A saintly tale
I was to find out more about the so-called ‘Apostle of the Indies’, not to mention his digits, in the city of Old Goa. The former capital of Portuguese India lies on a hill a few kilometres inland. At its zenith it was known as the ‘Rome of the East’ and rivalled European capitals in scale, splendor and wealth. Then, following a wave of deadly plague in the early 19th-century, it was completely abandoned, with a new capital (Panjim) eventually being built to its west in 1843.
Empty and haunting, the city echoed to the wingbeat of pigeons. Today, there is virtually no resident population living among the soaring bell towers, fortress walls, grand portals and triumphalist arches – some of them restored, others pink and grey stone ruins. This was the ‘hazy tone of colour’ and the ‘huge masses of masonry that had Burton’s lyrical juices flowing, l was reminded of Fatehpur Sikri, the Mughal capital built on a similarly massive scale near Agra, then abandoned for lack of water.
In the Basilica of Bom Jesus, a few leathery bits of Francis Xavier were just visible through his glass-fronted silver casket. Under Portuguese patronage the revered saint evangelised as much of Asia as he could before he later died in China in 1552. His mortal remains – completely uncorrupted, it is said – were returned to Goa and have been paraded through the streets once every ten years ever since.
“You are too late. He came out last year, so you’ll have to wait till 2025 now,” laughed guide Armando Silva before telling me how, in 1634, during the first exposition of the saint’s body in Goa, a woman, in a state of religious zeal bit off the little toe of his right foot. “And that’s not all,” he chuckled. “During the 1995 parade, another adoring woman bit off the little toe of his left foot.” Symmetry at last.
The flavours of Lisbon remain strong in Goa’s state capital Panaji (still widely called Panjim, its Portuguese name), built on the hilly south bank of the Mandovi estuary. I settled into a rather rough-and-ready old colonial-era home, The Panjim Inn, at the heart of Fontainhas, its easy-paced ‘Latin Quarter’. There I wandered through a bewildering amalgam of Iberia and India: languid lanes of cottages with shuttered windows; sun-bleached churches and whining yellow auto-rickshaws; and a river-front café with Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god, sitting trunk by jowl alongside the Virgin Mary.
And what could be more anomalous in India than everyday restaurants full of locals tucking into plates of beef and pork. One such dish is carne de vinha d’alhos, a stew of meat with wine and garlic, and thought by many to be the precursor to ‘vindaloo’, its original Portuguese name having morphed as it spread through the subcontinent, before being appropriated (with added spice) by the British.
