Familial lives

Born in the first decade of the 20th century, Filomena Borges de Figueiredo’s extraordinary life begins in the village of Raia in south Goa where she lives with her siblings and grandmother — her Avo. Embedded in the reassuring clasp of this world, and through a babble of Konkani, Portuguese and occasional Latin, Filomena imbibes the spiritual nourishment that will shelter her later in life. Her eldest daughter Maria Aurora Cuoto will go on to recreate her milieu and trajectory in Filomena’s Journeys — a composition that is as much a family memoir as a reflection of an effervescent culture pinioned against a mercurial society.

Anchored by her Avo and an assortment of uncles, aunts and cousins, “Filomena seems to have carried all the passion and warmth of her early life in Raia into her relationships in later life,” observes Cuoto while retracing her mother’s path.

The trail leads her to a period that witnessed an enlightening interaction between the early converts, the landed gentry and the missionaries; and the subsequent birth of an ethos engrained in cultural assimilation and community bonding. While traversing the brickwork of the early Goan social order, Cuoto finds a feudal, agrarian system that was non-coercive and encouraged generous dialogues between the landlords ( bhatkars ) and the peasants ( mundkars ), the faithful and the converts, the church and the temple. From here on, the book basks in the pleasurable duality of unravelling Filomena’s world and elucidating the mise en scene that silhouetted her thinking and her exploits.

In Cuoto’s previous work, Goa: A Daughter’s Story , she established her native land as an inimitable pivot of culture and learning, invalidating the hackneyed platitudes her people are most often exposed to. Here, she carries on in the same vein, weaving a tableau of the period and social context. Giving a detailed account of the economic liberalisation of Goa (which at times makes for dreary reading) in the first decades of the century, she traces the advent of a new era of professional employment, private enterprise and the spread of the English language, which paved the way for a social upheaval and created a generation of displaced elites, hitherto accustomed to boundless privileges. Cuoto invokes the example of her musician father Chico Figueiredo — an effusive, gifted individual with a proud ancestry and his heartbreaking errors, when it comes to confronting a new and bewildering social arrangement.

Despite its encyclopaedic depiction of a bygone epoch, the narrative uncovers the mystical force that brought together Filomena and Chico — the author’s parents. Poring over old family journals, newspaper articles and consultations with distant relatives, Cuoto succeeds in reconstructing the lives of her parents. While reviewing events of the past, she is besieged by the paradox that defined Chico’s life. For someone with social graces and a strong sense of propriety, Chico “had little experience of worlds outside his extended family and his class” and remained in the throes of an incurable alienation most of his life.

With characteristic courage Filomena’s daughter recalls her childhood days in Dharwar, growing up with six traumatised siblings, a grief-stricken mother and an authoritarian, even tyrannical father.

Bound within the pages of the book, is a photograph of Filomena with her seven children, taken in 1956. She sits serenely, clutching her youngest son, belying perhaps the storm that rages within. Having faced the crushing disappointment of her husband’s decline, she is confronted with the daunting task of raising seven children. Cuoto, awestruck by her mother’s endurance has not only charted an incredible campaign where, “Filomena seemed to live with and yet float above the dire realities from which she protected her young children,” but also scanned a society that continues to embellish India’s cultural landscape in its own unique way.

(Urmi Sengupta is a freelance writer based in Mumbai)

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