Rosalyn D'Mello: Colour me Goan

My niece woke up all excited about my sister's roce. This week has been filled with customs we were never previously privy to as Bombay Goans. Imaging/Uday Mohite

I've never been one for glamourous parties meant to collectively ring in the New Year. Time is a construct, and the year's ending on December 31 is symbolic only of the Gregorian calendar. I accept the multiple ways in which time can be measured, and this is just one narrative. Last year, I didn't even engage in a countdown. I was having a drink with my loved one, who suddenly, after it was past 12, decided to get up from the dining table and wish me. The year before, I may even have been asleep at midnight. This year, since I knew I'd be in Goa, I decided it would be fun to revisit something I'd done with my family some years ago - go for a 'dance'.

My friend Julien and his partner would be in Goa with his sister and a bunch of friends, Asli would be around too, and I roped in one of my favourite photographers, Akshay Mahajan and his beautiful partner, Mrigs, to come along too. I bought the passes and reserved enough tables for about 24 people, including my friend Bee Rowlatt and her husband, who turned up later with her four kids in tow. It was hard to describe to them what to expect from a Goan dance. I said something along the lines of there being three bands, and lots of Goans dancing all through the night, with a whole battalion showing up after the mass. It was the most 'local' thing to do, I think I said, but I didn't need to sell the idea to them. They were on board from the beginning. Any intelligent tourist or resident knows not to spend New Year's Eve on a beach in Goa.

It was rather phenomenal, listening to Konkani music amid other more popular tracks (We had bets about how many times The Shape of You would play). The Archies were top-notch as a band, starting off their post-midnight set with a stellar rendition of The Blue Danube Waltz. My Goan-ness came several times through the evening, particularly when Maria Pitache played. It's like an anthem, you hear the first chords and you understand it as a dance floor summon. Like mice to the pied piper's siren call, we make our way to where everyone is and dance in this quasi-ancestral way. It's so culturally specific, I cannot explain the lure to outsiders who choose to sit this one out or go to the bar instead, and I can never get non-Goan friends in Delhi to even shake a shoulder to the beat.

Sometimes I think it's like a test of your Goan Catholic-ness, how you react to Lorna's Bebdo or any hit by Remo. It reminds me of that excerpt by Zora Neale Hurston that I read long ago from her 1928 essay, How it feels to be Coloured Me, when she takes a white friend out to the drafty basement of The New World Cabaret and her colour comes. I must quote from her - "We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen, follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeoww!" Hurston describes her feeling of being in a jungle, with her face painted and her pulse throbbing like a war drum. Then the piece ends and the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. "I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.

"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips. "Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so coloured."

My niece woke up this morning, all excited, "It's coconut milk day," she said, referring to my sister's roce. It's an amazing word, 'roce', suggestive of 'rus', the lovely liquid we put on the bride and groom and their entourage. It's supposed to be done separately, but we're flouting tradition and having a joint celebration. This week has been filled with all manner of customs and rituals we were never previously privy to as Bombay Goans. It's been a learning experience. I'm practicing my Goan-ness. It's getting better with every well-formed, fried-fish infused morsel of xit-kodi.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

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