[Reader-list] Old People's Garden

[Dilip D'Souza -- Sarai]

May 10 2006

Dear All,

Here's one more of my articles about getting to know Bombay's
villages. This is about Matharpacady, in Mazagon. Again, I'm going to
be trying to get this, or a slightly modified version, published. Your
thoughts, as always, welcome.

cheers,
dilip.

---


Old People's Garden
-------------------
Dilip D'Souza


The cliches come easy. The village time forgot. The village that was.
Old world air. Time stands still. That sort of thing. When in its
life-cycle does a place, a locality, make the transition to cliche?

In Matharpacady, it's easy to wonder. Parts of this little village --
well, it's just one street, really -- look like they must have done
for generations. Other parts have unfinished towering raw concrete
hulks that erupt from the old world surroundings, that will one day
contain several flats. When in its life-cycle does a place start
selling out to pressures from builders with rupees in their eyes?

But let's begin with the etymology thing. The name comes from
"mhatara" (old man) and "pakhadi", which may be like "wadi" meaning a
small locality. Or it may not. Nobody could tell me why it had been
named Matharpacady, but in the village, the accepted translation seems
to be "old people's garden". I doubt whoever came up with the name
could have predicted just how appropriate "old people's garden" would
be by the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. I mean no offence to
anyone when I say Matharpacady is now home, largely, to old people.
Like other Catholic enclaves in Bombay, nearly every family here has
seen its sons and daughters emigrate West, or effectively West, to
Australia and New Zealand.

So when you visit a home here, you might catch a whiff of longing in
the air, for the children lost to opportunity and affluence abroad.

89-year-old St John (pronounced "Sinjin" by one and all) Valladares is
lucky. His youngest of four, Julius, did not emigrate like his brother
and sisters did. He is a captain in the merchant navy, and thus
travels a lot, but home is still their Matharpacady bungalow, "Keep
Sake". And Julius has three energetic young sons, whom you are likely
to meet riding bicycles about or playing a mean game of football. Not
too many other homes here have both a son and grandchildren.

When we stroll through, we find St John sitting in a chair on the
porch, smiling genially at us. He is so visibly friendly that we can't
resist stopping for a chat; it ends up being two long chats, over two
different days.

The first time, about ten minutes after we meet, St John scurries off
inside and emerges minutes later with a file. "Here", he says with a
guffaw, "this is what keeps me busy these days!" There are 40 or so
pages in the file. They are covered in an ornate, slanted hand with
great big "M"s and "A"s. This is something of a labour of love. St
John has been putting down his memories of the Matharpacady Club, 100
years old in 2006 and a place that he has patronized, even nurtured,
for a good fraction of that time. With a measure of quiet pride, he
reads for me the short speech he gave at a function the Club held to
thank him for his years of devotion, written out and filed among those
pages. There's also minutiae from Club elections, Christmas balls and
... snooker tournaments.

>From St John's recounting, snooker has been the main pursuit at the
Club since at least 1922. That was when it acquired its "first
fullsized billiard table" and put it in an outhouse offered to the
Club by a favourite son of the Bombay Catholic community, the freedom
fighter Kaka Joseph Baptista. The limited space for this fullsized
table, writes St John, "necessitated [the] use of a short cue." The
table was disposed of in 1924, when the outhouse reverted to the
Baptistas. But another one came their way in 1926, as did the space to
house it, and over the years since, the Matharpacady Club became a hub
for the game.

One of the city's most venerable tournaments -- the Open Handicap
Snooker Tournament for the Sushil R Ruia Challenge Cup -- is held here
annually (as also billiards tournaments). It has attracted -- and
probably been a launchpad for -- "some of the best ever players India
produced"; and considering that some of them were world champions, you
could say "best ever players the world produced" and not be too far
from the truth. And while not quite in that class, St John was no mean
player himself. He produces a sheaf of photographs, among which is one
of him -- slender, dapper -- leaning over to take a shot, his eyes
fixed like lasers on the ball he means to hit: semifinal, 1956.

The Club, and Bombay's Catholics going to the Club: how familiar,
almost cliched, is that? This is one reason that, for years, Catholics
were disproportionately represented among our top sports men and
women. Well, at least in hockey which they learned by dodging through
narrow lanes, and in billiards and snooker played in the Club. This
one, and others.

Yet of course, the Catholic Clubs also restricted membership. In
Matharpacady, writes St John, membership to the club "was initially
open to Catholic residents" of the village. Later, "it became
necessary to be more accommodating": "non-residents of Mazagon and ...
non-Catholics" were admitted in limited numbers. But they were only
"associate" members, meaning they could use the Club, but had no vote
and could not serve on the Managing Committee.

Had they been more accommodating still right from the start, would we
have seen more champion players from more regions and more religions
in more sports?

Questions, unanswerable imponderable questions.

Then again, here are some of those "best ever players" who played and
won at the Matharpacady Club snooker and billiards tournaments: Percy
Edwards, Kenny Durham, Om Agarwal, Babu Kanti, Thomas Monteiro, Shyam
Shroff, Ritesh Shah, Howard Oliver, Ashok Shandilya, Yasin Merchant
and Michael Ferreira. Over the years, quite a spectrum.

So after reading about, hearing about, this brief Matharpacady snooker
history, I knew I wanted to take a look at the Club itself. From St
John's house, we squeeze past the chapel, up and then down a few
steps, then down a long slope. On the right, at the bottom ... the
rambling old building looks like it is about to fall down, and clearly
I'm not the only person who thinks so. For the walls and balconies --
through the floor of some of those balconies, we can see rusting,
crumbling beams -- are held up by sturdy bamboo poles. It looks like
they are the only reason the balconies are still there, that the
edifice still stands. The door under the "Matharpacady Club" sign is
locked. But somebody emerges from another quarter of the rambling
building -- people actually live here -- to tell us the bamboos are
preparatory to the repairs the Maharashtra Housing and Development
Authority (MHADA) is about to make to the building.

We stand before the Club for a few seconds. Not too near the walls,
because looking at it, I am actually afraid of getting closer. From St
John Valladares's handwritten account, from all he says, I understand
how intimate a part of Matharpacady's community this clubhouse has
been over the years. Yet looking at it, I cannot help think how
appropriate that name -- "old people's garden" -- is to this club as
well.

They still hold the tournaments here; they still hold a 9-day "Feast
of the Cross" ending on May 1 at the Matharpacady chapel. Yet this is
a place that time forgot. In an odd, wistful way, it's also a place
youth forgot.