MY GOA – MY FOOT A well groomed, sombre looking gentleman, quite distinct from ‘The Goan’ mould of today, was standing by my side at a Margao newsstand where I went to buy some magazines. He had a newspaper tucked in his armpit, so he could set his hands free and his eyes cleared for the count of coins to pay. Meanwhile the vendor asked what was it that I wished to buy – Herald? - Navhind? - Gomantak?............. “No, no, do you have ‘My GOA’?” I asked, when suddenly my left ear registered a rise in decibels. The gentleman to my left changed my opinion of him even before his coins changed hands with the vendor’s. With the newspaper still lodged where it was, and his glasses descended on the tip of his nose he startled me with a rebuke: “My Goa? My foot! I could understand if you had said it yesterday, but Goa today, ‘meu irmão’, is neither yours nor mine. Pardon me for saying so, but it’s very true.” In fact, my next pick was intended to be a copy of ‘GOA TODAY’ but suspecting that this disgruntled Goan was on his way to emptying the remains in his chest, I thought I had better skip the mention of that second mag on my mind. But no way, the gentleman kept the heat on, nonetheless. “Look at this”, he said, pulling the folded paper out and lifting the glasses for better vision. “This is ‘HERALD’ with the two vowels on either side of it pushed wide enough to make it look ‘English’. Era ‘O Heraldo’, antigamente, em anos passados. It used to have just about four pages then, highlighting Portugal’s progress in its ‘provincias ultramarinas’. Might not have been much in Goa, but it was Agente Monteiro’s whip that beat the hell out of lawbreakers, and guaranteed us the ‘Special Status’ that we all are now clamouring to regain. “Now, this ‘Herald’ has many more pages, some of them announcing days of births the others of deaths, and the rest filled with such events that would make Salazar himself turn turtle in his grave. For example, here is today’s headline: FOREIGNERS RUNNING GOA’S SEX TRADE. In olden times the Ranas used to maraud along our northern borders. Now the Russians have taken over. With iron ore extraction ground to a halt, they are revitalising Goa’s economy by a quantum leap in surface exploration. That is, trading in over-exposed skin on our beaches, with undercover clients from across our borders. And, with the advent of rapid-rapes in Delhi’s moving buses, this model will easily be replicated in Goa too, more so on our city-bound buses loaded with a mixed baggage of bum-to-bum commuters.” “From the looks of you, I feel that you too lived in a Goa that had no criminals and no gallows to hang them on. Portuguese criminal law forbade capital punishment, anyway. But now I wish they could tighten that law of the noose, for that may be the only deterrent for these global goons who ‘target Goa’ of all the places on the planet, despite government’s pronouncements of the so-called zero tolerance to tolerance.” At the end of that sermon the gentleman bade me ‘adeus’, in a mannerthat re-established my first impression of him, andleaving me free to push yet another magazine into my shopping bag - ‘Viva GOA’. Bennet Paes
