Dr. Luis Dias
Going through the family archive of documents can be an emotional roller-coaster for many reasons. Often (as was most recently the case at the time of my mother’s demise in April 2024) one needs to find a specific elusive paper that you thought was safely filed away in this folder, only to find it has mysteriously migrated elsewhere, and one has to turn the house upside down in order to retrieve it.
Too often, one finds that a precious document or photograph has gotten even yellower and more brittle and fragile, and then one has to digitise it (photograph it), and live in hope that one will remember where that JPEG document gets filed away, and hope it doesn’t get corrupted or deleted due to some computer virus or other hocus-pocus that I can’t understand.
But there are some photographs and letters that stop you in your tracks from whatever your initial quest had been, and take you in a completely different direction. It doesn’t happen often, but it is quite an experience when it does.
Last month, in a sequel to our family visit to Corjuem Fort, a few days later we visited the Aguada Fort, now for some inexplicable reason re-branded as ‘Aguad’, dropping the final ‘a’. Maybe it is easier for the visitor and tourist to pronounce. Why don’t we drop the ‘a’ in ‘Goa’ and just call our state ‘Go’? It could really catch on, and Majorda, Fatorda, Agonda and Utorda could
be next.
It was our first visit to the museum, and our son, recently out of high school, still had the history of the Goan Liberation Movement fresh in his memory. By sheer coincidence, a few days earlier, I had been doing some tidying in a pile of old letters and documents and found a sheaf of letters from the ‘Father of Goan nationalism’ Tristão de Bragança Cunha (April 2, 1891 – September 28, 1958), better known as T. B. Cunha, to my mother and father in the years before they were wed.
Apart from the obvious fact that he was a giant in Goan history, his letters also throw warm light on the milestones in my own parents’ lives. For instance (as I mentioned in a column after her death), when recreating a chronology of my late mother Dr. Elvira Dias’s life, I recalled that she had completed her MBBS exams in April 1956.
How lovely therefore to find a letter from Cunha dated July 19, of that year. In earlier correspondence, he had addressed her simply as “Miss Elvira”, but in this instance, he begins with “Dear Dr. Elvira de Sousa”, and continues, “First of all I congratulate you for your success in your Final Exam in your medical studies and wish you a brilliant and prosperous career of doctor. Your graduation has put you in a good position to help the welfare of the people and I am sure that you will be of great service to the collectivity.”
Cunha then writes laconically about having “received the letter that you mention and I have replied to it, and also have published in my paper the translation of the Lawyer’s letter as you may have need. Copies of this since have been sent to Germany [West Berlin, where my father was studying at the time].” He then ends “With best greetings, Yours sincerely, T. B. Cunha.”
His address, written in his hand at the top right of every letter, was then, as now, a very fashionable one: the Art Deco building ‘Sunshine’ (which if I’m correct overlooks the Oval Maidan), Churchgate Reclamation, Fort, Bombay (now Mumbai).
There are hardly any congratulatory letters marking my mother’s graduation. I think another branch of the family has the letter from her father writing from Nairobi, which probably arrived later due to the distance. It was a significant milestone not only in her life but for her whole family, as many sacrifices had been made, the family moving back to Goa so she could complete her schooling, and then ‘Inter Science’ (their counterpart to our standard 11 and 12) at Wadia College Poona (Pune) and finally medical studies at Bombay. So Cunha’s letter means that much more, quite apart from his historical stature. I think his blessing to her for “a brilliant as prosperous career” and of “help to the welfare of the people” and “a great service to the collectivity” did come to pass, but then I’m obviously biased.
In another letter, he mentions having called her hostel “but was told that you were out”. In another, he apologise for having missed her visit when she called on him.
You have to marvel at Cunha’s penmanship; it is legible most of the time, and extremely neat. You get the impression of someone who has thought through his sentences and paragraphs before he commences writing. In all his correspondence spanning years, there isn’t a single crossed-out word. He seems to have had a fondness for black ink as he uses it in all the correspondence.
The letters to my father in West Germany are on diaphanous ‘air mail’ paper, and so the writing on each side can be a task to read for that reason. The tone is a tad more formal, business-like: “I am in receipt of your two last letters, thanks”. “I have sent to you two copies of the past issues of ‘Free Goa’ in order [that] you may send over to Lisbon.” [this letter is dated July 3, 1956]. He reveals “I have been sending 3 copies with 3 different addresses to Portugal but I don’t know if they reach the addresses as ‘K’ has told me that none reached lately when he was there. So please make inquiries if any of them have been received there.” Further on he laments that “It looks as if pro-Portuguese elements have succeeded in sabotaging the work for Liberation.” He then shares the address of one Madame Colette ____[the hole-punch for filing obliterated the surname] in case my dad needed to send Cunha any material from Paris.
In another letter he rants about a foreign student who borrowed an important reference book but never returned it.
My parents would have been aghast at my making their ‘personal’ correspondence public. But this is no ordinary ‘personal’ correspondence when the sender is someone as larger-than-life as Cunha. The letters shed some light on what was going on in his life too. The last letter I could find is from 1957; he was dead just a year later. With another June 18 around the corner, I thought this would be a fitting time to share this facet of family history.
There is one letter I know he wrote because I saw it years ago. Somewhere along the line, he sort of nudges my father to think of ‘Miss Elvira’ as wife material. He gave their union his stamp of approval. Whether it has been misfiled, or kept in a place so safe that I can’t (yet) find it, or whether either of my parents felt it was ‘too personal’, only time will tell as I keep ‘tidying up’.
