A different side of Goa
It is a tiny room. It has a wooden ceiling, oyster shell panes and tiled awnings. Printed umbrellas hang from the ceiling and framed photos on a wall sit beside the Goan ghumott (percussion instrument) and the Portuguese guitar. One wall among the four stands out. It looks like a street in Lisbon — houses with tiled roofs, decorated windows and balconies. It is in front of this ‘street’ that celebrated Goan fadista (fado singer), Sonia Shirsat, takes centrestage every few weeks, serenading people with the musical genres of fados and mandos.
The concert space, MadraGoa, occupies one room in a 200-year-old Goan house in Panjim by the Mandovi riverfront. As houses go, this one is quite majestic. A wide stone staircase neatly segregates the house into two parts — one where the de Noronha family takes up residence while the other houses a Centre for Indo-Portuguese Art (CIPA).
The art centre is an umbrella academy, a passion project of Orlando de Noronha, who wanted a space to showcase, document and impart information about the arts. “Our family has always been connected to Portuguese culture. My eldest brother, Óscar de Noronha, founded a publishing house, Third Millennium, which brought out works in Portuguese, Konkani and English. I was linked to ceramics, and I love the fado and mandó. Tina [his wife] is a good cook. It made sense to create a centre for Indo-Portuguese arts where we could preserve these literary, ceramics, music and culinary art forms,” says Orlando. The CIPA was born on July 24, 2019.
Walk into the house and the traffic noise and the casino drama in front just melts away. At the top of the stairs is a mural of a flower vase (one of Orlando’s first hand-painted ceramic tile creations, azulejos). The centre is essentially just a few rooms, brimmed to the wall with crockery, pottery, books and one big room bedecked with azulejos. The first room has pretty patterned crockery (by de Noronha Associates) and a stand showcasing some of the books and periodicals published by Third Millennium Publishers. Step out, and the balcony doubles up as Chafe Braz, serving rissois, quiche, choris pao and Portuguese custard tarts.
Once in a while, the concert space of MadraGoa hosts jazz concerts. The biggest room is dedicated to the Azulejos de Goa — a shop dedicated to Orlando’s azulejos. The centre also conducts ‘Renascença Goa’, a Portuguese radio chat show.
Orlando was inspired to open Azulejos de Goa during his one-year stint in Portugal in 1997 where he had gone to pursue Portuguese guitar. He ended up learning to paint azulejos as well. On display in the room are big and small hand-painted tiles, mementoes depicting Goan life — some even have legendary artist Mario Miranda’s paintings, and some azulejos-inspired jewellery by Tina. Orlando also conducts painting workshops.
A visit to a friend’s place in Coimbra, Portugal, led to the birth of another idea. “They conducted fado concerts, and people could just walk in and experience this art form. It made me think about doing something similar in Goa,” he says. It was only when the second part of his house, earlier rented out, went vacant that he could realise his wish of opening a fado house. “The Goan mando is also a dying art, so I linked it with fado. The main aim is to take this music to the next generation,” he says.
Concerts are usually held over the weekend. Shirsat, sometimes accompanied by Orlando on Portuguese guitar and Carlos Menezes on guitar, introduces everyone to fado and mando. In the interval, out come plates of Indo-Portuguese snacks like bacalhau, pork empadinhas and pastéis de nata. Guests are urged to honk the powder horn hanging above the staircase, if they are happy with the concert. It is not uncommon to hear continuous honks as people stream out. All because of that small, magical room.
