In the Mapuca Market in Goa, on a sultry Friday noon, at the
famous Hanuman Soda fruit juice ice cream shop four elderly people namely Alda,
Nascimento, Liano and Sita come and by chance all of them get seats next to
each other in the crowded shop. Nascimento asks for a Gadbad Ice Cream, which
is his favourite and by some act of providence all of them order the same as if
inspired by what the gentleman is eating. Alda notices that all of them have
same squarish nails and finger tips. After sometime they leave the place into
some Goan villages, perhaps never to meet again.
Wendell Rodricks’ new book ‘Poskem- Goans in the Shadows’
starts with the description of these four people in an ice-cream parlour.
Poskem in Goan means the people who have been adopted by wealthy families. When
famine, war, arson and fights happened, poor people left their hapless children
in front of the well off Portuguese and Naik families and such children were
brought up in those households as a sibling with ‘equal rights’ but were often
sexually exploited by the men folk in the house. That tradition is almost over
now and very few Poskems are there in Goa today. Wendell Rodricks with his
passion for fashion, culinary art, social justice movements and folklore, in
this latest book, amply illustrated by an assortment of drawings from the Mario
Miranda collections, tells the story of these Poskem people.
Alda has a tragic life. Her first born out of the eldest son
of the Maurice family was killed at child birth and the boy was sent to foreign.
Alda becomes a witch at least in her imaginations. She takes revenge using her
body as a medium. Nascimento becomes a cook as his ‘father’ was a cook and
becomes chief chef in the Taj Hotel Mumbai. Liana is single daughter and she
finds her fulfilment as she joins Louis Miguel in Spain. Sita saves herself
from a possible incest relationship with her brother Shiv but she comes to know
that she could marry him for she is an adopted one in the family. All of them
have different ups and downs in their life and finally all of them have come
back to Goa. Alda is the only one who remains there but it is Sita who goes in
search of her roots.
In a single chapter Wendell gives the story a quick twist
and then we find the prologue also becomes the epilogue. Sita finds an old lady
Indra in a village called Bicholim. Indra tells Sita that there was one lady
called Shanta who was married to one Vinayak Halankar. In the fifth part of the
small book Rodricks goes back to 1932 where Shanta’s story unfolds. Shanta once
fallen to bad times leaves her elder daughter Sita in the Naik’s house and
places one girl before the Mauricio house hold and one before the Trinidads.
The boy child was left at a church. They grew to become Sita, Alda, Liana and
Nascimento respectively. Rodricks says that there have been many stories like
this but hardly people want to recount the kind of racial mixtures, sexual
violence, displacement, heartbreak and so on involved in their lives.
Wendell, as I said before with his interest in the culinary
arts has incorporated very special recipes of cakes, cookies, vindaloos and
many other Goan dishes as a part of the narrative. And as a reader we find
these recipes blending easily with the narrative like egg yolk in cake
batter. Some of the recipes are from the Poskem people. At times the reader
would feel that the narrative is created for incorporating recipes and making
them interesting. Any book about Goa is pretty readable for the pronounced
exoticism that they carry. Rodricks’ work has the same remoteness and exotic
nature. A good and light read.
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