The Last Catholic Colony: An Indian Catholic Childhood: Fiction and Essays

By Richard Crasta

A subjective impression of life in Mangalore, which with its churches, convents, seminaries, and Jesuit schools, loomed large in the imagination of the author, as he was growing up, and made a deep impression on his mind: fiction and essays celebrating and analyzing Mangalore's Catholic community.. The fiction includes overheard conversations among Mangalorean bluebloods (no relation of the Bloods and the Crips) and a Bishop complaining about his impatient and disrespectful sheep.

By the author of "The Revised Kama Sutra: A Novel."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Crasta
• Release date: Jul 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310660023

Richard Crasta

Richard Crasta is the India-born, long-time New York-resident author of "The Revised Kama Sutra: A Novel" and 12 other books, with at least 12 more conceived or in progress. "The Revised Kama Sutra," a novel about a young man growing up and making sense of the world and of sex, was described by Kurt Vonnegut as "very funny," and has been published in ten countries and in seven languages.Richard's books include fiction, nonfiction, essays, autobiography, humor, and satire with a political edge: anti-censorship, non-pc, pro-laughter, pro-food, pro-beer, and against fanaticism of any kind. His books have been described as "going where no Indian writer has gone before," and attempt to present an unedited, uncensored voice (James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip Roth are among the novelists who have inspired him.).Richard was born and grew up in India, joined the Indian Administrative Service, then moved to America to become a writer, and has traveled widely. Though technically still a New York resident, he spends most of his time in Asia working on his books in progress and part-time as a freelance book editor.

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The Last Catholic Colony

An Indian Catholic Childhood: Fiction and Essays

Richard Crasta

Copyright © 2014, 2015 Richard Crasta

Published by The Invisible Man Press, New York

http://www.richardcrasta.com

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Disclaimer: The characters and events in this book, when characterized as fiction or satire, are fictional and imaginary, and any resemblance to real persons, events, countries, or planets is purely coincidental. In other essays and reflections, creative liberties have been used as are a regular feature of these authors’ writings. Names may have been changed to protect the identities of real persons.

Dedication

The author dedicates this book

To Saint Aloysius College, Mangalore,

and some of its teachers and priests, including Father Stany Vas, Father Terence Colaco, and Sunney Tharappan, who inspired us to question the status quo, to seek knowledge and truth, and to fearlessly speak it regardless of the consequences.

and

To Saint Agnes College, Mangalore,

which, by presenting us with visions of beauty and mystery, personifications of heaven on earth, inspired us to attend their mixed seminars, introducing as to such vibrant Agnesians as the Gang of Four, who along with other associated girl gangs inspired us to seek great things.

Table of Contents

Preface

The Church Ruled Mangalore—Dennis Britto Interview

The Stepmother Aunt

Selected Mangalore Sections of The Revised Kama Sutra

Prelude

The Beginnings of Sorrow

Paradise Lost

Underwear

The Water of Life

Bag Lady

The Five Pillars of Oppression

Together Again

Essays and Fiction by Richard Crasta

The Pious and the Damned Rich

Visiting a Bishop, a Writer, and a Grandmother

The Frayed Patriarch

My Life as a Crusader

Those Konkani Hymns Inside Our Heads

Invisible Beginnings: A Short Early History of John Baptist Crasta

Fathers and Sons — A Tale of Literature, Reinvention, and Redemption

The Taboos: Excerpt from The Killing of an Author

Epigraphs from What the Children Saw

Excerpt: Tales of Shame from Benzo and Antidepressant Land

About the Author

Other Books by Richard Crasta

Epigraphs

The past actually happened, but History is only what somebody wrote down.

—Whitney Brown.

A novel is the private history of a nation.

—Source Unknown.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

—Aldous Huxley

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

—John 8:32.

Preface

Mangalore, where the rain and the sun take annual turns making wet and scorching love to the earth, which reciprocates with six months of roaring rivers and thick green carpets, followed by six months of steamy humidity and dust slowly overpowering the green. The countryside around Mangalore, which is still a paradise when viewed, during and soon after the monsoon season, from an airplane as it prepares to land at Mangalore airport.

The Mangalore I grew up in was also a city of convents and churches, seminaries, monasteries, and Catholic schools—at the time, before tall apartment buildings mushroomed all over, the highest building was around four storeys high, and the panoramic view of Mangalore from the top of the St. Aloysius College tower made it appear that the town was just a massive, seaside coconut garden from which a few churches and school buildings peeped upwards. In the distance the Arabian Sea faded off towards an indefinite horizon, seemingly separating us from the rest of the civilized world, isolating rather than connecting.

So much has changed since then, possibly forever, Mangalore being a congested city with traffic jams, skyscrapers (mostly depressing apartment buildings, like some Bombay suburb), and people who are strangers to their own neighbors; this book presents glimpses of a Mangalore that once was ... a semi-Catholic colony, at least to the Catholics who lived in a world of rosaries, novenas, retreats, processions, endless Holy Masses, black masses, feast masses, and High Masses.

None of this takes away from all the things that Mangalore’s people are justly proud of: the beauty of its women, now internationally known thanks to movie stars Aishwarya Rai and Frieda Pinto; the hospitality and essential honesty of its original residents; and the beauty of its surroundings, outside the urban landscape. Nor is it to minimize the Tulu language and culture which increasingly defines Mangalore, though the main viewpoint of this book is from a character so restricted by his surroundings and experience that he is minimally aware of it.

This book is intended to serve as a historical record, a collection of glimpses of the Mangalore that once was: a sociological document as well as a celebration. (The selection of Revised Kama Sutra excerpts is brief; for more glimpses into Mangalore, please go to the novel itself.)

Richard Crasta

July 2015

The Church Ruled Mangalore—Dennis Britto Interview

[A somewhat creative essay based on a long interview, in the mid-1980s, with the late Dennis Britto, who had strong views about Mangalorean Catholicism, and could back them with colorful language. ]

At the bus stand, where yellow-plastic-enclosed copies of Rati Shastra (the poor Indian's Sensuous Man — but the free availability of such books is a recent development) are still sold side-by-side with oranges and jasmine flowers, I took an autorickshaw past Kirti Mahal, Saint Mary's Convent, and Saint Joseph's Bakery to the path through dense tropical foliage — you had to walk now, assuming you could pick up your pulverized bones and step out of the auto-rickshaw — and you were now in front of the bamboo-obstacle that was the gate to Dennis's house.

This was pretty much the route I had traversed as a child when I came down from Bombay to visit my uncles; for my uncles lived in a sliver of inhabited vegetation by a paddy field just beyond Dennis's house. I remember that, surrounded by rice plants and coconut trees, one was apt to forget that one lived in a city with 99,999 other human souls.

Things hadn't changed all that much since then. Dennis's house, an old, tiled affair with a veranda and a porch, enveloped in a leafy cocoon of tropical darkness, recalled that very time. As did the cobwebbed yellow walls, on which were hung, on nails, stained gloomy, framed photographs of various dead relatives lying in state. These photographs alternated with occasional wedding photographs of assorted relatives, the newlyweds seemingly in a state of shock, possibly by contemplation of what they, almost guaranteed virgins, would have to undergo on the wedding night. A single, dominant steel cross completed the picture: Mangalore's obsession with religion, marriage, and death. Dennis, a lean man in a chocolate-brown sweater, lungi, and crudely cut leather sandals, his scarecrow frame topped by a shock of white Bertrand Russell hair, his glass-magnified eyes, Dr. Spock ears, and bony, accusing fingers magnifying the impression of eccentric intensity, looked most of his ninety-five years — until he started to hold forth from his easy chair pulpit in the manner and voice of an ancient but impassioned priest.

This was the moment I had been waiting for:Mangalore's foremost historian-of-the-common-people, whose life seemed at times to be contemporaneous with its history, In Concert; Dennis, Live. I have introduced myself to Dennis as a Mangalorean living in New York, working on a book — hoping he won't recognize the ancestral portion of my features and launch into the genealogical detective games that are his pastime. Luckily I am wearing faded blue jeans, have a professorial beard, and have acquired a certain maturity in my features, a certain lightness in my skin; when I travel the world I am mistaken for many nationalities from Italian and Greek to Arab and Argentinean. I now ask Dennis the Mother of all Questionsfor oldtimer interviews:

Mr. Britto, what was Mangalore like in your time?

Dennis noisily clears his throat, and begins:In my time — and in fact, until fifteen years ago — the church ruled Mangalore. Actually, do you know what gave the church the power to rule absolutely, to make people behave as if they were idiots? Because people were afraid that, if they were rebellious, they might not be buried in the Church graveyard.

How interesting! That How was Mangalore like in your days? is answered as if it were What was the religious State of the Mangalorean Nation?Precisely the misunderstanding that permeates some of the historical tracts I have read, wherein Mangalorean Historyis understood to be synonymous with its Ecclesiastical History. A vital clue in unraveling Mangalore's soul — indeed, you can still set your time (and place) to the rosary that is still said in Mangalorean houses — I think, as I allow the old man to go on, uninterrupted.

"At one time, the priests were dictators. Women had to cover themselves with a special garment in church so they might not tempt the priests. They said that Christ couldn't stand the sight of a woman; so women were not allowed inside the sanctuary. And when the priests preached about sin, they only talked about sex. As if all sins are firing! [The gun, in this case, was a sexual symbol, its firing the moment of sinful climax.] In those days there was a rule that [Dennis pointed at his own bare nipples] this thing should not shake, so women wore tight bodices. Nowadays, of course, women are really temptresses. They only want to make a show of their beauty, so they simply walk up and down the streets, wearing low sarees and showing their navels so that other men may admire. Why? Should they marry her?"

In Dennis's limited nineteenth century world, I presumed, admiration of the opposite sex could only end in marriage. It was an old-fashioned Mangalorean viewpoint — understandable for one born in a bullock-cart century — but given a brittle edge by this cantankerous old man who, in his Lear-like, raging recall of another time, and his rare lack of inhibition, had more spice, more meet mirsang and nanji, than a thousand other sources put together. I must hear him out.

Dennis continues, after pausing to blow his nose loudly into a huge, red handkerchief. But I say: we are idol-worshippers! Our churches have so many statues in them, this saint and that saint! And priests are only here to make money. At one time, a Mass for dead souls cost only eight annas — half a rupee!Now they cost fifteen and twenty-five rupees, and even with that the priests say they are backed up. One Kuwait-working woman: she paid the priests one thousand rupees to make sure her dead husband went to heaven! Naturally, all the big [important] families wanted their sons to be priests, and so many good families have died out because all their sons either went mad or became priests. So Heaven is full, but Mangalore is empty.

I see a clue to his rage: all of Dennis's sons have become priests, and the Dennis line, in the strict patriarchal sense that he would regard these things, is therefore no more.

And the blessed convents: pray, pray, pray, and nothing comes out.

At this point he pauses to inhale some snuff, and blows the resultant thundering sneeze into his red handkerchief.

He continues: And then, they had strict laws against intermarriage and divorce. When you asked them why, they said Canon Law. Tell me, the Canon Law, does it have balls?And the Pope's gun — does it have bullets?

In those day people had a Hindu mentality and everybody believed in ghosts and everybody remembered when Ambu Castelino had come home one day and found his jewelry in the gutter, and shit in the rice pot. [I cannot say for sure that I heard the last part of this sentence right; it is the only part I am not sure of; I taped most of this on my Sony Microcassette recorder, the only way I could be sure of getting most of it right, but this part foxes me now.]

A breeze blew some old leaves that had fallen on the chipped red parapet, blew them onto the floor, where they would remain along with earlier arrivals, including small bits of paper, until the day someone thought to put a broom to them.

A lizard climbed up the muddied nearly-yellow wall towards the dusty, single tube light.

I have one foot in the grave, he said suddenly, and laughed, launching now briefly into a self-pitying description of his medical conditions.

Then he noted that one negative influence of the British, whom Mangalorean Catholics at the time tried to emulate, was to make them unclean. The British washed themselves in their own dirt, he said, reflecting the Indian abhorrence of tub baths. They didn't have daily baths. As Brahmins (which many Mangalorean Catholics believe themselves to be), Mangalorean Catholics had been ritually obligated to take daily, morning baths. But some of the citified among them, over the years, possibly influenced by the British (like one old lady I knew, who loved to shit in a tin pot), had changed to the weekly head bath, usually on a Saturday evening, and one body bath, usually on a Wednesday. Their shirts, lungis, and coats were not as clean as they once had been.

He continued:

They say this miracle, that miracle. But Saint Francis Xavier's body, they preserved it with salt and chunam [limestone], like salted fish. What's so big about that?

In those days, you couldn't see a Hindu woman on the streets.

Nowadays, the youngsters have no respect. Because they have seen in pictures [movies] how to make fun of superiors, he said now, shaking his finger in a scolding fashion.

As if on cue, at that very moment two nuns, relatives of his, came in and paid their respects to the patriarch. One of them traced the sign of the cross on his forehead — a gesture of blessing that she, though inferior in age, could possibly impart because she was superior to him in grace. Then she said to him, One of the reasons I became a nun is to pray for the family.

After his nun-relatives had left, I asked him about Mangaloreans’ Portuguese connection.

The Portuguese had their headquarters at Feringpet, he said now, talking of a large village seven miles from Mangalore, named after the phirangis or foreigners. "It was also called Town of Syphilis