Of Aunties and all that ... The end of a Bombay Goan era

OF AUNTIES AND ALL THAT: THE RISE AND FALL OF A BOMBAY GOAN ERA

Roland Francis
roland.francis at gmail.com

If Bombay in its post-Raj era had been a relic of British
rule in India, growing up in the city, we knew nothing of it,
or maybe just didn't care. To us youthful Goans, it was a
place where our parents had emigrated to and where we were
born.

Correctly said, we didn't even call ourselves
Goans. We were labeled makapaos, just as there were
labels for everybody else. The Parsis were called
bawas, the Sindhis papads, the Maharashtrians
ghatis, the Gujaratis gujjus, the Sikhs surds and
the Anglos payday kings.

If Byculla, Mazagon, Colaba, Girgaum, Mahim, Bandra, Chembur,
Malad and Borivali were Goan kingdoms, then Dhobitalao was
surely the capital of them all. It was the fountainhead of
the Goan in Bombay and the place where no matter where you
lived, you always knew someone there.

So it was no surprise what happened when Morarji Desai of
'pisskey' fame (he banned whiskey but believed in 'auto-urine
therapy') decided in his Gujarati bania wisdom that the
Bombayite needed to abstain from liquor. It was in Dhobitalao
that the legend of the Goan Aunty was born.

Dhobitalao was the area which had the most Goans per square
inch. Perhaps historian Dr. Teresa Albuquerque -- the sister
of editor Frank Moraes, and aunt of Dom Moraes -- may explain
why, but it could have been due to the kudds or village clubs
locating there.

It was the Goan heartbeat with the Sonapur lane its aorta.
Though mainly lower-class Goan in population, it was a
vibrant neighborhood comparable to a bustling village church
area on a Sunday morning.

If you were an uncharitable traveler, you may have compared
it to Warsaw's Jewish ghetto. There were the similar winding
streets and narrow lanes we called gullies. Hardly any dead
ends and, if you knew the place well, even a battalion-sized
force could not encircle you.

So, Dhobitalao became the Goan Aunty's liquor heartland.

A place where any drunken Goan's wife could at last find the
solution to her financial woes. Don't forget that although
Bombay's Goan community was solid burgher in it's work ethic
-- with more than it's share of educators, doctors, lawyers,
high ranking police and army officers who made their name
throughout the country -- these elite Goans formed the
fringes who lived mostly in places I have described above,
outside of Dhobitalao.

The core was the underclass of barely educated and
underemployed Goan labour, a goodly chunk of which
lived in Dhobitalao. Of this, quite a few did
nothing more in life than hit the bottle and
consequently their families suffered. Whether it
was the frustrations of a city or the longing for
their native Goan village, it was difficult to tell.

Not only the Goan community, but the rest of Bombay took
their Goan Aunties to heart. Bombay was a bon vivant place
then. The music scene, the advertising crowd, the business
community, the religious groups -- all had the need of a
tipple when the occasion arose. And such occasions were many.

Give a man the freedom of a bottle and he may choose to
ignore it. Take the choice away from him and he will spare no
effort to drink when he can.

It started out with a few Aunties allotting a small room in
their house to known musicians and fellow village seafarers
living in nearby kudds, to sit, have a few drinks and thereby
earn a little income. The moonshine was bought from East
Indian Christians living in the suburbs, who distilled it in
their large backyards mostly in Bandra and Borivali and
transported it to the city in rubber packs. The kind you fill
with hot water and use as a compress on your aching back.

Overripe fruit was used as the ingredient and the resultant
distillate had a rather palatable flavor, while giving you
the necessary high. Few Goan musicians could blow or play
without this nectar and few Goan college professors could
unwind without it.

The police took a rather benign view of the whole
thing in the beginning. Police stations were headed
by Anglo Indians, Parsis and Jews. It was not
unusual for, say Inspector Mistry, to caution an
enthusiastic aunty that she should tone down her
operations to no more than a few bottles, enough to
care for her family with as less disturbance to the
neighbors as possible.

However as Aunty's services to the thirsting Bombayman spread
beyond the original confines, the Aunty, like any good
corporation, expanded her market share. Except that beyond
word of mouth, she had no need of any marketing.

Liquor needs went beyond what amateur operations could supply
and the channels expanded to South Indians operating giant
vats in the marshes and vast hutments of Dharavi, Asia's
biggest slum. Using, at times, groups of lepers to carry the
booze to avoid police searches.

They used battery-grade sulphates commonly called battery
powder to distill it faster, and spoiled rice and sugarcane
molasses instead of overripe fruits. Police saw an
opportunity of their own, in this expansion process. They
made fortunes from extorting the Aunties and their suppliers,
though extortion might be the wrong word here. It was all a
peaceful business process. The cops got a feel of Aunty's
turnover and put a proportionate 'toll' on it.

Business was good for everyone -- the Aunties, the cops and
the consumers. A win-win situation as we call it today.

Village socials, dances and weddings were no longer the muted
occasions they became when Prohibition was initially
introduced to the city. Aunties spread everywhere and no
place in Bombay was more than a little walking distance from
the nearest speakeasy.

With competition the business evolved. The drinker
needed some visual stimulation and younger and
fulsome Aunties began wearing low-cut revealing
blouses and throwing flirting looks and
invitations. The older ones substituted with
putting their frisky nubile daughters to serve the
clientele with strict instructions on how far to go
and advice on how to further relationships when
they encountered eligible and responsible regulars.

Many an Aunty's daughter was married off to a Times of India
reporter or an upcoming schoolteacher or even a prosperous
businessman's son. The Uncle was completely out of the
picture. He was either told to get out of the house by 5 pm
and sleep at a relative's, or better still he was packed off
to Goa with a regular remittance following.

Just as Goans prospered with a stint in the Gulf countries or
earlier than that, in Africa, the Aunties too prospered. Most
were possessed of shrewdness and spent their money educating
their children and buying flats and homes in the suburbs.

Bandra was a favorite. In fact I was dating a very beautiful
girl of Sophia College which was then the St Xavier's College
female equivalent, who went on to become a medical doctor and
who unbeknownst to me, was an Aunty's daughter. The day of
enlightening came when she invited me over to her house in
Dhobitalao quite early in the evening, but not early enough
to discover (to her chagrin) a few customers straggling in.

She avoided me after that, though having a rich Aunty as a
mother in law would not have found disfavor with me.

Prohibition spanned more than one generation and an entire
Goan culture encompassed it. Tiatrs were staged around
Aunty's lives or with her financial assistance. Booze was
supplied to the tiatrist if he was good and his presence in
the joint would increase the clientele.

Bands would not venture to the show without a nip sized
bottle in their inside pocket and this helped the composition
as well as the quality of the music. Many a hot song would
not have been birthed without this necessary ingredient.

My father had a good friend who after liberation went from
Bombay to a police officer's career in Goa. There was an
occasion when he had to come back to the city to arrest and
take back a criminal who had fled here after committing a
crime in Bardez. Having found and handed the felon to the
Byculla Police Station for temporary custody, he came over to
where we lived nearby and whispered an invitation in my
father's willing ear to celebrate his success at a nearby Aunty's.

By this time the Prohibition Branch had been added to the
Bombay Police and they had a habit of raiding speakeasies at
their peak hour of business. Both my father and Blasco, his
friend, were trapped along with the 50 or so other customers.

Mum had suggested to them that they drink at home, but they
ignored her advice. So when they did not return at a late
hour, I was sent to see what the problem was. I was too young
to visit such joints then but I was the usual smart Bombay
kid and in no time I found out from word on the street that a
certain place had been raided.

Walking, I came across my father and Blasco coolly returning
from the other direction. It transpired that while the
clientele were lined up for questioning, Blasco could have
stepped out of the line and revealed he was from Goa Police
but he feared that he might be arrested instead of released
and would lose his job as a Police Officer breaking the law.
However when his turn came he decided to reveal it and was
told as a brother officer to walk away and take his
companion, my father, with him.

When I came of drinking age myself, I was a regular visitor
at Cardozo's joint in Mazagaon. Peter Cardozo was in a much
senior league than the biggest Aunty. He employed trucks to
bring commercially bottled feni and naval rum from Goa to
Mazagon and my favorite was the Old Barrel brand which he
sold for 20 rupees, the same price as the rum.

The feni was good, better than today's Big Boss and I
considered myself too haughty to drink the usual country
stuff. I was one of Cardozo's VIPs as I used to bring my
friends almost every weekend and was a big spender.

For us, the all-you-can eat fresh Bombay Ducks fried in
turmeric outside his doors was a complimentary from Cardozo
who was a young mid-30s entrepreneur.

One day while relaxing in this manner with three others,
suddenly the word 'raid' was heard. Leaving the bottle and
the tasty Bombay Ducks, we ran to the nearest window that let
out into a side street, along with the other customers and
jumped from a height of about six feet.

Not all of the others were as young, athletic and of the
level of sobriety as we, and a couple of them at least landed
on their bones and started moaning and shouting in pain. We
were not callous boys but we had no wish to remain to help
them when faced with an arrest.

My Mum was a strict nurse and would have given me a
strong Catholic guilt trip of how she had raised
her only child to no good result. We walked back
discretely to the front and saw Cardozo, limbs
akimbo, telling one and all it was a false alarm.
We went back to our places as if nothing had
happened. Cardozo took care of the injured in style,
by brazenly calling an ambulance and paying all the
concerned charges.

When V. P. Naik the new state of Maharashtra Chief Minister
replaced Morarjibhai of the Bombay Province, he relaxed
prohibition. Not only because it had caused lasting harm to
the Bombay public's health and guts but was also because of
the culture of bribery and corruption that was taking root in
the Bombay Police force.

I am sure that being a big grape grower had something to do
with his decision. Beer was now made available and the
government started permitted Country Liquor outlets, selling
brand names like Rocket and Double Ghoda (Twin Horse), which
kicked you much harder than a horse could.

No doubt these liquids had their origins in distilleries
belonging to Naik and his sugar-baron cohorts from the
Vidharbha region of Maharashtra. This gradual relaxation of a
meaningless law sounded the death knell of the Bombay Goan
Aunty. By then she had made her money and she could well say
like Shakespeare 'all's well that ends well'. It was the end
of a Bombay Goan era.

--

Roland Francis is based in Toronto, and wrote this in May
2008. It is to be published in a forthcoming book on Goans in
Bombay, covering the 1930s to the 1970s, currently being
edited by Reena Martins, a feature-writer and journalist
based in India's commercial and media capital.

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