16 Jan: Colva, Goa. JOANITA (ROSY) FERNANDES (Born 1926). Wife of late Antonio Marcus Fernandes. Mother of Maria/Alfred (London). Grandmother of Adrian and Brian. Funeral on 18th Jan. Our Lady of Merces Church, Colva.

Francisco Joao Da Costa, died at the young age of 41, probably broken-hearted, derided as he was by Goans of his time. To me, he is probably the greatest writer Goa has ever produced. Ismael Gracias, that doyen of Goan intelligentsia compared him to Mark Twain; his sardonic pen spilling onto paper, to create a genre which unfortunately died with him and has never again been taken up with the same type of incisiveness and skill. Francisco, came into the limelight in 1890s, writing a column Notas a lapis, for O Ultramar, a newspaper floated by Bernardo Francisco Da Costa, in Margao. On the face of it, it was a humorous sketch of life in a fictional Goan town called Breda but between the lines Francisco's sterling pen sketched a scathing, unrelenting dissection of our Goan society at the turn of the century; their superficial obsession with all things Portuguese, their caste pretensions which none could assign to either the good grace of education nor the veracity of lineage, the vacuity of their thought, the brittleness of their lives, fragile and insulated from anything that was real or which mattered.

One of the characters Francisco crafted in his seminal book, Jacob e Dulce, was that of a priest, Father Antonio Dantas, the pa-tio of the house who looks after the administrative affairs and assumes his role as the patriarch of the household. Antonio Dantas, an avaricious man devoid of any principle, whose only delight in life was material acquisition, causing distress to others and having a somewhat unexplained relationship with the spinsterly Dona Dorotea, is an unforgettable character, whose villainous ways though caricatured are easily recognizable amongst our clergy. It was rumoured at the time that Francisco drew his characters from real-life families in Margao.He denied doing so, claiming instead: "I simply described the ridiculous customs that prevail in the Indo-Portuguese society, and to do so I had to create certain characters with the vices and customs most in evidence amongst our families, characters found all over Goa and amongst all castes."

As expected, Francisco was pilloried by Goan society, although many accepted the ugly truth of his depictions. The rejection deeply wounded him, leaving him to remark: "I should have been lauded. I was not. Instead, I was subjected to a torrent of invectives." Francisco today is all the more relevant to Goans than he might have been in the 1890s, for more than a 100 years later, we Goans are as wary as ever of holding up mirrors and being naked in front of ourselves. We are so afraid of criticism; we want to live in a make-believe world of singing mandos, eating sorpotel and hanging on to the last vestiges of an adopted culture. But culture is a dynamic, living organism, which cannot and should not become stultified. It must be in constant motion, in a state of evolution. Cultures are the outpouring of collective soul-searching.

Our society cannot be held hostage to the self-appointed custodians of culture and religion. Our lives cannot come to a standstill if a Calvert Gonsalves makes a CD allegedly about the shenanigans of the local parish priest or if Subodh Kerkar has a liberal interpretation of Ganesha.

Imagine for a moment if, in 1896, the literary work of Francisco Joao Da Costa had been destroyed, burnt in the municipal gardens of Margao in protest. Goa would have lost the voice of one of her most profound social commentators and that much more impoverished intellectually. Every time, we protest against freedom of expression we are in fact starving ourselves of the very thought that nourishes our society, we are driving ourselves backwards and all because we don't like what we see in the mirror when we are naked.