Goan at heart, British by mouth.
I am Joe, a Goan ‘baddezcar’. My mother tongue is ‘Concani’.
My friend, Tony is also a Goan, but a ‘sashticar’. His mother tongue is the
same as mine, but made to sound as ‘Concainim’.
We both had another friend, Vinod. He came from Pernem and he always
maintained that his ‘mai-bass’ was ‘Konkni’ – not Marathi.
Strangely enough, my mother is ‘sashticann’, Tony’s is ‘baddezcann’ and
Vinod’s? Could be from Sawantvaddi. Yet we all speak in our fathers’ tongues,
even though they go by the nomenclature of a “mother tongue’.
When the three of us met some time ago, our mother tongue twisted three ways,
and it made a kind of music - like Jacinto Vaz and Miguel Rod singing to the
accompaniment of Ravi Shankar’s sitar.
We were all English educated, in Goa, and our English remained freer of
phonetic differences, than our mother tongue exposed us to. However, none of us
had majored in English literature, to be able to throw stones at glass houses,
because we were living in such, ourselves.
Over the years Tony migrated to England. There, he got his Goan English honed
to sound British. His newly acquired accent is a rapid-fire mix of tonal highs
and lows. His vocabulary, a way lengthier than the litany he once chanted at
his village ‘ladainha’. His British English is so honed, that he lets it cut
through glass houses, even over the net.
Tony insists that his heart is still Goan, only his mouth British. Vinod says
his face too could have been like the latter, but for a little shade on it. And
I have a question for Tony: “how does it feel to stone glass houses, like the
very ones you once lived in?
Bennet Paes – in a light vein.
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