George Menezes

Have you ever felt a hollowness in the centre of your chest? A gigantic emptiness? I mean physically. As if a living organism, a preciousness had suddenly taken flight leaving a void full of unbearable pain, the kind that  even Thecla and I have not experienced during the pain filled days since she started her dialysis in April of this traumatic year.

 

I feel that pain now, right here as I write

 

My mother saved Francis for long years with her prayers especially during his courageous and life threatening march to liberate Goa.

 

My Dad saved him and made him strong by not allowing “grace marks” to condone his academic failure although he was Under Secretary Education at the time Francis appeared for his Matriculation exam.

 

Ada, my sister saved him by harnessing all the power of her faith and converting it into beautifully candid and frank letters that she alone could write.

 

Armida my youngest sister who was Dean of Sion Hospital  saved him by her warm and competent presence in his every illness, big or small.

 

Louis, Ignatius and Lenny my brothers were there for him materially some rare times, siblingly most of the time.

 

And I the eldest, the “morgado” the loved one of the family?

 

Let me take you to a time when as kids we found ourselves playing on the edge of the river at “Vitagem”, a pier off the Mandovi river in our ancestral island village in Goa.

 

 We had come to watch the arrival of the “gazolina”, the deisel engine driven boat that made its daily trip to Panjim and back.

 

Francis dared the river as he dared everything in life that were obstacles to his road less traveled on his journey of self discovery.

 

He dared and he slipped and he fell into the swirling waters of the Mandovi. As he was being carried away I grabbed his outstretched hand and pulled him ashore.

 

Many years later, differences of opinion led to a slanging match between Francis and me which was never resolved and ended quickly when my mother started the family rosary earlier than usual.

 

He asked me later, very seriously, whether I had ever regretted saving his life, denying the great Goan river its genuine victim?

 

How could I? Could I deny the family, the community and the nation he so loved, years and years of stellar and unaccountable contribution?

 

Could I let a mere river take him away when the waters of the Arabian sea were inadequate to embrace him and  the mountains of the Sayadiri range could not prevent him from planting the Indian flag on the soil of Portugese governed Goa ?

 

Francis was and will always remain an enigma. His towering scholarship was at times so childlike. His brilliance was often misunderstood for stubbornness and for inflexibility by pygmy brothers like me who found him uncompromising in his goals and yet gentle when he tried hard to “suffer fools gladly”

 

Could I have been able to deny his community and his beloved mother land a maverick genius who gave a new meaning and purpose to sensitivity training and the holistic development of people?

 

A dreamer of his own complex dreams and a ruthless and uncanny interpreter of the dreams of hundreds of disciples who grew tall and strong and hoped in their great love for him that his “guruship” would never end

 

They were right. His reluctant guruship will never end.

 

As we watch in utter amazement, two yellow butterflies settle on two sides of his bier. I hear one say “What manner of men are these who see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower?”

 

“I will tell you” says the other butterfly.

 

 

 

“The poet Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy wrote about them”

WE are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;–
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample a kingdom down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.