"The older generation had so many difficulties."
"In the old days there was no employment, but a little money went a long way. Now money has much less value it seems."
"Now when people say tomorrow, they mean next year."
"In the old days it was merit. Now it's who is a friend of the Minister. That's the only way to get on."
"Mind you," said Gertrude, "have our Catholic ministers been any better? "
"They've been worse actually," agreed Celine. "Filling their pockets."
At that moment, a servant appeared from the kitchen with a tea tray. Gertrude took charge and poured. The cups were passed around, and as the sisters contemplated their situation a shadow of silence fell across the room.
"All we can do is live in the present moment," said Gertrude eventually. "As Fr Aloysius used to say: 'Yesterday is history, and tomorrow is mystery."

"No one can predict the future. We might die tomorrow. Nothing is in our hands."
"And nothing is gained by worrying, that's my motto. Can you change anything?"
"All you can do is pray."
"The power of prayer. Prayer with Faith."
" Especially to St Francis Xavier."
"All the people still have faith in St Francis Xavier. Everyone knows he is protecting them. People still flock to the basilica."
"Oh yes."
"They come from all over the world for his feast. Christians, and Hindus too."
"One woman did not believe about his body being incorruptible and all that- thought it was a hoax. So when the body was on display one Holy Year, she went and bit the toe. And you know what? It bled. "
"Once they tried to take the body to Europe and the ship wouldn't move. Someone told the captain, and he ordered the body ashore. All of a sudden the boat could sail away."
"It was the saint insisting his body remain in Goa."
"These are some of the miracles he has worked for us,"
"He is still protecting us," concluded Gertude. "Otherwise things would not still have been as they are. He keeps our community safe. I feel that."
"It would have been worse."
"No question. It's St Frances Xavier that's been protecting us."
"If it wasn't for him…"
"Who knows? Who knows what it might have been…"

The Portuguese first came to Goa in the last days of the Middle Ages.

In 1498 Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route to the Indies, and immediately began planning ways of wresting control of the Indian Ocean from the Muslims, and so diverting the spice trade to Portugal. By August 1507 Afonso de Albuquerque, 'the Caesar of the East', built a fortress on the island of Socotra to block the mouth of the Red Sea, and cut off Arab traders from India. Then, in March 1510, Albuquerque arrived off the coast of Goa. With him came fleet of 23 caravels, galleons and war barks. Albuquerque massacred the Muslim defenders of the local fort, then carved out for himself a small crescent-shaped enclave clinging onto the Western seaboard of the Deccan. From this fortified enclave, the Portuguese planned to control the Maritime routes of the East, and to set up a missionary base from which they could plan the conversion of Asia to Roman Catholicism.

The conquistador chose his kingdom well. Goa is an area of great natural abundance and the state is still envied throughout India for its rich red soils and fertile paddy fields, its excellent mangoes and cool sea breezes. From its harbours, Albuquerque's fleet brutally enforced the Portuguese monopoly of the spice trade, and began to destroy the region's mosques and temples.
In its earliest incarnation Old Goa was a grim fortress city, the headquarters of a string of fifty heavily armed artillery bastions stretching the length of the Indian littoral. But by 1600, Goa had transformed itself from a fortified barracks into a vast metropolis of 75,000 people, the swaggering capital of the Portuguese Empire in the East. It was larger than contemporary Madrid, and virtually as populous as Lisbon whose civic privileges it shared. The mangrove swamps were cleared and in their place rose the walls and towers of Viceregal palaces, elegant townhouses, austere monasteries and elaborate baroque cathedrals. With easy wealth had came a softening of the hard edges.
This period of Goa's history is written most succinctly in the portraits of the Portuguese Viceroys that still line the corridors of the abandoned convent of St. Francis of Assisi in Old Goa. The early Portuguese Viceroys are giants among men: chain-mailed warlords like Pedro da Alem Castro, a vast bull of a man with great mutton chop whiskers and knee-high leather boots. The boots terminate in a pair of sparkling golden spurs; his plate-metal doublet is bursting to contain his massive physique. All around Castro are others of his ilk: big men with hanging-judge eyes and thick bird's nest beards. Each is pictured holding a long steel rapier.
Then, sometime late in the eighteenth century, an air of ambiguity suddenly sets in. Fernando Martins Mascarenhas was the Governor of Goa only a few decades after Castro had returned to Portugal, but he could have been from another millennium. Mascarenhas is a powdered dandy in silk stockings; a fluffy lace ruff brushes his chin. He is pictured leaning on a stick, his lips pursed and his tunic half-unbuttoned; it is as if he is depicted on his way out of a brothel. In contemporary North India, a couple of generations in the withering heat of the Gangetic plains turned the Great Moguls from hardy Turkic warlords into "pale princes in petticoats." In the same way, by the end of the eighteenth century, the fanatical Portuguese conquistadors had somehow been transformed into effeminate fops in bows and laces.
The fops and dandies had no interest in war and concentrated instead on their seraglios. Old Goa became more famous for its whores than for its canons or cathedrals. According to the records of the Goan Royal Hospital, by the first quarter of the seventeenth century at least 500 Portuguese a year were dying from syphilis and "the effects of profligacy". Although the ecclesiastical authorities issued edicts condemning the sexual 'laxity' of the married women who 'drugged their husbands the better to enjoy their lovers,' this did not stop the clerics themselves keeping whole harems of black slave girls from Mozambique for their pleasure. In the 1590's the first Dutch galleons began defying the Portuguese monopoly; by 1638 Goa was being blockaded by Dutch warships. Sixty years later, by 1700, according to a Scottish sea captain, it was a "place of small Trade and most of its Riches ly in the Hands of indolent Country Gentlemen, who loiter away their days in Ease, Luxury and Pride."

So it was to remain. The jungle crept back, leaving only a litter of superb baroque churches- none of which would look out of place on the streets of Lisbon, Madrid or Rome- half strangled by the encroaching mangrove swamps.
The most magnificent of the surviving buildings is Bom Jesus, the great Renaissance church which now acts as the enormous vaulted mausoleum of St. Francis Xavier , Goa's great saint, and the most successful of all Jesuit missionaries. When he visited Goa Xavier was so shocked by the lingering pagan practices performed by the colony's converted Hindus that he successfully petitioned for the import of the Inquisition- but this does not stop Goans of all faiths revering his memory four hundred years later.
Ironically, the healing powers of St. Francis are today particularly sought after by the very 'pagan' Hindus Xavier sought to convert and 'save'. Outside Bom Jesus stand the usual lines of postcard and trinket sellers. But among the Catholics selling effigies of the Virgin and pictures of the Pope, are a group of Hindus who squat on the pavement and sell wax models of legs, arms, heads and ribs. I asked them what the models were for:
"To put on the tomb of St. Francis," replied one of the vendors. "If you have a broken leg you put one of these wax legs on the Mr. Xavier's tomb. If you have headache then you put one wax head."
"How does that help?" I asked.
"This model will remind the saint to cure your problem," replied the fetish salesman. "Then pain will be finished double quick, no problem."
Today the best view of the old metropolis can be had from the Chapel of Our Lady of the Mount. To get there you must climb a kilometre-long flight of steps, once a passegiata for the Goan gentry, now a deserted forest path frequented only by babbler birds, peacocks and monkeys.
Scarlet flamboya trees corkscrew out of the cobbles. Bushes block the magnificent gateways into now collapsed convents and overgrown aristocratic palaces. The architrave of a perfect Renaissance arch has rotted to the texture of old peach stone. Roots spiral over corniches; tubers grip the armorial shields of long-forgotten grand Goan families. As you near the chapel, its facade now half-submerged under a web of vines and creepers; there is no sound but for the eerie creek of old timber and the rustle of palms.
The panorama from the chapel's front steps is astonishing. The odd spire, a vault, a cupula, a broken pediment can be seen poking out of the forest canopy. You look down past the domes of the churches and the white facades of the monasteries and, as distant bells tolls the angelus, see the golden evening light pick out the paddy fields and the wandering course of the Mandovi River beyond.

The river is empty now: the docks are deserted; the galleons long sunk. Of one of the greatest cities of the Renaissance world, almost nothing now remains.

* * *

"But of course despite everything they hung on," said Dona Georgina, leaning back on her wickerwork divan. "Despite the loss of their trading Empire, they ruled us for another three hundred years. They were in Goa for a full two and a half centuries before you British conquered a single inch of Indian soil; and they were still here in 1960, more than a decade after you all went home again."

"Until Nehru threw them out at the liberation of Goa in 1961."

"Liberation?" said Dona Georgina, her face clouding over as quickly as a Goan sky at the height of the monsoon. "Did you say liberation? Botheration more like!"
I had clearly said the wrong thing, and Dona Georgina Figueiredo was now sitting bolt upright on her divan, rigid with indignation. We were talking in her eighteenth century ancestral mansion, not the largest of the Indo-Portuguese colonial estancias that still dot Goa, but from the inside certainly one of the most perfectly preserved. I had driven to Dona Georgina's village, Loutolim, along a lagoon edged in coconut groves, breadfruit trees and flowering hibiscus. The village revolved around the large white baroque church. In front of it stood a small piazza; to one side was the school, on the other side, the taverna, The Good Shepherd Bar. In it, appropriately enough, you could see the village priest sitting at a table in a white cassock, reading the daily paper. Scattered around the vicinity were the grand houses of the village, and the grandest of them all was the Estancia Dona Georgina.
Inside, a servant had showed me to a divan. On one side, next to an eighteenth century Indo-Portuguese tallboy, stood a superb tall Satsuma vase. From the walls hung dark ancestral portraits. Other treasures- Macau porcelain, superb statuary, Mannerist devotional images- were dotted carelessly around the wooden galleries. On entering the room, Dona Georgina had clapped her hands. Within seconds another barefoot servant came running down the passage from the kitchen:
"Francis. Bring Mr. Dalrymple a glass of chilled mango juice. I will have a cup of tea."
The servant padded off down the bare wooden floorboards, while Dona Georgina clasped her hands: "Now understand thees, young man," she said in an accent heavy with Southern European vowels. "When the Indians came to Goa in 1961 it was 100% an invasion. From what were they supposed to be liberating us? Not the Portuguese because the Portuguese never oppressed us. Let me tell you exactly what it was the Indians were freeing us from. They were kindly liberating us from peace and from security."
Dona Georgina had fearsome beady black eyes and her hair was arranged in a tight quiff. She wore a flowery Portuguese blouse bought in Lisbon, offset by a severe black skirt. She nodded her head vigorously. I was clearly not the first recipient of this speech:
"We were ruled from Portugal for exactly 451 years and 23 days!" she said . "The result of this is that we are completely different from Indians- completely different! We Goans have a different mentality, a different language, a different culture. Although we are now under Indian occupation, I feel awkward when I cross the border into India... everything changes: the food, the landscape, the buildings, the people the way of life..."
Dona Georgina stared over my shoulder towards the open window: "In the Portuguese days we never had to lock our houses at night. Now we can never be sure we are safe even during the day. And you know who we fear most? The Indian politicians. Absolutely unscrupulous people. They have cut our forests, ransacked our properties. They have made life impossible for everyone- particularly all us landowners. They offer our land to the people in their election promises: never give anything that belongs to them- oh no, not even a pin- but they never think twice about offering people what belongs to others. Oh yes. That's very easy for them."
What Dona Georgina said reflected stories I had heard repeated in the grander Catholic homes all over Goa. The sheer length of time that the Portuguese had hung on in their little Indian colony- some four hundred and fifty years of intermingling and intermarriage- had, they argued, forged uniquely close bonds between the colonisers and colonised. As a result, the grand old Catholic widows-of which the state seemed to have a remarkable number-- still considered their state a place apart: a cultured Mediterranean island, quite distinct from the rest of India. As they quickly let you know, they ate bread- pao- not chapattis; drank in tavernas not tea shops; and their musicians played guitars and sang fados. None of them, they assured you, could stand the sound of sitars.
This was of course a vision hotly disputed by many other Goan Catholics, the majority of whom believed Portugal was guilty not of oppressing so much as merely neglecting Goa, and forcing many of its people into exile in the search for employment (as one of them put it, "we needn't put up our umbrellas every time it rains in Lisbon. Life goes on.") It was a vision also strongly resisted by most Goan Hindus, now the majority in the state, some of whom, partly in reaction to the views of their Catholic neighbours, and partly from long memories of Portuguese religious oppression, had come to espouse ultra-nationalist views, and loudly accused the Catholics of being subversive and unpatriotic. Immediately after the incorporation of Goa into the Indian Union, there had been talk among those nationalists of Goa being absorbed into neighbouring Maharastra; that idea had now been dropped, but had contributed to the sense of siege felt by some of the less adaptable old Catholics. These fears had recently been reawakened by the accession to power of the pro-Hindu BJP government which some Catholics accused of creating religious divisions, of discriminating against the local Christians, and filling the state bureaucracy with their own communal cadre.
None of this of course stopped Dona Georgina saying exactly what she thought. Like many Goan Catholics of a certain generation, she still talked about "those Indians" and "crossing the border to India", while happily describing her last visit to her cousins in the Algarve as if she had been revisiting her childhood home.
Absorption into a wider India, the old Goan Catholics would admit, had certainly brought prosperity to the previously stagnant colony, but at a price. Public life had become corrupted, they argued, and the distinct identity of Goa, along with their own elite status and privileges, were all being forcibly and deliberately eroded. Portuguese, for example, was no longer taught in the Goan schools; Portuguese places names were everywhere being Sankritised; the superb colonial buildings in Panjim were being deliberately pulled down to make way for anonymous Indian concrete: the Mansion of the Count of Menem, the last of the great Panjim aristocratic town houses, was destroyed only in 1986 to make way for a six storey block of flats.
There were, it was true, still some last remaining corners left: the haphazard, narrow cobbled lanes of Fontainhas, for example, the oldest quarter of Panjim. Fontainhas still looks like a small chunk of eighteenth century Portugal washed up on the shores of the Indian Ocean. Here old spinsters in flowery dresses sit on their verandas reading the evening papers, chatting to each other, sometimes in Portuguese. Wandering of an evening through the narrow streets with their oyster shell-paned and shuttered windows, their iron railings and latticed balconies, you come across scenes impossible to imagine anywhere else in India: violinists practice Vila Lobos in front of open windows; caged birds sit chirping on ornate art nouveau balconies looking out over small red-tiled piazzas. The houses are painted bright Iberian colours: burned Mediterranean yellow and chocolaty reds; inside you can see heavy Portuguese furniture, marble table tops and wooden pillars. Many of the signboards are written in 1930's Iberian typefaces: The Holy Spirit Home for the Aged and Mascerenhas Undertakers- Our Lady of Perpetual Succour Help Us. As you watch, old men in pressed linen trousers and Homburg hats spill feni-fuddled and toddy-tapped out of the tavernas: with walking sticks in their hands, they make their way unsteadily across the cobbles, past the lines of battered 1940's Volkswagen Beatles slowly rusting themselves into oblivion, and the butcher shops with their strings of fat paprika-red sausages. A Mediterranean douceur hangs palpably, almost visibly, over its streets.
But such corners, insisted Dona Georgina, were becoming harder and harder to find. For twenty minutes my hostess listed the now familiar litany of complaints:
"We could not fight the Indians in 1961," she said. "They were too many. Goa was a small place and could not defend itself. Even today we are only one million people. What can we do against 900 million Indians? But their seizure of Goa was an act of force. The majority here were opposed to the Indian invasion. That was why they had to come with their army, their air force and their navy. That day we all cried bitterly. It was the end of the good old days."
Dona Georgina brought out a small handkerchief and dabbed her eyes: "In fact, since 1961 we've had two invasions," she sniffed. "First it was the Indians. They plundered Goa: cut down our forests and took away our woods. Their politicians created havoc. Then after that it was the turn of the hippies. Disgusting. That's what those people were. Dees-gusting. All that nudism. And sexual acts: on the beach, on the roads- even in Panjim. Panjim! Imagine: kissing in public, and I don't know what else. Dees-gusting."
The previous afternoon I had seen a little of what remained of Goa's once vibrant hippy community. Here instead of the rusting Volkswagens of Fontainhas, a line of Enfield Bullet motorbikes were parked beneath the palm trees. The weekly Anjuna flee market was packing up as I arrived: the German Holy Man was returning his stock of Hindu charms to his bag while under the next palm tree a Mexican bootlegger was putting his remaining cans of imported lager back into his knapsack. On the dunes by the shore, a bonfire was roaring, and what appeared to be a topless six-a-side female football team- an odd sight anywhere in the world, but an astonishing one in India- were kicking a ball around. To one side, another group of bangled backpackers were cheering them on while passing a 10 inch joint from hand to hand.

In the sixties, Anjuna Beach had been the goal of every self-respecting hippy in Asia. From Hampstead and Berlin, from the barricades of Paris to the opium dens of San Fransisco, streams of tie-dyed teenagers crossed Asia to reach this shore and make love on the breakers. Whole nomad communities formed around the beaches: Anjuna, Chapora, Colva and Calangute, previously backwaters, barely known even to the sophisticates in Panjim, became mantras on the lips of fashion-conscious acid-heads across Europe and the U.S..
But in time, as the Sixties turned into the long hangover of the Seventies, most of the hippies either died of overdoses or went home. The young who come today are mostly students, generally a pretty affluent middle-class bunch who in due course will no doubt go home, cut off their poney tails and become accountants. More recently there have been the Russians, the Israelis, the techno-trancers and wave upon wave of Northern European package tourists, broiling like lobsters in the sun of Baga beach. Only very few of the genuine die-hard flower children of '67 still remain. Some have become very rich- it doesn't take much imagination to work out what trade their fortunes have come from- but most of these Stayer's On are good natured old freaks who grow their own, flap around in flared denim, hold forth on dragon lines, the Gaia theory and world harmony, and make ends meet by selling chocolate hash brownies, aromatherapy oils and Indian waistcoats to the backpackers. This fossilised relic of Haight Ashbury is pretty tame stuff, but you would never guess this talking to Dona Georgina:
"Of course it's because of drugs that their behaviour is like it is," hissed my hostess.
"Disgusting people. Drugs and sexual acts and I don't know what else. I don't know which is worse: those hippies or our modern Indian politicians. The Portuguese wouldn't have allowed either…"
Dona Georgina sipped her tea defiantly: "Mr. Salazar would have known what to do with those hippies. He wouldn't have let them behave the way they did. He knew how to sort out people like that."
The old lady took me around the house. She showed me the great ballroom where they held the last ball in 1936 and the sunken cloister where she grew all the essential ingredients for her kitchen- chilies and asparagus, coconut and lemon grass, tea rose, papaya and balsam.
"Despite the hippies and the politicians you seem at least to have maintained your house," I said looking around at the succession of perfectly preserved colonial Portuguese rooms surrounding us.
"Thanks to hard work," said Dona Georgina. "Hard labour I might call it. I'm currently fighting twenty-five law suits in an effort to keep the family property intact. That's right: twenty-five of them. Then there are the monkeys: big monkeys who jump on the roof and try to tear it apart. And as for preparing for the Monsoon rains: it's worse than a wedding. The amount of work: checking the drains, making sure nothing leaks... But let me tell you this: it is my duty so to do. It is my duty to my ancestors, to myself and to society."
We ended up in front of the ancient oratoria: a cupboard-like object which opened up like a tabernacle to reveal ranks of devotional images, crucifixes, icons and flickering candles. There every day, twice a day, the household met up to say the rosary. On the wall beside it, Dona Georgina had hung a drawing of the Holy Family.
"I drew it myself," she explained, seeing where I was looking. "The baby is Jesus and the lamb that he is feeding symbolises Humanity. The old lady is St. Anne, Jesus's grandmama. All the ancient families of Goa have St. Anne as their patron saint."
Dona Georgina fell silent, leaving the last phrase hanging in the air:
"It's entirely through St. Anne's intercession and God's protection that this house is standing and that I am still alive. People always ask me: 'Living alone you must have someone to look after you. Who is it?' To which I reply: 'God Almighty, Jesus Christ and St. Anne.'
"And young man. Let me tell you this. Between them they are doing a very good job."

* * *

For Dona Georgina, as for much of her generation, class and community, the idea of the Goan Catholics inhabiting a Portuguese island in an alien India was the official story, almost indeed the Gospel. Yet you don't have to scratch very far beneath the surface to find a much more complex and interesting reality. For while the Catholic elite of Goa may like to imagine and present themselves as a beached European minority, in reality they are a minority shot through and through with Hindu and Indian customs, and still faithful to the traditions of their pre-conversion ancestors.

I first became aware of this at the temple of Kamakshi near Shirodha. It was while looking around this celebrated shrine that I noticed a separate entrance to the sanctuary, leading off to the left of the main shrine. While most of the pilgrims visiting the Goddess did darshan facing the goddess down the main axis of the temple, a smaller stream of devotees were approaching the deity from the left hand side, and were attended separately by a different Brahmin. I asked one of the priests, an old man in his eighties, who was sitting cross legged at the back of the shrine, why this was.
"That is the special entrance for the Catholics," he replied.
"Catholics visiting a Hindu temple?"
"Of course. All the people who the Portuguese converted still know that this is their deity. They believe in her, and know the power of the Goddess."
"Do many of them come?"
"Much less than before," he replied. "I was ten years old when I started here in 1934. In those days they used to come in very large numbers. At the beginning of the fishing season the Christian fishermen still come in their hundreds to ask for a big catch and to seek the protection of the deity. But their padres preach against this practice, and now they only come secretly, in ones and twos. These days we only get perhaps twenty-five or thirty a week. Except on a new moon day, when we still get quite