Goa: X-mas to New Year

CHRISTMAS among Christians, like Divali among Hindus, is strictly an occasion for family reunions and festivity. Both have crossed domestic confines and become public festivals. On Christmas, Christians have no inhibitions about food and alcohol and love more music, song and dancing, embracing everyone within arm’s reach. You have to be in Goa on Christmas Eve to experience it.

Goans foregather in their homes. Visitors celebrate in hotels because most of them are far away from their homes. They get a surfeit of Christmas carols which blare away from loud-speakers all day and night. Homes are festooned with coloured lights. There are Christmas trees and men dressed like Santa Claus. There is a lot of exchanging of gifts; in Goa they have no one to give gifts to or receive from. Nevertheless, an elderly English lady thrust a slab of chocolate in my hand and Herr Kotzner, a hotelier in Dusseldorf, presented me with two ball-point pens: I had nothing to give him in return.

Goans have evolved a cuisine of their own largely based on fish, crustaceans and pig-meat. Like other coastal dwellers, they use coconut exhaustively in their cooking. Of their alcoholic beverages I was only aware of Feni made of cashew or coconut. They have many more: a liquor made of passion-fruit, and fermented juice of toddy. Preparations for Christmas feast begins many days ahead, with preparations of consudda (sweets) of different kinds-kul kals, arehas largely based on flour, sugar jaggery and coconut. The best is known by girlish name Bibinca. They have their own variety of pilaf, called Fefogado, enriched with meat of suckling pigs.

Christmas Eve festivities go on till after 11.30 p.m. Then church bells begin to toll and Goans loaded with food and drink go to the nearest church to attend midnight mass which lasts for almost an hour.

I did not want to see the end of wining, dining, singing and dancing or the hotel empty out for the mid-night service at the little church of Saints Cosme and Damiano. But I could sense what had transpired at night the next morning. There was no one in the dining room when it opened for breakfast at 7 a.m. They started coming in after 9 a.m. and continued well past the time meant for breakfast. All morning they lay in the sun nursing their hangovers. Alcohol and prayer make a very heady cocktail. It reminded me of the last paragraph in Aldous Huxley’s novel Genipus and Goddess based on Bertrand Russel. It ends with a Christmas Eve party. The host warns a departing guest: "Be careful driving back. This is our Lord’s Day. Everyone you meet on the road will be drunk."

She’ll make it to top

Television buffs might recall the still-born Star-Plus chat show Nikki Tonight came to an abrupt end after its first showing. The fellow who was being interviewed by Nikki used unprintable words for Mahatma Gandhi and claimed that I had published them in The Illustrated Weekly of India. This was not true. If there is one person against whom I can’t and don’t take anything derogatory, it is my much loved old Bapu. However, I was reminded of the episode when I ran into Nikki Bedi and her husband Kabir in London. I knew Kabir’s parents, B.P.L. Bedi and Freda, from my Lahore days. I met Kabir again in Bombay when he got engaged to Protima Gauri. I never met his second wife, an American. Nikki is his third. I assumed from her looks and accent that she was a pucca Brit. She is pucca enough but only half-Brit. Her father was Argo Moolgaokar, an eminent gynaecologist-obstretician who settled in England. Nikki went to the best schools in England and won prizes for acting, debating and sports — she was a champion sprinter and javelin thrower. Compared to her husband who stands well over six feet, Nikki is more than a foot shorter than he.

The Bedis invited me to lunch. He wanted to take me to a swanky Spanish restaurant L’Esperanza (Hope) in Knightsbridge. I suggested a tiny Italian eaterie Sugo alongside a bus stand in South Kensington. The Guptas, Anil and Urmila, and I had eaten there the day before. It reeked of garlic smoke, had no class but the food and wine were first rate. So the six of us (Gupta’s son from America) trooped into Sugo. Kabir was recognised at once as his serial had been telecast in Italy many times. I bagged the seat next to Nikki so that I could find out more about her and size her up. How should I describe her? She is the personification of the Punjabi word Nikkee — meaning small or petite. And also animated! Listening to her endless prattle got me out of breath. Others had described her as witty, intelligent, beautiful, elfin-like, irrepressible, super-fit, sexy, brilliant and stylish, a merciless mimic, a chatterbox with a 100 mega-watt smile. And so on. She had something of all that. I summed her up as a pretty gamin with enormous animation and vivacity. She has done a lot of commercials for TV, appeared in Tipu Sultan and Mr Yogi. She has also acted on the stage: as Desdemona with Kabir as Othello, in Jane Eyre and other plays. But she has yet to make it to the top. I have no doubt she will — soon.

The Bedis have decided to make their home in England. Nikki has signed up British TV to appear in its popular daily show This Morning. She also means to do TV programmes and films in Mumbai. So does Kabir who is to appear in Italian films and TV programmes. I have faith that little Nikki will soon be recognised as Waddi (big) Bedi.

Interesting nonsense

1. Coca-Cola was originally green.

2. Iceland consumes more Coca-Cola than any other nation on earth.

3. The youngest Pope was 11 years old.

4. It is possible to lead a cow upstairs but not downstairs.

5. Men can read smaller print than women, women can hear better.

6. City with most Rolls Royce’s per capita: Hong Kong.

7. The world’s youngest parents were 8 and 9 and lived in China in 1910.

8. First novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer.

9. A duck’s quack doesn’t echo, and no one knows why.

10. Each king in a deck of playing cards represents great kings from history. Spades: King David, clubs: Alexendra the Great; Hearts: Charlemagne; and Diamonds: Julius Ceasar.

11. If the statue in a park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in a battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

12. Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them would burn their houses down — hence the expression "to get fired."

13. "OK" meaning alright is now used all over the world. Many people, including the Germans believe it is an American expression. That is OK because OK was a German! An immigrant German, Otto Krause, worked at the American Ford Motor Company in the 1950s. As Mr Quality Control, he drove each car off the assembly line. If it ran well, he chalked his initial into the hood — OK.

(Contributed by Amir Tuteja, Washington, DC)

Father-in-law’s mansion

A friend was Superintendent of the Central Jail at Ajmer. One day when he was showing me round the jail, a new prisoner was admitted. In his usual jocular manner, he addressed the prisoner, "Perhaps, you have come for the first time to your father-in-law’s house." The prisoner retorted, "Sir, I have come to my father-in-law’s house several times in the past but I am meeting my brother-in-law for the first time."

(Courtesy: R.N. Lakhotia, N. Delhi)

Boozer’s measure

Banta, who was an old tippler was initiating his friend into the art of drinking like a gentleman: "See on that table there are four men drinking. As soon as they appear to be eight, you should know you have had enough and drink no more."

Santa took a good look at the table indicated and replied, "Banta, there are only two men at that table."

(Contributed by Shivtar Singh Dalla, Ludhiana)