I don't remember Aunt Veronica clearly. We had met once at a family wedding. As her voice trails through the telephone line, I try to imagine a resemblance to my father's side of the family; tall, fair with astonishingly sharp cheek-bones.

"You know we spent so much time at your grandmother's house. It was too far for us to walk home after school, so Manuel and I used to go to your grandmother's house. There was a handicapped relative who lived there as well." She tells me.

The Manuel she is talking about is her brother, Manuel (Boyer) Aguiar. My father remembers his time at our ancestral house all too often. As a young boy he would make up plays in his mind and enact them on a makeshift stage. Having a celebrity in the family is a strange affair. It doesn't take away from the ordinariness of his life.

Goans don't come from a culture of writing biographies. I don't think our writers and artistes ever thought about documenting their own lives. Somehow that would go against the grain of humility. A few sketchy biographies have been recreated in recent times, but in actual fact we know all too little about our writers or our tiatrist. What thought processes went into their creations? What forces shaped their world-view? What vagaries of nature humbled them into submission or blessed them with epiphanies?

The tiatrist's creativity gestated in the bowels of poverty. He understood the little man or who Somerset Maugham would have called the flotsam and the jetsom. He was the voice for the reideiro, the mundkar, the poder, the cusiner, the impoverished widow and the orphaned child of Goan villages. At the tip of his pen, the disenfranchised, the powerless and the ridiculous found redemption. His protagonists were not empowered people who brought change by discovering humanity in themselves. Rather they were disempowered people who wrought change through struggle and bringing these lessons to those in power. So we come from a rich tradition of grass-roots social revolution, however subdued that voice might have been or whatever opaque silence it might have been met with.

Not only does the tiatrist's life remain undocumented but early scripts of so many tiartres are also lost to us. It never occurred to Goans that the playwright too was part of literature. The absence of these plays is almost like the amputation of one arm of our literary heritage.

And the loss of heritage is always a lamentable condition for in that loss, we lose a definition of ourselves. As for me, I've got to plan a weekend at Aunt Veronica's house. Soon