on his lap, and gently asked, "Tell us, child, where is your father?" She could not tell him, because she did not know he was still in the house, hiding in a bumhyar. Twice he and his brilliant young brother-in-law, the lawyer Mariano Vaz from Anjuna, had to flee to Bombay to escape the wrath of the Portuguese, most notably when Gomes da Costa implicated them, and their friend the Visconde de Bardez, in the Rane rebellion of 1895. Hipolito Caetano Pinto's portrait still hangs on the wall of the family living room; it shows us a young man, perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties. a man who wears a troubled look and seems to have much on his mind. His eyes are averted. I stand before him and a thousand questions crowd my own mind. Alas, my grandfather died in 1897, almost thirty years before I was born, but my grandmother lived on until 1941, and she had much to tell us about him. But I was barely a teenager then, and though I loved her stories, I had no sense of history, no inkling at all of the importance of oral tradition and the links it can provide to our past. My father, too, who was born in 1881, had stories to tell about those days, and his own involvement in the Rane revolt. Though as a teenage cadet he served on the opposite side, his admiration for the Ranes, particularly Rauji, was unbounded. Death has silenced all those voices, and the files of the Correo de Goa now sit unexamined in the Central Library, gathering dust along with hundreds of other valuable documents of past centuries -- they are now deemed to be too fragile to be looked at by anyone. So the whirring grandfather clock was right---the passage of time does indeed pose a danger. Not only do we lost bits of oral history as each older generation dies out, but our written documents are in danger of becoming inaccessible as well. The rest of the world preserves such documents on microfiche. We don't. "There's no money in it," a noted young historian told me recently. "There's money in restoring a decaying historical building, but there's no money in preserving a document." Should we let our heritage die? Tick tock. END
