a response to Passage to Goa by josé colaço

regarding the Passage to Goa

Ben Antao

I read Jose Colaco’s Passage to Goa, posted on his website, with much interest and not a little
fascination, as the good doctor who makes his home in Nassau now playfully pats his stethoscope on the chest of Goa, up front and back and sideways during his recent visit.

He sums up his verdict on the health of the patient with his accustomed style that is marked by kindness, thoughtfulness and combative integrity. While externally the places he had passed appeared to have distressed to him, he nevertheless managed to meet some good people there.


I was rather impressed with the candlelit view of his house in Velim, which I had entered many times as a boy, for either to participate in a ladainha or to relay a message from my mother to one of his unmarried aunts. Also, as an altar boy, I had served his uncle Father Olimpio at Mass. The row of candles burning on the verandah of his house (it was Christmas time) lent a charming feel to his ancestral house.

In contrast, two doors down the road, the house where I was born and raised in probably looked stark and dark to him for it had been kept shut since my step-mother died in 1994, and my brother’s family had preferred to live in Margao where our family had migrated in 1945 in search of good education.

Jose’s observation that "a number of houses in the Goan villages sit dark, deserted and shut" awakened in me a touch of sadness that the manifest destiny of many Goans still continues to be to leave their birthplace in search of education and employment elsewhere in the wide world.

In his Passage, Jose mentions with obvious pride the arrival of the Internet in Velim, a fact that must have tickled Kuwait-based Gaspar Almeida immensely, for he had noted in a recent email (with his tongue in cheek, I felt) that the prodigy of the seamen of Velim had done well. Good for the Velimcars! Arre, xenantullo kiddo xenanto uronam.

The photos in the Passage helped to give depth and enhance the writer’s message. Fred Noronha and his wife Pamela looked stylish and urbane; I couldn’t recognize Fernando do Rego, whom I had interviewed way back in 1963 for The Navhind Times, because like me he was quite young then, maybe in his late thirties. And until I had talked to Fernando, I had no idea what an agronomist was or did. I still remember his telling me about the importation of mango seedlings from Brazil
and grafting them onto the home-grown trees. The malcorado mango was one such luscious fruit stemming from the graft, I seem to recall.

But age, in its own surprising way, also enhances recognition. The photo of Tony Correia-Afonso bears a striking resemblance to his father Roque Correia-Afonso, whom I had known and heard many times in Bombay in the fifties where he was a distinguished university professor and public speaker during the liberation movement. I had met his late brother, Jesuit Father John in Toronto in 1991 who must have taken after the features of his mother.

Although Jose Colaco has titled his piece Passage to Goa, I feel he has also made a discovery that good Goans are everywhere to be found if you really care to search for them. Thank you, Joe, for giving me an update on Velim, Margao and Panjim.


Ben Antao
February 6, 2002