The shadow of orange-coloured tiger

http://bit.ly/1Y0tagZ
Teotonio R. de Souza
It is not everyday that one comes across a light and delightful reading on Goa. I thought it
deserved a kind of a review. I chanced to find this book by Afonso de Melo in my University
bookstall in Lisbon. It is a second edition, but no reference where and when the first edition
was published. That is the style of this book with 206 numbered pages, many of them starting
and ending in the middle of a page.
The author introduces himself as a sports journalist who wrote columns for Ajkaal of Kolkata,
but also for several in Portugal. As subtitle of the book we are told that it is written in
Panchatantra style. The book is focused on Colv (south Goa) which he visits biannually to look
up Michael Fernandes who owns a shack named Michael Bobs and whose daughter is godchild
of the author. The visit takes place in October when tourists arrive from Europe and Shiva, a
newspaper seller on the beach and converses easily with English, French and German tourists.
Michael Fernandes had picked up some Portuguese words like bom dia and boa noite, and a
few choice bad words from his mother. He was obssessed with the idea of visiting the beautiful
Lisbon which he had never seen but was dying of saudades of being there. He refused to listen
to Afonz, the author, when tried to convince him not to exchange the Goan paradise for the
hell of Lisbon. After long shots of beer and occasional swigs of rum he would forget that
Lisbon existed.
Michael Fernandes is depicted as a devout Catholic believer, but also in karma and that he will
be reborn as a middle-classy Lisboner, owning a house in Baixa. The place name sounded good
to him, but had no other information except what the lawyers Misquita & Associates,
arranging his emigration had told him, without mentioning that it was impossible to live in
Baixa Lisboa. Elsewhere the author refers to a dialogue between Cames, Afonso de
Albuquerque and D. Joo de Castro, whose busts were in the Museum near the Kadamba bus
terminal, but the only witness to those confabulations was Prakash Bivshet, the curator who
did not understand Portuguese.
Describing the weather as sweaty, where one could smell the sweat of the pigs and eggs could
cook inside the hens, he wonders how that heat did not provoke yet another miracle of sweat
on the incorrupt body of St Francis Xavier. For Michael the Child Jesus of Colv performed
more miracles than St Francis Xavier, though the original child Jesus was no longer in Colv,
but at Rachol Seminary. The child Jesus of Colv was no longer one, but two. The one in Colv
had a ring of the one in Rachol. In chapter 6 the author expands his findings about St Francis
Xavier, all based on the hearsay and the fertile imagination of the author, but attributed to
Goans.
Afonso de Melo has quite a few asides about Goan dailies which he classifies as very naive in
their reporting, and often tend to refer to events of today as tomorrows, suggesting that it
could be due to the fact that their online edition is ready on previous night but prints made
available in the early hours of the next day.

What about the orange coloured Tiger that gave the title to the book? One can find its
explanation (if it is any explanation) in chapter VIII. The orange coloured tiger was only seen
by Niranjan Kurdekar, who suffered from hallucinations ever since he lost his wife many years
back, but believed she was alive and would sit for hours on a chair beside the empty chair of
his dead wife, seemingly in conversation with her. However, there were many in the
surrounding villages who mentioned the ferocity of the tiger they had never seen, but had left
them maimed in different ways.
The roaring of the tiger was heard once early morning, while Fr Nestor was preaching in the
Church of Sacred Heart of Mary in Chandor. He began reciting Hail Holy Queen, but went into
a slumber half way. The incorrupt body of St Francis Xavier opened its eyes wide, shocked
probably by what was happening. Michael Fernandes did not notice anything, because he was
only dreaming of Lisbon.
Michael Fernandes would only mount his shack when his cook Rajendra arrived from Nepal
overland, and he had probably brought with him the story of Jim Corbetts The Man Eater of
Kumaon [http://bit.ly/1OOS0cf], whose imaginary shadow injured more people around Colv
than any real tiger anyone ever saw.
At the fag end of the book the author quotes from a book with some veiled emotions a phrase
he wished could be his: Since Adam was expelled from the paradise, he had never been so
close to it again. Apparently, a methaphor to convey that the Portuguese now feel closer to
Goans than ever since the expulsion of their colonial regime. Curiously, the author has no
word of sympathy for the Portuguese consulate in Goa