Living Portugal

How much effort are you prepared to take to have a truly quality time when on a backpacking trip? When I heard of Korlai, I knew that it would be worth it to learn Portuguese and then visit the only place in India where over 900 people still have the language as their mother tongue. And I wasn't wrong!

Maybe it is that lone young people don't board the ferry that leaves the Gateway of India quay at Mumbai for Alibaugh on weekends too often, and if they do, they are instantly branded dubious wandering explorers by the locals from Maharashtra's coastal belt.

For as the boat chugged away eastwards from the Mumbai skyline, a group of fishermen folk had identified me as one, perhaps because I was the only one on board who was not surrounded by a huge group of college students or a better half.

Soon I was the centre of attention of the hoi polloi. "Why you go alone? How you will spend your honeymoon if you go alone?"

So I made an attempt to divert attention from this alleged irregularity in my existential setup was by asking them where near Alibaugh that town was where over 900 inhabitants spoke Portuguese as their mother tongue even today.

"Oh you want to go to the town of Firangis?" came the quick reply. "Go to Revdanda and ask for Korlai!"

Yes, that was the one I was looking for. The way from Alibaugh bound south for Murud town – with its majestic sea-fort of Janjira – isn't quite a path well trodden. So when I learnt that tiny fishing towns on that road were once the hotbed of Portuguese colonial activity, I knew that stuffing my backpack up was the inevitable thing to do. My intuition told me that Revdanda was the material that would make for many delightful private discoveries and have you wondering if you should disclose its existence to the world. What if millions of tourists throng this place tomorrow and kill the charm of this place?

Hitting land at the Mandwa port, I boarded one of the 8-seater shared rickshaws just where the milestone read, 'Murud – 58 kms'.

The rickshaws here are staple transport for the locals, all of whom seem to be traveling from one village to the other all the time.

Noticing my backpack and camera, a croaky voice belonging to a passenger asked in Marathi, "Going to Revdanda?"

As I replied in affirmative, another fellow commuter spoke, "Revdanda is a boring place, I don't know why youngsters go there. There is nothing to see in Revdanda."

The rickety vehicle carrying us trotted along a highway that ran just next to the sea all along. Every now and then, villages with houses covered in dense foliage appeared and disappeared, adding and subtracting people from the rickshaw. And then the blue sea crashing against the now rocky and now sparkling white sand shore returned to be the winding road's companion.

The rickshaw pulled off below an old ivy-covered thick-stone archway that is the entrance to the erstwhile Portuguese fort of Revdanda, formerly known as Chaul. The road runs through the town for a couple of kilometers until it passes under a similar high archway and opens up to a bridge over the Kundalika river mouth. The entire stretch of the road between the fort walls is covered in a thick canopy of dense tropical vegetation, which makes the hot and humid weather bearable.

The black-stoned fort walls are really thick, perhaps to nullify impact from huge cannonballs shot from warships. The Revdanda fort was built in the mid 1500s to augment the Portuguese military control of the coast.

The fort's walls and citadel are mostly in ruins, but at some places there are plaques on walls and on top of doorways with the seal of the Portuguese empire in a surprisingly perfect condition.

As you inspect the fort, you run the risk of becoming the subject of amusement in the tea stalls clasped to the fort walls.

"That's all of the fort that you can see. The rest is not accessible, too many dense bushes," called out a creepy onlooker in a very I-keep-seeing-many-of-your-kinds manner from a Chinese food stall thoughtfully named 'Maratha Hu-Lin'.

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)