Great-grandma's dilemma!
1919....Goa.
Granny was a lil gurl then....living in her home at Caranzalem village.....at the foot of the Dona-paula hill....she was a naughty girl..
always made to stay indoors after seven pm.
Ours was one of the few homes in the area...most people lived
300 metres away on the beach, till their homes were washed away by that devastating Cyclone and made them run inland and up the hill.... Twice a year for days in a row ..you could hear the sonic Booms of the pyrotechnics for the St.Peters feasts and other feasts...the loud 'FOZZNEY' ...to herald the beginning and d of High mass.in the chapel next door. Grandfather (paternal)who was a widower himself with 2 children.. from a neighboring village....married my grandmother (paternal)....who too had lost her husband sadly just after her first marriage...well the new granpa...(lol this sounds damn confusing even to me...)
helped re-construct the old house with his own hands...granma had refused to live with new-granpa in his village...so instead he used to hop between his home and hers(ours)...as she was the only daughter....and she had to inherit great granmas house one day...
One day Great-granma was boilin the water in a big compro (vessel)
One day Great-granma was boilin the water in a big compro (vessel)
in front of our house over a bonfire.....this was the G
oa in 1919...it was eleven o clock in the night and as she was huddled over the fire....a tall figure clad in black and wearin a hood came to her and signalled askin for a fire-brand....great-granma was about to question
him as to his identity when she happened to look down at his feet..
THEY WERE TWISTED ALL THE WAY BACKWARDS......
THE DEVIL INCARNATE.....
her blood curdled....she shuddered involuntarily for a brief moment
but soon regained her composure...took a piece of red-hot coal
and offered it to the stranger....he took it on his palm, nodded...
lit his beedi..(country-ciggarette)...and walked on to till he eventually
merged with the inky darkness...
Granny saw all this with bated breath through the peep-hole in the jack-fruit door....
..the same peep-hole that she would be shot-at by my step-auntys husband some decades later...but thats another story....
Granma asked her mother about the man....
Great-granma told her about the nocturnal visitors true identity....
`never talk to strangers in the night`, was her golden advice she gave to her little girl....
Long after that when granny married and my aunty was born, she passed down this story to her and she; to me!
She also told me of the time when the hill behind our house used to be a desolate and `God-forsaken` place......Granny would go up the hill walkin a steep winding path, to collect dry firewood and twigs...
One day as she was decending with a basket of wood on her head,
she heard a loud crackle, as if a twin was snapped in two...lonely and
startled, she cursed loudly and that was the worst thing that she could do....for the spirit of a dead woman who had commited suicide on the branch of the same Cashew-tree where my Granny was at the moment, entered her body.....possessed her till her dying death...
She became mad.....had recurring bouts of amnesia coupled with dementia...was put in the Mental hospital at Altinho but escaped by jumping over the wall.....
I remeber her pitiful state just before she died...Daddy and I; we both tied her to a chair in her room with electrical wires....
Was this the same strong woman who taught me my first prayer sitting on the wide-wooden bench in our verandah?
my first song? Gave me a `kals` full of `burnt-Feni` sometimes
as an appetizer or when I had a cold?
Dishevelled silver-black hair, wearin her orange `Kapod`,
was this the same `Granmai' that I ran to for solace when Rosa would scold me?
She would roam the village and enter peoples` homes and once
she opened a tin of baby-milk powder and ate it all in somebody's kitchen which she had entered through their backdoor...
Frequent complains from neighbours and grannys` insane out-bursts forced Dad to confine her to her room....
One sad morning Rosa whispered in my ear, ``Wake up Jhonny, Granny is dead!"
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