What Blog Men!

He pointed me to a street that went in the direction of the sea, proposing that I might like to check out the old chapel where St Francis Xavier lay buried. St Francis Xavier in India? Yeah right, I thought.

There, just next to a well stood a roofless ruin of a structure that had the looks of a could-have-been chapel.

A fairly new marble plaque at the ivy-infested entrance read 'St Francis Zavier Chapel'. Maybe 'Zavier' was not the same as 'Xavier', perhaps the people of Revdanda had a casual sense of spellings or maybe they had achieved more phonetic progress than the Americans, I examined all the possibilities.

I recalled a tourism department handout which claimed that St Francis Xavier had delivered both his first sermon on Indian soil and the last discourse of his life at Revdanda. Surely if that were true, the monument would not be an abandoned ragtag now.

A large tablet with inscriptions in Portuguese lay on the ground inside, while two huge cannonballs from yore lay along one wall. If somebody were to decipher and translate the text on the tablet, perhaps the truth about the chapel would be known.

"There was a man who knew all about the history of Revdanda. He had found secret passages inside the fort walls. He died in 1978. His ghost comes here during stormy nights. But you might want to check out the Birla Temple across the river," said the man from the Chinese stall as I returned back to the fort archway.

I took the cue from the fishermen in the ferry and asked him for Korlai, which turned out to be the next village down the highway. Passing over the river bridge, I could see the Korlai fort far away in the distance, standing majestically on top of a hill jutting out at the mouth of the Kundalika. Small needle like things protruded out of the fort's vantage points. Cannons, I reckoned. Sparkling white sand beached bound the blue water and land together all along the coastline.

The Korlai village is divided equally into the Catholic, Hindu and Muslim communities. This part of the Maharashtra coast looks like a very unlikely place for being a hotspot on the world etymology map. But Korlai village, with its population of 3,003 (as written on the state transport bus stand sign), speaks 'Korlai Creole', the purest living form of Portuguese in the Indian subcontinent. About a thousand Catholics in the village have the language as their mother tongue, though the other communities too speak it because all the children study in the same Mount Carmel School. The language is a mixture of Portuguese and Konkani Marathi, the former being the dominating component.

Around 1515 AD, the Portuguese families that immigrated here mixed with the locals and settled down here. Of all that they passed down the generations, only the language survives.

"These people can't read or write Portuguese. A Portuguese national today might be able to make out what they are saying, but they wouldn't be able to understand modern Portuguese," Father Diago of the 350 year old Mount Carmel Church told me, as I climbed up to his flat
teeming with the odor of freshly cooked chicken.

"There is no recorded history of this place. A historian from Revdanda had done huge research on this place but I don't think he's alive now," he remarked as I made a connection with the ghost that haunts the man at the Chinese food stall.

The school attached to the church had just ended, and a mass of children streamed out of the doors as if a dam had burst open.

Identifying a few idle ones, I asked them to teach me some of their Portuguese. Knowing some modern Portuguese myself, I could make out the difference between the pure form and the Creole. 'Eu' (I, in Portuguese) had become 'Yo', 'Voce' (you) was 'Vaache', 'queira' (to want) was 'halla'.

The path winds through the village to a narrow strip of land that connects the Korlai hilltop fort, once known as 'The Rock of Chaul'. Climbing up mildly along the sea facing side of the hill to the lighthouse, the path provides a beautiful view of the huge U-shaped beach of Korlai, marine blue water breaking against white sands till more then two miles until a hill extends itself out to close the bay.

Few cross the lighthouse complex to climb up the 150 steps to the Korlai fort, but the tiring ascent is well worth it. The ramparts run along the ridge of the hill which is surrounded by sea on three sides. The fort is a long sequence of seven doorways, one after another, and
is hardly ten meters in width. The topmost part of the fort has the citadel with a dilapidated church and a temple facing a water tank.
Cannons lie facing the sea in all directions. The lowermost gate that opens up into the mouth of the Kundalika river has a seal of the Portuguese empire with the inscription 'No entry without a fight' on it. The fort has its share of snakes but one can hardly see them outside their hidden shelters except when its monsoon.

I took one last glimpse at the Korlai beach from top of the fort and returned to the highway. A rickshaw going further south along the coastal road was waiting to fill one vacancy so I stacked myself in.

Ten minutes later, the road descended down a hill in a hairpin bend and suddenly a beautiful blue beach kissed by the setting sun unveiled itself. Kashid Beach is the most famous beach in these parts and the location for several advertisement and film shoots. Few venture out here, which explained why I had the entire two mile stretch of the beach bliss all to myself.

One doesn't get much to eat here, except bhurji-pav and tadka-Maggi, but some commendable soul has put up hammocks along the entire length of the beach.

Checking into one of the hotels here, I settled into a hammock with a book, watching the sun sink.

(Published in April edition of Darpan, the Indian Airlines in-flight magazine)