The Way We Were (Ayesha Kagal, in ... And Read All Over, Goa,1556, 2025)

[Frederick Noronha]

The Way We Were

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Ayesha Kagal

Three of the five of us around the table in the tavern that night in Panjim have passed on. The first to go was Ivan Fera, my talented colleague at the Times group in Bombay, a reporter with the Illustrated Weekly of India. Ivan was followed by Chiang Ko-Hung, the brilliant FTII-trained cinematographer and photographer who had accompanied me on the assignment. And finally, there was Matanhy Saldanha, the bush-shirt clad, bearded, primary school teacher turned Ramponnkar leader I had come to interview.

The year was 1979. I was 23. Darry D'monte, my boss at the Sunday Review, the Sunday supplement of the TOI, had dispatched me to Goa to cover the growing Ramponnkar movement, where Goa's traditional fishing community had taken on the mechanised trawlers who were fishing too close to the shore and destroying their livelihoods.

I was glad to revisit Goa, home to childhood holidays: lit by flickering petromax lanterns, scented with the aroma of ripening jackfruit, drenched by the longing in architect Lucio Miranda's voice ”Cu... cu... ru... cu... cu.... Pa... lo... maaa....” As he sang in the gathering dusk of an Altinho evening, our grandfather Fredrick Bertram DeSouza — better known as Freddie B — gazed tenderly at Lucio's lovely mother.

But, back to the bar. There we were, the five of us. Matanhy was silent. He said next to nothing, leaving the conversation to Christopher Fonseca, his right-hand man – ebullient, effervescent, garrulous. He held forth. We listened.

When we finally left the tavern, the deserted streets of Panjim called out to us and we walked late into the morning, reluctant for the night to end, stopping for a final cigarette on the wide, welcoming steps of the Church of Immaculate Conception.

Over the next few days, we embedded ourselves in the lives of Matanhy and Christopher as they traversed the coastline, going from village to village, addressing groups of Ramponnkars. And we watched Matanhy transform from a quiet Don Bosco High School teacher to a firebrand speaker—urging, exhorting, entreating groups of fishermen to unite and join the Goenchea Ramponnkarancho Ekvott to organize against the dire threat they were facing.

It was quite the performance, Chiang and I spellbound observers. Our features — Chiang's photographs and my article –on the Ramponnkar movement appeared in both the Sunday Times and the Illustrated Weekly of India. For the soft board in my room Chiang gave me a large black and white portrait of Matanhy, where he looked like a dashing young Che.

Back in Bombay, over the next few months, the post brought in a steady stream of pale blue inland letters. And in one of them arrived a proposal. For a whole week I envisaged life as the wife of a primary school teacher in Panjim. But reality has a way of intruding, rudely disrupting dreams and I finally wrote back with sadness, saying I didn't think I could make the cut.

Work was a distraction from the business of life. Those were good, generous days at the paper. Our budgets were not limited. We travelled by air, we could spend a couple of days on each story. I travelled extensively for the Sunday Times, all over the country – Kashmir and Kutch, Manipur and Nagaland, Kerala and Bastar covering peoples' movements and political protests, environmental issues and tribal ones, cultural and social and literary happenings. True, I earned a pittance, my salary for the longest time was all of Rs 450, and I was the boss of no one. But I was doing what I loved, I was free to travel and write on the subjects I wanted (mostly). As a feature writer– not confined to a beat– I could also plunge into a wide range of subjects, was given enough time to understand a story and the space to explore it. A half page story was the norm, a full page story, common.

Both shrank over the decades – the funds to travel and the word limit – as editorial supremacy gave way to marketing domination. But those early years were golden.

Freshly minted from Delhi University's Miranda House with a sociology degree, I learnt on the job. The skills of the craft honed by the relentless doing and the need to communicate an increasingly complex set of ideas and information simply and effectively; the politics evolving with the people I met and the times we were living in.

Soon after coming to Bombay from Delhi in 1975 I met a group called Vistas, a set of young, idealistic St Xavier's College students. They were working for famine relief in rural Maharashtra and fired by Paulo Freire's seminal book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, they evolved into advocates of Freire's theory of conscientization, making villagers aware of the roots of social injustice and organizing to change that. The group became lifelong friends.

We were an Amar Akbar Antony gang, mirroring the Bombay we inhabited. There was Pradeep Guha and John D'souza, Joseph Pinto and Aspi Mistry, Eric D'sousa and Norman Dantas. Anjum Rajabali joined us. Who we were and where we came from was irrelevant, we had common aspirations then: a better tomorrow for all. Where there would be no hunger, no fear, no discrimination.

Those were momentous times. Tumultuous times. Youth and hope and the promise of change were a heady concoction.

It was the time of the Emergency. In those days I worked at Youth Times, the youth magazine of the Times group and an editor who was constantly travelling left us to fill up the pages gloriously unsupervised and uncensored. So we wrote freely and passionately — as only the fearless, very young, can – about political prisoners and political theatre, profiling groups protesting at the Gateway, calling for democracy. (Looking back, I suspect no one read the magazine!)

My days were spent at the Times office opposite VT station, the evenings and nights given to the Vistas gang in Colaba. We had set up a Documentation Centre by then, an alternative information centre, behind Regal, in the days when information was scarce and we believed knowledge was power. The Doc Centre served as a rallying point for all kinds of groups pushing for a new world order. We brought out publications, we had film screenings, held exhibitions. We didn't label ourselves but others did: the CPI(M) dismissed us as anarcho-syndicalists, a term we hadn't heard of it till then; others called us orphans of the left.

World events were lapping at the edges of Bombay. Two rival groups of Iranian students — Islamists and Marxists — had begun protesting against the Shah and the Marxist students were regular visitors to the Doc Centre. We, in turn, joined all their protests at Churchgate station and were routinely carted off to the police thana at Colaba.

In those years liberation theology was spreading among Jesuits around the world. Closer home, in Dahanu district, two Jesuits – Peter D'Mello (who later took on the name Pradeep Prabhu) and Nicky Cardoza — had left the priesthood to form Kashtakari Sanghatna, organizing impoverished adivasis in the region. They were frequent visitors at the Doc Centre. I went to Dahanu to report on their work and came back fully fired. The revolution was round the corner. And I was reporting it!

I had moved to the Sunday Times by then and the formidable Girilal Jain was the editor in chief of the paper. Those were also the days of the big fat red pencil. My article — I can still see those typed sheafs of yellowing newsprint — was returned to my desk with a red pencil mark scored through all the pages and the scrawled comment: “This is a speech! Not an article!” Duly chastised, I set about rewriting a less speechy story. And learnt a valuable lesson in the power of restraint. It was to stand me in good stead. To realise that passion leashed was far more persuasive than passion unleashed.

It was around that time, in 1979, that a group called the Forum Against Rape came together in Bombay to protest against the rape of Mathura, a young Adivasi girl in a police station in the Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra. The Mathura case marked a turning point in the womens' rights movement in India. I remember that lively and impassioned first meeting of the Forum and writing the pamphlet on Mathura which we then distributed in protests all across the city. Organising around this case began the debate on violence against women and the fight for legal reforms in the country.

In the following years there were innumerable women related issues to cover. In Delhi feminist groups like Saheli were organising against dowry deaths; in Maharashtra groups like Stree Mukti Sanghatan and Maitrini went on two week long yatras across villages and towns in the state. Day after day, night after night, in Sangli and Satara, Belgaum and Ichalkaranji, they performed the play Mulghi Jhali Ho (A Girl is Born), to audiences that ran into tens of thousands. And it was electrifying to watch the response the play evoked as actors planted the first feminist seeds in viewers.

Those were also the years which saw the first stirrings of environmental protests. In Kerala, people had begun organizing against the setting up of an hydroelectric project which would flood Silent Valley, a pristine tropical rain forest, home to the endangered lion-tailed macaque. There was a nine-week long strike at the TOI in 1979 and a friend at a magazine called New Delhi, edited by Khushwant Singh, offered me an assignment to cover the Save Silent Valley Movement. I spent two weeks travelling in the area and the magazine carried the story which ran to 25 pages. As I said, those were good days. Length was not an issue, a short attention span not an affliction.

Journalism also granted you access into homes and lives beyond your class bubble. In mid 1977, the “missing girl case” had begun to attract attention in Bombay. A young Muslim girl from a rag pickers family in Shuklajee Street, who was visiting her brother at a JJ Hospital ward, had vanished.

Rumours were flying thick and fast, communal tension was simmering in the city and the Chief Minister had offered a Rs 5000 award for anyone who could provide information. My mother had a feisty MLA friend called Qamar Ahmed who asked me to see if I could follow the case and even though I was not a reporter on the daily I began investigating.

I found a sympathetic doctor at the JJ Hospital hostel, a Muslim boy as it so happened, who was deeply upset. The young girl, who would bring her brother a tiffin every day, had been lured to the `Apna' hostel and had been gang raped by a group of doctors who lined up outside a room to assault her. Clothes torn and bleeding, she had left the premises. That's all he knew.

We figured since she had not gone home in that state she may have walked to VT station down the road and there we found that she had been picked up for ticketless travel and had been locked up for a night. We also learnt that she had been released along with another woman. After which the trail ran cold. We feared the woman who had picked her up had taken her to a brothel and later, after she was found, we discovered that that was what had happened. A regular Bombay story.

In those months she was missing I was a constant visitor to their home, a one room hovel in a densely populated heart of the city, and her grandfather Nana — a white bearded, blue check lungi wearing patriarch from UP — and I became fast friends. I was as comfortable in their home as he was in my mother's fancy Carmichael Road apartment, where he would arrive, hitch up his lungi, sit cross-legged on the sofa and smoke his beedi with supreme self assurance. The first person he called that Christmas eve in 1977, when the police called him to say his granddaughter had been found, was me. I spent that night in the police station, taking on the cops who were parading the terrified young woman like a specimen to the all-male press corps.

Ten years later, when I got married and was leaving the city, the Bombay Central platform our train was departing from was awash with black burkhas, as the entire Shuklajee Street extended family contingent arrived to bid me farewell. It was a stupendous send-off.

Odd, the memories that stay with you.

In the early 90s I moved to Russia where I lived for three years before returning to Delhi and joining NDTV.

But that's another story, for another day.

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FN * +91-9822122436 * 784 Saligao 403511 Bardez Goa 

[Savia Viegas]

Thanks for posting this Frederick.

That fiery firebrand speaker in Ayesha's story was my cousin Matanhy Saldanha.  She told me this story when we met for the first time a few moinths ago.

mY GRANDMOTHER, a great visionary sensed something and played us against each other so that besides being primas we were great friends till the very last.

Do you still want that Ivan story or it is done!

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Savia Viegas

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[FM N]

Fantastic piece! Thanks for sharing.

FMN

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