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GOAN GAMBLERS
By Valmiki Faleiro
Goa’s ‘Provedoria,’ like most other State lotteries, drew once a month. That
was too long
a wait. Gamblers needed a quicker turnover. The mid-1960s ushered Ratan Khatri
and
his Mumbai-based daily ‘motko’. The gambler’s prayers were answered. The
multi-tiered
enterprise of bookies, collection agents, agents, local kingpins and
trans-State kingpins
was intricate, and illegal. Yet, the daily operation, running into crores of
Rupees, worked
with clockwork precision, and with honour.
>From ordinary playing cards, three numbers (‘Teen Patta’) were drawn. Its sum
>digit was
the ‘Opening Number.’ This happened precisely at eight every working night.
Three
hours later, three more cards were drawn for the ‘Closing Number.’ One could
wager on
the ‘Teen Pattas’ (the highest stake, 1:800), on the two digit number of the
day (1:80),
and/or on the opening or closing digits (1:8.) Prize money was paid the next
morning.
So well oiled was the ‘motko’ machine that numbers drawn by Khatri in Mumbai
reached
Goa instantaneously -- in times when there was no trunk dialing and one waited
endless
hours to be connected by the operator to a number outside one’s Telephone
Exchange.
How Khatri managed to draw his cards at the appointed hour and at a
pre-determined
place was a secret only Khatri and the Bombay police shared. The venue was
‘changed’
daily, a smokescreen to show that the cops were being bamboozled. In Goa, the
then
ruling MGP politicians allowed ‘motko’ to take roots. The game grew so
prosperous that
it yielded them, and the local police, handsome revenues.
Many thought the traditional Goan ‘godgodo’ and Provedoria lottery would fade
into
history. They didn’t. Motko itself survived online lotteries, slot machines and
casinos.
That speaks for Goan resilience. Goan gamblers absorbed them all, with panache.
Khatri spurred an entire industry (far more jobs than all of free Goa’s
governments,
combined, could ever produce.) Even newspaper circulations! Some Goan vernacular
dailies carried sanctimonious editorials decrying the lack of official action
against motko
and, unabashedly, the day’s winning number on another page. Khatri’s figures
improved
circulation figures, thereby advertising revenues. A remote English language
newspaper
in Goa sold more, thanks to its *Mutt & Jeff* syndicated cartoon strip. The
strip somehow
‘inspired’ motko players. Illiterate labourers ‘studied’ the cartoon, holding
the newspaper
upside down, for reasons never disclosed.
RK Laxman, the Times of India cartoonist, once wrote how he was feted by a
stranger,
over dinner. The man had made a fortune playing the numbers RKL supposedly hid
in
his 'You Said It' daily pocket cartoon. Until that day, the celebrated
cartoonist had no
idea he was hiding numbers in his cartoons.
An entire printing industry survived on churning charts that spelled out the
number
probabilities. Whether these did better than the cartoon strips in daily
newspapers is a
matter of conjecture.
Then one day Ratan Khatri was put behind bars. A pall of gloom descended on the
gambling world. A cousin, who once played hockey for Bombay’s Burma Shell, and
now
Khatri’s game, relates how he and his friends sat after work at Dadar’s Gokhale
Road,
animatedly discussing motko numbers -- now, in sullen silence. Upstairs was a
maternity
home. An expectant woman walked towards the building.
"Boy or girl?" It was their bet of the day.
Idle Goans had harder times, but innovated. Groups would be seated by the
village road,
carefully noting number plates of passing vehicles. They were not compiling
traffic stats,
just wagering on the last digit of the vehicle that would next come in sight.
Fortunes were
made and lost wagering on digits of vehicles just registered or those that met
with
accidents.
But, as usual, the player, in the long run, never won. My first, and lasting,
impression of
‘motko’ was the macabre story of a migrant porter from the Margao bus stand. It
was a
rainy day in the late-1960s. By the Loyola classroom window, I daydreamed as
usual,
waiting for the interval bell. The old Gomant Vidya Niketan library house had
just been
reconstructed into the present auditorium.
I suddenly noticed a man running around its rooftop, in blinding rain. He then
stopped,
climbed the terrace parapet wall, and leapt out. The interval bell just then
went off and
with a few friends, I was instantly at the place. The bloodied, lifeless body
was bundled
in a police jeep. As we learnt, the porter was due to visit his native place,
and had put all
his savings on a particular number. That number didn’t come. His did. (ENDS)
The Valmiki Faleiro weekly column at:
http://www.goanet.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=330
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The above article appeared in the October 7, 2007 edition of the Herald, Goa
