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URBAN GAONKAR
Plus ça change
Margaret Mascarenhas
Although I was geared up for this season, having spent the last two in a
mad-writer-anti-social-hermit state, I was unable to conquer my fear of
crowds and tended to stick with intimate dinners. Anything over six seemed
like a mob. I decided the only way to confront my crowd issue was to take
the leap. First I threw a party of my own, next, I hitched a ride with a
family friend to Vasco for Austria Day. We were there at the invitation of
Dattaraj Salgaocar, Honorary Consul of Austria, and the Salgaocar House
lawns were heavily peppered with glitterati, literati and politicos. I asked
Goan Observer editor Rajan Narayan who the Penpricks were; he told me. Then
I found myself caught up in a conversation with the Power Minister regarding
electrical fires on power lines in the middle of the night.
"I will not answer your call in the middle of the night," he said
definitively, but with a smile, so as to soften the blow.
"But, your predecessor did," I said. "The line was crackling and sparking
and then snapped and burst into flame. It looked very dangerous. I tried the
electricity department, then the fire department, both kept passing the buck
to the other. I finally called Mr Kamat at about five in the morning. And he
attended to the problem immediately."
"I don't answer the phone at five in the morning," he replied amiably.
"Okay," I persisted, "What if I were to come in person to your house at five
in the morning with an emergency?"
"I might give you tea," smiled the Power Minister, who, I discovered later,
is also a cousin.
I must have started rolling my eyes wildly at this point, because Commodore
Venugopal diplomatically took my elbow, said I looked like I needed a drink
and steered me towards the bar, where I picked up a glass of white wine.
I'm a barefoot village bumpkin most of the time and my shoes had begun to
hurt and I felt I fully understood the torture of Chinese foot binding. I
sank gratefully into a chair next to cartoonist Mario Miranda, who is one
of my favourite people. "What has happened about your ancestral house?" he
asked.
"Still under inventory proceedings," I said. A total dead-ender as
conversation topic.
"Let's go get something to eat," I said brightly and stood, wincing and
limping in my pretty shoes. We tottered arm in arm towards the buffet and,
somewhere near the mutton, I lost Mario. Some women beckoned and I joined
them. They were discussing this designer and that. And I slunk away,
because, at the rate I'm bleeding money into my latest house renovation, I'll
be lucky if I can afford new pajamas this season.
After a majority of the guests had left , about ten of us hung around
drinking cognac, smoking cigars (yes, sometimes I do that), and talking
about FN Souza, and how he used to hang out on the sofa of Pandit Miranda in
New York.
In the rush of attending to a continuous stream of house guests, it seemed
like about a minute had gone by before I was at a CII bash hosted by
Pallavi and Shrinivas Dempo. Besides me, there were some Goans who were not
CEOs. We greeted one another, and then I was grabbed in a bear hug by
industrialist Subbhu Subbiah, the father of two of my girlfriends-Sivu and
Walli. He has never let me live down the time over 20 years ago while I was
working in Bombay and accidentally boarded the plane to Madras, instead of
the one to Goa. "Ha, ha, her father was ready to send out the army to look
for her when she didn't get off the plane in Goa; I sent my daughter to pick
her up at the airport and told him I was hanging on to her," he said
jovially to Mr Jaywant Chowgule, who was distracted by the acrobatics of the
entertainment troupe in the background.
Mumbai gallery owner Pheroza Godrej and I went off to a quiet table to talk
about art funds and then I went up to the buffet. Once again found myself
face to face with the Power Minister. He was standing with the Finance
Minister. "How come it takes more than four months to get an electricity
bill transferred in one's name? And, by the way, I'm moving to Aldona and I
hope you guys aren't planning any SEZs over there," I started off..They
grinned at me affably.
Talking to politicians is just like talking to my contractors who tell me
what I want to hear, which generally has nothing to do with reality.
"Do you know," said another friend during a jazz night at the home of
Armando Gonsalves in Campal, "we have actually had to join with Babush to
stop the Habitat project in Dona Paula. It's absurd, but even if he's doing
it for the wrong reasons, he's on our side in this." Talk about strange
bedfellows.
By the time IFFI rolled around, I had gotten pretty good with crowds. But
IFFI was much better managed this year, and not over-crowded at all. And
anyway, I had so overcome my crowd phobia that I had even begun to write
potentially crowded events down in a notebook (I have never owned a diary)-
concerts at Kala, public meetings, book launches, assorted lunches, dinners
and weddings, the Parmal issue release, Shireen Mody's exhibition, the
Wendell Rodricks fashion show, Goa Sudaroop Awards, the Saturday night
market. And suddenly it was Christmas and I was calling the cops on my
neighbor for playing music on loud speakers without a license. And then it
was the New Year, and I was jumping out of my skin because of all the
illegal cherry bombs, and getting enraged about all the seasonal garbage,
and all I can say is: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
If you haven't seen Alex Fernandes' photography exhibition at Literati yet,
do so. (ENDS)
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The above article appeared in the January 2008 edition of Goa Today, Goa
