I almost got caught. The keyword is ‘almost’. Which means, I did not get caught in the act, I almost got caught. The wife stared at me. Stern, cold. Unsure whether she had heard right.

She had heard me, I thought. I was going to get it in the neck, even though the words were not intended for her. They were there, the words I mean, coming out of my mouth before I even knew what was happening.

“I want pork,” I had said, firmly, with just the right amount of resolve and conviction. With the ideological commitment and zeal of a good cook. Even though I was burdened with not being recognised as one by his own family. Said like I was adding just the right amount of ‘amsol‘ to the meat, so that it gives off the perfect importance to the tang, releasing a short, sharp sourness that compliments the piquant addition of browning garlic.

And adding, of course, to the thick, creamy sauce forming around the onion — chopped thick, but now happily disintegrating after being fried in pure, cold-pressed coconut oil, with choice fatty bits of cubed pork that now form the bedrock of the recipe. And of course, one must never forget, the fat Goan green chillies, de-seeded, cut into slivers, with maybe two or three green peppercorns smothered in a pestle with some curry leaves and tiny strips of ginger — all of which have now mysteriously disappeared.  Enough to get the salivation going one could say…

Instead, I get: “Did you say you were going to Goa to eat pork?”

I knew that tone of voice. I could easily be told to keep the knapsack on my back while I hit the road. This wife was dangerous. The culprit, of course, who prompted my comment and my connection with my Goan culture was rolling on his back under her chair, oblivious to my pain.

“Why are you going to Goa?” the hairy beast had asked, making me feel like I was being interrogated. I reacted like a true Goan. The wife hadn’t heard him. I felt like a fool, talking to myself, and that too, loudly, like I was yelling at a resurrected dog. I felt sheepish, like a slab of nice boneless mutton, beautifully marbled, partially slit in two, just waiting to be smeared and stuffed with a Goan ‘Cafreal’ masala, giving it my famous De Souza ‘twist’ with a Mediterranean feel. I am not cribbing, but the only ones allowed to savour my recipe are my 86-year-old Maharashtrian father-in-law and his 90-year-old cousin.  When they visit, the three of us lick our lips and say mildly uncomplimentary things about the women in our lives who put dietary restrictions on us. 

“Hey ma-an,” Monsieur Bernard Koko said, chortling in glee, “the lady’s just like everybody else ma-an, she wasn’t born in Africa like you, she can’t hear me speak! But she can hear you ma-an so what will she think huh, seeing you talk to the floor, you be careful…”

I don’t need this at my age. While a re-born African hound carried on a natter centred around the diet for a carnivore, the wife, unaware that her once favourite dog had come alive to purportedly help me in my old age, shifted gear, foot jamming the accelerator to the floorboards. The mutt laughed, fit to burst, while she told me what the doctor had said about cholesterol and elaborated on the links that the daughter had sent me, duly copied to her, listing for men in their late sixties the evils of eating fried pork…

“Your son eats pork,” I told her feebly, “he loves it, he slobbers when he sniffs it cooking on the stove…”

“He’s not in his late sixties,” she said. The dog rolled around on the floor some more. My Goan grandfather Camillo’s clock struck the first of the seven chimes that would send the wife scampering to the lift and off to work.

“I am not going to eat the pork,” I tell her, “I just want to cook it, it’s an integral part of my Goan culture.” My words stuttered to a halt. She bristled, gave me her ‘new age’ look. “You’ve made me late,” she said in a tone of voice that made the dog hold his sides.

“Hey ma-an,” he said between snorts of laughter, “You’re not allowed to eat pork?”

I want to tell both of them that old Camillo lived to the ripe old age of ninety, and had his tot of feni every single day when this same clock, in front of them, chimed once in the afternoon and seven times after the angelus had long been sung in the evening. Except on Sundays of course, when, at the same times on Sundays, he doubled his measure. And he loved his pork. His wife, the lovely Maura, couldn’t cook to save either her or his life, but their cook, the fat, affable Therese — named after a saint who was ‘de-recognised’ by the Vatican for reasons Therese  could never fathom — could cook like she was born to it, and her ‘sorpotel’, famous in the whole village, was always served to Camillo every Sunday without fail. And, on Monday mornings as well when it would be reheated and served to him with a perfectly rounded half-fried egg. The ritual was to begin spearing the soft yolk with a large bite-sized piece of ‘poyo’, the dough, at night, that had risen with toddy not yeast.

Giving her my Goan history would have been pushing it. The dog laughs, I sigh, the lady starts her list again.

“Laptop and charger, phone and charger, wallet, ATM card, take some decent looking clothes, make sure your t-shirts don’t have holes in them, cut your hair please you look like a savage, trim your beard, take something to read. You’re only allowed one small beer a day, don’t even think of rum, you hear?”

I follow her to the door and watch her get into the lift to make sure she’s leaving. The dog laughs. “Make sure you have your bus ticket with you,” the wife tells me. The lift reaches down.

“Are you planning to come to Goa with me?” I ask Koko, the minute the lift door opens, then closes.

“No ma-an,” he replies, “I can’t, I’ve got my eyes on this great lady-dog, dark, almost black bushy hair and a tail that can stop traffic…you remember Tina Turner?” His beady eyes roll around like he’s going to have a seizure. “No ma-an,” he says, “not interested in coming to Goa, although I wouldn’t mind some roast pork — the skin crackling, glazed.”

A part of me feels bad leaving him behind. “We can go and watch a football match,” I tell him, “there’s always a good football match happening in Goa, the best football played in India.”

He laughs in my face, a cruel laugh. “Not possible ma-an,” he says, “the best football is played in Africa!” I know what’s coming. “The best, ma-an, is Nigeria who will dance their way to winning Moscow 2018, and then there’s Egypt, Morocco, Senegal and Tunisia – in that order ma-an! And you’re talking to me about – what’s this place? Goa, you’re joking, right? No ma-an, I’ll take your roast pork from Goa but leave football to us Nigerians.”

He leaves me on the landing, speechless in anger, as he saunters down the stairs. “Football in Goa,” he sneers. “Get me some roast pork”.  I walk back in, close the door, make sure I don’t forget my ticket to Goa. 

*********

I am hardly two days in Goa when Koko’s words reverberate in my head. Not football, but pork and other good things. One evening, I caught a bus and headed off for a football match at the stadium in Margao. Pork was not on my mind. From the bus window heading to Margao, normally, I’d catch at least four football matches in makeshift grounds in the fallow rice fields at the side of the road leading northwards, with at least fifty people, old guys like me, watching the game. I always felt like stopping the bus and getting off to watch the game. The grounds at the side were the same, almost unchanged over the years – soft, sandy and dusty except that I guess all the kids used sexy football boots and jerseys with the colours of Brazil, Argentina, Portugal and Manchester United with the names of Messi, Neymar and Ronaldo printed across them. But things had changed. 

The old guys like me still came to the makeshift grounds to kill time, except they weren’t coming for football they were watching T-20 cricket played with a tennis ball. Maybe Koko had a point, I thought to myself.

From the bus stand in Margao, I walked to the stadium, taking the road through the vegetable, fish and meat market. Past the vegetable sellers, the shops selling chicken were doing roaring business, as were those selling pork.

When I passed the chicken and pork outlets, I found myself in the middle of what seemed like an agitation outside the 10 or so shops selling beef. In fact, it looked like I had walked into the middle of an agitation that jumbled up the demographic of those selling and eating beef. The predominantly Muslim butchers in the Margao market sold beef that was bought and eaten predominantly by Catholics. Right next to the beef shops were shops of Catholic butchers selling pork and the spicy, red-hot sausages now known throughout the country and mostly eaten by Catholics.

Now, thanks to the ‘cattle protectors’ guarding roads coming into Goa with their beady eyes on the cattle trade, and the Goan slaughterhouse not big enough to handle Goa’s supply, beef had gone off the shelves.

People in the market were angry. Mutton was already more expensive than most could afford at Rs 450 a kilo and now overnight the prices of chicken and pork had increased. Everybody had forgotten that there has never been a communal riot involving Goan Muslim and Catholic communities on the issue of Goan Catholics buying, selling, cooking and savouring pork.

I bring matters back to football. I spot one of the men I used to buy my pork from. We wish each other. “Do you need some pork?” he asks as he turns to go back to his shop. “The wife and kids have banned me from eating it,” I tell him. He laughs. “My wife too,” he says, “old age problems, I only sell now…but I cheat, they can’t stop me from eating my ‘amsol’ with a drink…they think I don’t have rights or what?”

I see the Muslim butcher I used to get my tenderloin from. “Don’t worry,” he tells me, “the beef will come back, we have been eating it for centuries…”

“Exactly,” I tell him.

“Who are these people to stop us from eating beef? We will go on the street and protest.”

The butcher is a football freak, I’ve bumped into him at the stadium. “You don’t have work,” I say to him, “let’s go watch the football game.”

“Football,” he snorts, “you call that football these days? A circus is better, at least you can laugh because of the clowns. Go, waste your money…you know what the tickets are? More than beef even! Go, see and come back and tell me…”

I head to the stadium, in my head cooking an imaginary ‘sorpotel’. As I reach the main gate and see the queue I wonder what I will find about Goan football that I can proudly proclaim to Koko.