Once a Kevni resident, Goa-based Ivan Arthur’s new fiction recounts the underlying rivalry his village had with neighbouring Amboli and when the two merged into one
Belinda Clotilda Rozario stands at the entrance of her father’s ancestral land in Amboli Village. Pics/Sneha Kharabe
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While leading us through the narrow, paver-blocked lanes of her idyllic township, 54-year-old Belinda Clotilda Rozario stops briefly for some small-talk with her neighbour, who has dared to step out of her home in the searing afternoon heat.
“Is that your dog?” Belinda asks, interrupting the woman’s game of fetch with the furry animal. “No menn, it’s a stray,” her Goan neighbour breaks in. “These buggars always come from dat udder lane,” she adds, and then immediately decides to shoo it away. “Now, go menn. Enough game became,” she tells the dog. We look on amused, even as the dog silently obeys and moves away. But, mostly, we are piqued by this language — a brand of English often attributed to the Catholics of Mumbai, and mocked for its bizarre vocabulary, phonetics and grammar.
The ground near Amboli village where residents would hold Christmas celebrations. According to residents, the spot was once a pond before it was reclaimed
In Amboli village, nearly two km from Andheri West station, this lexicon is still thriving. “This is Ambolingish at its best,” writer Ivan Arthur says, while describing the language of his impish childhood. Here, the ‘menn’ translates into a verbal punctuation, replacing the full stops, question marks and exclamations, and ‘buggar’ describes any person (or animal) under the sun. ‘Became’ — always appropriated in the past tense — implies ‘over’ or ‘done’ and has overstretched its use, despite its ambiguous context.
Ivan Arthur
Arthur’s knack for observing the absurdities of the people of his community — that of Amboli and the adjoining Kevni pada in particular — has inspired his new novel, A Village Dies (Speaking Tiger). The book, published this month, is a fictional retelling of the many stories and people, who came to give this place its character. Yet, at its core, the book is a funeral song of two vibrant Catholic villages, hidden in a suburban pocket of Mumbai, which slowly died the death its very people co-wrote. Today, despite the nearby St Blaise Church boasting of over 10,000 parishioners, the skyline has changed drastically. There is no village. Instead, we see, small bungalows making way for towering buildings. The only semblance of the past are the names of these new highrises — Rita Villa, Mary Ellen and Doris Terrace to name a few — that bring to mind the two old villages, now growing vertically.
Quick rewind
Arthur’s novel takes us back to the Amboli and Kevni of his memory — the one that his parents moved into when he was a five-year-old in 1946. Here, there used to be a thriving East Indian Catholic community that owned vast stretches of ancestral land. Single-storeyed cottages with extended backyards, full with mango, love apple and pine trees, and tiny horse stables, speckled the pastoral township. In fact, the mango trees, which continue to grow in the area, is said to have given Amboli its name: Ambe Ville. “In the early 1940s, with the influx of Goans and later Mangaloreans, some of the East Indians decided to make use of their land by building chawls on their property. These chawls comprised rows of one-room bamboo, mud or brick tenements. The Goans and Mangaloreans, who came to the city, rented these tenements and began to live here,” says 74-year-old Arthur, one-time resident of Kevni, who shifted to Goa, after retiring as area creative director of J Walter Thompsons in 2002.
The interactions between the three groups provide the material for Arthur’s fiction. The East Indians, who were in fact the sons and daughters of the soil, were quietly resentful of the Goan and Mangalorean. Marriages within these communities were firmly discouraged. “Though things are quite different now, it was cause for much tension then,” says Arthur. A Village Dies narrates a few interesting stories on this theme.
Further, the porous borders of Amboli and Kevni “showed up some marked differences in character”. “These came to the fore on the cricket field and in other social areas. They were like two, neighbouring countries with drawn fists,” he says.
Most traditional East Indian homes in Amboli were one-storey cottages
Arthur light-heartedly remembers some of these tales in his fictional narrative of this town, told through his protagonist Kitty, a resident who leaves her hometown for a better life in Muscat, the capital city of the Sultanate of Oman. Kitty becomes symbolic of the changing face of this bucolic town.
One big family
Despite the diversity and disparity of this burgeoning Catholic community, Belinda remembers the town as one “big happy, family”. “We prayed and partied together,” she says. Belinda’s dad Joseph Ferreira was an East Indian, who owned ancestral land inside a small pocket in Amboli village, which is probably the only portion of Amboli untouched by land-sharks. He married a Goan, much to the disappointment of his family. The mixed marriages, which became commonplace in the 60s and 70s, helped set the wheels in motion for a more progressive community, says Belinda. “Weddings were week-long affairs and Christmas would see massive get-togethers at the nearby compound,” recalls Belinda, who now lives with her husband and daughter in a tiny bungalow that she built two decades ago, on land given to her by her mother Olinda Ferreira. Her brothers live in the quaint ancestral property, which sits adjacent to
her own.
A slow change
In his fiction, Arthur points out that the character of the villages began to change some time in the 70s, as other communities began to assert their presence in the area more.
This was compounded by the sudden shift of the youth to the Gulf for better job opportunities. UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, among others, promised a better future for the Goans and Mangaloreans, away from the harsh realities of chawl life. For the East Indian landed gentry, who failed to see any purpose in owning land, selling it off and moving away to Canada and Australia, seemed more lucrative, says Belinda, who also tried to relocate abroad last year. “But, nothing comes close to Amboli,” she says. With time, Amboli became Kevni, and vice versa, and the vague borders that demarcated the two villages, were blurred.
Arthur laments about this in his book too. Many of the East Indians have abandoned their homes, says Belinda. Today, the otherwise industrious Goans and Mangaloreans, have bought themselves flats in the many, new buildings that came up in the last decade.
This change is perceptible, as we walk through Belinda’s Amboli village. “Most of the houses are locked and one has even been rented out on Airbnb,” says Belinda. “My family is probably among the handful that continue to live here.” There is, however, hope if Belinda’s neighbour Jessie Gonsalves’ claims are anything to go by. The 64-year-old, who moved to Amboli village after getting married to her East Indian husband in 1976, says the young are returning. “Not to stay,” she says. But, out of curiosity about the Amboli of yore. “When they come on holidays, they take keen interest in the traditional festivities and customs,” she adds. Some day, she believes, they may fall in love with the place again.
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