from www.timesofindia.com - May 28, 2008 Of stories and music...
Alexandre Moniz Barbosa sits on the balcao and listens as raconteur Victor Rangel-Ribeiro weaves a tapestry of his life At 82, Victor Rangel-Ribeiro is as active as any 18 year old. He may not zoom past on a motorcycle, but his pace of walking could make a teenager blush with shame. When we walked into his house it was mid afternoon and he had just finished directing some fire fighting efforts, putting out a blaze that was threatening to raze to ashes an entire bamboo shrub. Unfazed by the near disaster, Victor welcomed us with fresh mango juice, he prepared himself and then got down to reminiscing of a time long past but vivid in his mind. Having spent the most impressionable years of his life in Goa, Victor has fond memories of the place and returns to Goa annually. Says wife Lea, "Victor lived here as a child and is very attached to this house and to Goa. He often recalls stories heard from his older siblings. As one ages one goes back to the early memories or sometimes I wonder if they are fantasies." But Victor's fantasies, if indeed that they are, did turn into reality, when a few years back he accidentally discovered a hiding place he had heard of in the house. It was a hole in the ground concealed by a cupboard floor, where his grandfather Hipolito Caetano Pinto who ran the newspaper Correio de Goa in the 1880s would hide whenever the Portuguese came in pursuit. Stories from the past cascaded through Victor's memory as that hiding place triggered memories that were forgotten. Off to Bombay at the age of 14, with music coursing through his veins and words spurting out of his pen, Victor ventured into journalism as a music critic and later literary editor of the Illustrated Weekly. And it's in these two areas — music and writing — that Victor continued his career in the United States, where he migrated to in the 1950s. "On my return from Calcutta I had married Lea Vaz, the brilliant young pianist I was in love with. Two years later my wife and I and our infant daughter migrated to America... I have had several parallel careers during our stay in the United States — as a music critic and writer on music, as a music impresario, as a teacher of the troubled and the illiterate, as an editor, as a fiction writer," says Victor, reminiscing the years he spent in the United States.. It was in New York that Victor's career in music took off in a big way. Says he, "My love and knowledge of music paid off in other ways. I became conductor of the International Chamber Orchestra in its first season in New York. Some years later I was appointed music director of the Beethoven Society and our concerts were so successful that in two years we were invited to full membership in Lincoln Center, one of the world's great venues for the performing arts." It was Victor's passion for Goa, the constant tugging at his heart strings, that led to the novel Tivolem which won the Milkweed Publishers Prize for best novel and was acclaimed as one of the twenty notable first novels of 1998 by Booklist, a professional publishing House. Tivolem is set in a fictional village in Goa in the year 1933 and the events that take place there could have happened anywhere in Goa. Victor also has another book of short stories Loving Ayesha and is currently working on a novel that will have the Rane rebellion as the background. Besides fiction, Victor's interest in music led to other books including Baroque Music — A practical guide for the beginner. He has also edited close to 40 full-length non-fiction manuscripts for publishers in New York. Despite his busy schedule, Victor has found the time to build the Goan Association of New York and to start a free music school along with wife Lea, who is a concert pianist herself. Even during his holidays in Goa, Victor finds the time to conduct music concerts and to help budding writers with their work. He helped create a writer's club in Goa and attends meetings of another such club. "Goa has changed a lot over the years. The most dramatic change I saw was people who had never had a chance at education now have a chance. It is a good thing. But look at the fields! They were all green once but today they are not even ploughed," laments Victor. Victor feels strongly about not tending to the land one lives in. Even though he is settled in New Jersey, he potters around his garden where he grows various vegetables including green chillies, string beans, coriander, mint leaves, lady fingers and tomatoes, remembering a Goa that existed a lifetime ago and which is slowly but surely fading away.
