If you read about my family history, you will realise where the inspiration for most of the stories came from.
—Jane Borges
By Selma Carvalho
Jane Borges is a Mumbai-based journalist. She currently writes on books, heritage and urban planning for Sunday Mid-day, the weekend edition of Mid-day newspaper. Her debut novel Bombay Balchão (Tranquebar, 2019), is set in a Catholic neighbourhood in the eponymous city. She previously co-authored Mafia Queens of Mumbai: Stories of Women from the Ganglands (2010) with S. Hussain Zaidi, shortlisted for The Economist Crossword Book Awards 2011. Her work has appeared in various publications including the New Asian Writing Anthology 2013. Here, in conversation with Selma Carvalho we uncover the family stories which informed and inspired Borges’ novel.
Selma Carvalho: Thank you Jane for taking the time to talk to the Joao Roque Literary Journal during these despairing times the world is facing. Your book Bombay Balchão, captures a different time, a time when a loose amalgam of Goans, East-Indians and to a lesser extent Mangaloreans, thronged the Catholic quarters of South Bombay, a locality marked by Portuguese Churches but also by a commuter railway line which facilitated their settlement in places like Dhobi Talao, Byculla, Dadar, Parel and then later Bandra, with Cavel, where your book is set, being its earliest centripetal location. Can you tell us a little bit about your family, their origins in Goa, their migration to Bombay, and the neighbourhood of your childhood?
Jane Borges: Thank you Selma, for the opportunity. It’s interesting that you ask this question, because understanding my roots, and the reasons why my grandparents moved to Bombay, were instrumental in shaping this novel. Yes, I have written a book that primarily focuses on Goans in the city, but my background is mixed, with roots both in Karnataka (Karwar and Mangalore) and Goa. This story, though, is a long one, and you might have to bear with me.
Let me begin with my paternal side. My great-grandfather Ignatius Borges was from Sadashivgad in Karwar; he worked as a motorman for the railways and travelled often. His younger son, Stephen, my grandfather, served briefly in the army, before moving to Bombay in the 1940s, where he lived in a kudd, a short distance from Cavel. He got married to a Goan bride, my grandmother, Anna Vaz, and got himself a job as a tailor, and settled on Grant Road. I was told that he stitched men’s suits. It’s an occupation that most Bombay Catholics, especially the Goans, were known to be exceptionally good at. He also spent over a decade in Muscat, where he had his own curtains business. Anna’s mother, Regina Ramos, had Portuguese ancestry. She hailed from a well-off bammon family in Bardez, Goa, but after marrying a sailor (tarvotti as they are known in Goa), moved to Mazagaon, in Bombay.
My mother Sandra’s parents, Joseph Crasto and Estephanie Almeida, were from Kundapura, in the Mangalore district. My grandfather Joseph came to Bombay in his teens, in search of better prospects, and was employed by the renowned Hindi actor-director Motilal. He bought a small home from his meagre savings for his large and growing family in Malabar Hill, not very far from his boss. When he quit that job, his wife Estephanie started a bakery near their house, where they sold everything from kharis, pav, nankhatais to sliced bread. Malabar Hill was one place, where practically no Catholics lived (mostly home to Gujaratis, Marwaris and Maharashtrians). The Crastos were an exception.
Both my parents, Johnny and Sandra, hence, grew up in South Mumbai; when I was born, mum moved to Muscat in Oman, to be with my dad, who was working with a furnishing company there, as an interior designer. I was raised as a typical, overly-indulged ‘Gulfie’ kid, impervious to the hardships and rigours of Mumbai; my only connection with my roots was the occasional visit we made, once every two or three years.
We finally returned in 2003, when I was 16, and settled in the Goan neighbourhood of Cavel, where my parents had bought a gorgeous, quaint home from an East Indian relative, who had moved bag and baggage to Canada. That’s how, through this constant movement between villages, cities and countries across generations, I found my home in Cavel, and started engaging with it.
SC: The book draws on a wide canvas of history and experience. In the second chapter we have references to Prohibition, that misguided criminalisation of alcohol consumption which so severely crippled the Bombay economy, in chapter 4, we have mention of a tarvotti, and the newly arrived David who lives in a kudd at Jer Mahal, Dhobi Talao, and later in chapter 7, a couple with a young family return from Dubai to live on the second floor of 193-A, Bosco Mansion. How much did you draw on collected oral histories, research and personal experience, to create this compelling portrait of the Portuguese-Catholic community in Bombay?
JB: If you read about my family history, you will realise where the inspiration for most of the stories came from. My dad’s maternal grandfather and uncles (all Goans) were tarvottis, a profession that many from that region had taken a shine to. I have heard stories from my granny Anna, who I fondly call mãe. She is a splendid raconteur, and her very, Goan middle-class upbringing in a Catholic tenement in Mazagaon, helped me stitch a compelling portrait of life of the early migrants. Her mother came from an affluent family and was well-educated, but in Bombay, a Portuguese education was of no real use. Her sailor husband died tragically, following a fire accident on a ship, and having had to fend for herself and her four children, she started a tiffin service, where she served food to bachelors. Mãe also took jive and foxtrot classes, and her Goan way of life, shaped this novel in more ways than one.
The Mangalorean experience came from my mother’s side. My uncle, Patrick Crasto, was an athlete and national-level sportsperson in Bombay of 60s. He married an East Indian, Vivienne Gaudet, from Cavel. To help me with my research, aunty Vivienne, who played hockey for India herself, shared a memoir she had written for her son, which had beautiful memories from Cavel, where she spent her childhood and youth.
Going back to the Prohibition, the ban on sale of alcohol—it influenced life of Catholics in so many different ways. We all know of the Catholic aunty joints that mushroomed during that time. For the book, I spoke with several old-time patrons of these joints, especially of a popular one in Cavel, where you could get bangda (mackerel) fry with your drink. These stories were fascinating to say the least. That I had already co-authored a non-fiction title, Mafia Queens of Mumbai in 2011, where I had researched the impact of Prohibition on the city, and how it had only led to rise in illegal hooch liquor trade—and in the process, caused a spurt in crimes—made it easier to fit in that part of history into my narrative.
As far as the kudds are concerned, I live in Cavel, and some of these clubs still exist in the vicinity today, especially in the neighbouring Dhobi Talao, another vanishing Christian neighbourhood that gets its name from a washermen’s pond that used to be here. The kudds, as I write in the book, were chummeries started by the ingenious Goans, in the mid-nineteenth century. These humble lodgings were the mainstay of many migrants, especially the bachelors, who tottered and struggled in the new city, and couldn’t afford to pay steep rents. My Karwari grandfather lived in one, when he moved to the city. And I think that can be said of most Goans, too. I also referred to the work of late Goan historian Teresa Albuquerque, who has written and researched about the kudds, to get my facts right.
And, finally, of the bit about the family from Dubai: I took a leaf out of our own story, when we moved back home from Muscat. There was such a huge anomaly in the life we lived in the Gulf, and in Mumbai. The water problem was something I distinctly remember. So yes, I was sitting on inspiration, all the time. I just needed to start writing.
SC: There are details embedded in the story which may escape the attention of a casual reader, and yet they are an essential part of the Catholic community’s cultural, social and economic history. For instance, the character Tresa who having prepared the batter for baath (Goan coconut cake), takes the batter to the Cross Gully bakery. It was unheard of in mid-century Bombay, that a household would possess an oven; the women baked their batters at nearby bakeries. Often the women went early morning, so as to not offend the bakery’s vegetarian customers by baking egg batters. It is in the minutiae of community life that we find these symbiotic relationships which prevailed in Bombay, and it is this inter-connectedness at Bosco Mansion that is at the centre of this book. The book could easily have been written as a long-form journalistic essay, similar to Naresh Fernandes’ City Adrift: A Short Biography of Bombay (Aleph, 2013), given that your background is also in journalism. What made you chose fiction as your form of delivery?
183-A Pius X Mansion in Cavel, which was the inspiration behind Bosco Mansion in Bombay Balchão. The building gave the city three mayors—Dr Joseph Collaco, Dr Joseph Alban D'Souza and Dr Joseph Leon D'Souza lived on different floors of the century-old structure. Picture courtesy of and copyright Sohini Mitter.
JB: I agree. This easily could have been a long form journalistic essay, and had I done a good job of it, it would have become a legit, go-to piece of literature, to understand the ways of people in communities like Cavel. In fact, an avid Bombayphile asked me the same question, when the novel came out. He said: ‘If you had written that book, I’d have taken it far more seriously.’ Fair enough. But, here’s the catch. Not everyone is curious about history, and not everyone values their heritage, ancestry and roots. Were that the case, we’d not have to deal with vanishing community experiences today. Whatever little has survived, is unfortunately, on its last legs.
But then, don’t we all love a good story? As a journalist, I am aware of the power of storytelling. If you don’t tell your story well, it will never reach the right kind of audience. And that’s one reason, why I took the middle path. I thought, let me tell a story about unreal people, living real lives, with real history, in a real world, where neighbourhoods like ours are fast disappearing.
I wanted to introduce Cavel to the world, through characters that weren’t universal, yet relatable. I am not sure if I could bring that kind of sentimentality in my journalistic work. I would have been too objective, and often that doesn’t work in the favour of the story. I won’t lie, when I say that I wanted people to respond and react emotionally, rather than objectively. Cavel is emblematic of a Bombay we are losing to development. In the development versus heritage argument, there is only one clear winner. There’s no other way to tell this story, but with rose-tinted glasses, because, as fatalist as it sounds, if we go by the facts, we are losing anyway.
SC: One of things that you describe so well is the physicality of the lives at Bosco Mansions. The occupants of the building, much like real life, are preoccupied with real-life concerns—rent control, repairs, water distribution. The chronology of the book, from a time when these characters were young to seeing them in old age with absent children, achieves the desired result of tracing the community’s rise and decline in a changing metropolis, where they have lost their place. Towards the end, these sentiments are expressed by the character Joana, ‘Our lovely old Bombay has gone to the dogs.’ With a new generation selling up and resettling in the west, what do you see as the future of the Catholic community in Bombay?
JB: In 19th century Bombay, Cavel was a thriving Catholic village, and boasted of the largest Christian population in the city. This only explains why we have three churches in the vicinity of Cavel (Our Lady of Health in Cavel, St Francis Xavier’s in Dabul, and Our Lady of Dolours Church, Sonapur). Today, unfortunately, the number of parishioners in Cavel is less than 200. Most of them have migrated to Canada, the UK, and Australia. Others have moved to the suburbs. If you speak about the Catholic community in Bombay, as a whole, we are still significant in number, with Bandra, Orlem (in Malad) and IC Colony (in Borivli) having really large parishes. I cannot, however, predict the fate of neighbourhoods like Cavel, which are most likely to fall prey to the real estate and development boom. It’s unfortunate, but there is very little pride among the residents too, or rather lack of awareness, about the rich histories, both familial and local, of these places. If interest is built, I feel, people will start taking ownership of these stories and the lands that they occupy. It breaks my heart, every time someone from Cavel says they are moving abroad, or to another city. That kind of migration is not in our control. Movement is constant. It will keep happening. But, then, a lot of responsibility will fall upon those, who don’t leave. They will need to find ways to celebrate the past, while welcoming the future. Only then, can we prevent any historically-significant place from biting the dust.
SC: Your work joins the small but important efforts by writers like Reena Martins (Bomoicar), Ivan Arthur (A Village Dies: Your Invitation to a Memorable Funeral) and Brenda Rodrigues (The House at 31, Hill Road) in documenting the lives and history of a dwindling community. Their houses, clubs and the kudds, as you’ve pointed out should rightfully be listed as heritage properties. Are there any other efforts made at documenting such as collecting oral histories and dedicating a museum to the lives of these early inhabitants of Bombay, the city?
JB: Work is being done everywhere, even if in fits and starts. Naresh Fernandes’ Taj Mahal Foxtrot (2012) was a fitting tribute to the Catholic jazz musicians of the 20th century. I know Dr Fleur D’Souza, former HOD of History at St Xavier’s College, has been doing a lot of work to revive interest in heritage and history, especially of the East Indian community, the native Christians of Bombay. In 2016, Father Francis Correa wrote a book on finding the missing church bells from Vasai and other forts, which were taken by the Marathas after they defeated the Portuguese in the Battle of Bassein (1737-1739). There are many more, countless efforts being undertaken, even as we speak. So definitely, nothing is lost. I believe that our stories are in safe hands. But this effort should be a relentless and continuous one.
SC: What are your forthcoming projects?
JB: I do have something in mind, but it would be too soon to talk about it, as I am yet to give it any kind of shape. But yes, I do intend to engage with the community and its history, through fiction.
Selma Carvalho is editor at JRLJ.
Bombay Balchão can be purchased here.