My paternal grandmother, Maria Marta Apresentação
Lobo e Dias (called Mãe by my brother Victor and
me, even though she was our grandmother), was
around for just about four years of my existence
from the age of three to six. But I remember her
so well.
She had a sad life; she was widowed very young, aged just 41,
when her husband Dr. Vítor Manuel Dias was in the prime of
his life, and she thus had to shoulder the burden of
educating six young children. Further, she had to suffer the
pain of losing three of them in her own lifetime.
Just a few years after her husband's death from a cerebral
haemorrhage in 1949, she herself was paralysed by a series of
strokes. When our family returned from Germany in 1970, she
was wheelchair-bound, and needed help for basic bodily
functions. But she still possessed the faculty of speech
(which, tragically, yet another stroke took away about a year
before her death in 1973), and was as doting a grandmother as
her circumstances would allow her. I remember the Christmas
bonbons that had to be elegantly wrapped just so, under her
watchful eye, and they are still part of magical Christmas
memories of my childhood.
Mãe taught my brother Victor and me our prayers, and Bible
stories, and she would tell us bedtime stories as well. I
was introduced to Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, and so many
others by her. We would listen, wide-eyed, as the stories
unfolded and good ultimately triumphed over evil.
But I never ever learnt the ending of one story she
told us, because we would nod off like clockwork
after a few sentences: it was the story of Tall
John and Short John. All I remembered through the
sleepy haze was the eponymous characters, and
something to do with a horse, but that was it.
I somehow assumed the story must be part of the standard
fairy-tale repertoire, and through my later years I scoured
through the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles
Perrault but I had no luck. I tried speaking to a few
old-timers, but that didn't lead anywhere either. I tried a
Google search for 'Tall John and Short John': nil results.
So I guess I sort of called off the search and let the matter
rest.
In 1996, I visited Lisbon for the first time, and met my
first cousin Vítor's daughter Marta, named after Mãe, all of
four years old. Her own favourite story was 'Capuchinho
Vermelho' (Red Riding Hood), and she even had a smart red
cape to match. I remember reading that same story to her
from her storybook in my halting Portuguese, with her perched
on my lap.
I didn't meet Marta Junior again until just a few days ago;
she was in turn visiting Goa for the first time. The toddler
was now a grown young woman. We exchanged family stories and
memories while poring over old family photo albums, and we
spoke about bedtime stories. She remembered 'Capuchinho
Vermelho', and I asked her about Tall and Short John, on the
off-chance that the story might have survived through her own
grandmother Lena (Mãe's daughter). But she didn't know of it.
Then, in a flash of inspiration, I decided to change the
Google search to Portuguese. I typed 'João Grande e João
Pequeno'. And lo, the seventh hit among 1,34,00,000 results
gave me the much-sought answer.
It is a blog post on a Portuguese Sapo [https://www.sapo.pt/]
blogging site, and I am still no wiser about the provenance
of the story. But it seems to me that Mãe must have known
this story in Portuguese, and translated it into English for
the benefit of my brother and me. Having recently arrived
from Germany, we were having a tough enough time with English
and Konkani, so perhaps Portuguese would have seemed like
language overload. But I can't help wishing that we had been
introduced much earlier to more languages. The early years
are the best for this.
So: should I tell you the story of 'O João Grande e o João
Pequeno' or might it have a soporific effect upon you as well?
It's certainly a long winded story, with many
twists and turns. Basically, there were two Johns
(or Joãos) in a certain parish, so they were
distinguished and nicknamed by their vital stats:
the tall and thin one was called Grande, and the
short and stocky one Pequeno. Both lived alone
(sozinho) with their respective grandmother. But
JG was rich, and owned much land and horses (I knew
there were horses in the story!) while JP was poor,
with just a little land and a single horse.
One day JP borrows some of JG's horses to plough his field,
but when urging them on at the plough, calls them his own
horses, which enrages JG. When repeated warnings are
unheeded, JG kills JP's lone horse. And so begins a cascade
of tit-for-tat exchanges (involving further killing of
horses, grandmothers and eventually JG himself), with JP
being the more cunning, and therefore the
