Mensagens de um Brâmane (Portuguese Edition)

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The numerous dimensions of texts, whether oral or written, the circumstances of production, and the contexts of their reception challenged the divisions between centres and peripheries of intellectual influence. This was elaborated in representations that hoped to see institutions linked to the state reorganised according to principles of political economy, rationalisation and productivity. Residual intellectual traditions and institutional formations particular to Portugal continued to be influential, however, even if their legitimacy was being challenged by intellectual currents associated with Britain and northern Europe.

The abandonment of Old Goa by everyone but the regular clergy and those connected to the Arsenal da Marinha occurred between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century. The dismantling and the reuse of building materials and architectural elements and ornaments in the buildings of Panjim was regulated and, in some cases, manufactured anew, and accounts for the virtual disappearance of the urban fabric of Old Goa, including its huge perimeter wall.

The emergence of Panjim reveals the rhetorical function of images of decadence across a century in which a capital was in fact reborn. This rebirth is also significant because the new urban landscape signified a transformed political order within Goa. It was no longer a landscape that by default denoted an absolutist Catholic monarchy committed to evangelising proselytism. Instead, the symbolic connotations to its architecture were the focus of attention for a patrician government trying to expand the participation of civil society within the restricted liberal regime that it represented.

Comparatively, domestic architecture, in particular the multilayered nature of domestic spaces, has received more attention from authors. The nineteenth century saw the construction of numerous Goan Catholic aristocratic houses that changed the rural landscape Carita, ; Sampaio, ; Silveira, This was accompanied by increased significance accorded to surveys, publications and projects by agronomists trained in Lisbon and in British institutions.

A number of engineers, physicians, lawyers and judges were trained in Goa and occupied significant posts in other Portuguese colonies Bastos, ; Faria, , , The creation of the department of public works in reinforced this role, enabling the construction of public facilities and infrastructure in the Indian Ocean territories, from Mozambique to Timor. A similar relationship developed in relation to British territories in the region where educated Goans found institutes of higher education and avenues of employment, while the British colonial state mined the abilities of educated migrants whose training had been financed by a diminished political power.

The capital city became the harbour to which raw resources were transported, just as in Beira and Nacala in Mozambique and in Lobito Angola and Goa. Not only does this account include preexisting cultures of perception and representation in the analysis of the image, but it also indicates how visual culture as a lived practice was transformed when caste rituals were introduced to new forms such as commercial photography. Their publications demonstrate how the history of custom, language, land reform and rebellion could be the subject of knowledge accumulation that was directed to the state but did not always shape state policy Cunha, ; Rivara, ; Souza, ; Xavier, A memorable and extreme version of these was the vituperative writing of Pe.

The discourses of those in authority had been challenged before, but the contestations of official representations and their circulation in print constituted new public arenas. New participants in this arena challenged the linked terrain of knowledge and governance that defined the century. Thus, the English, Hindustani, Konkani, Swahili Vocabulary , which appeared in in Nairobi to assist Kenyans and Indian migrants settled in British East Africa in the previous century, was indifferent as to whether its orthography had met the test of etymological purity with which linguists and educationists were increasingly concerned Bir, However, it simultaneously borrowed representational forms from across genres such as ethnography, orientalist verse, satire, and prose and gave them aesthetic coherence through the novel Rochelle Pinto, In contrast to histories that tended to represent literature as though it was produced exclusively in one language, recent work accounts for a multilingual literary sphere, diglossia and parallel and oppositional literary realms.

Thus, even where the object of study may be the world of Portuguese or Konkani or Marathi writing, such accounts acknowledge the existence of literary work in other languages in use, such as English or French Fernandes, ; Passos, ; Sardesai, Instead, it demands an accounting of kinship structures through which devadasis could claim the name of their patron, of the routes of their capital, and of conceptions of servitude, be it slavery or labour.

This would provide a more dynamic account of how caste and sexual hierarchies and state discourses could be negotiated Arondekar, While legal relations to the temple economy and space and to village land are visible in the realm of Portuguese print, questions of sexuality and slavery remain part of the social legacy that can be known only through interactions, and through oral cultural practices, ritual and festivals Jason Keith Fernandes, Electoral victories and formal associations fit modern categories of political action more comfortably than those lower caste groups who could not represent themselves in these forms.

However, the disappearance of race as a category of difference within indigenous society by the early twentieth century is yet to be explored Chatterjee, ; Guha, As with British colonialism in India, anthropological studies with a focus on the contemporary have revealed how state accounts created dominant categories that limit our understanding of colonial society Siqueira, Ferreira notes that a similar approach to bringing such land under the purview of state policy was attempted in the eighteenth century but may have been disrupted by the political events of the early nineteenth.

It details the history of objects and categories mentioned and gauges the significance of the exhibition in the light of the international trend in showcasing colonial beings and objects for metropolitan audiences. Her tracing of the context of production of these objects helps illuminate the early interpellation of Goa into global discourses linking public exhibitions and industrialisation.

Language associations became vehicles of identity formation providing upper caste intelligentsia with access to state institutions and policy formation. The formation of linguistic states made language the bearer of symbolic value that consolidated dominant identities. While some aspects have been elaborated sufficiently to generate layered critiques and detailed accounts of particular aspects, others still await further exploration that can generate frameworks to enable future work.

While this dossier is restricted to work on Goa, the essays and review indicate how political events and representations in each territory reverberated through Portuguese and British territories in East Africa and the Persian Gulf, and not the least in Portugal itself. The Diocese of Damaun. The Life and Work of Dr. Routledge [1 st ed. Carvalho, Selma , Into the Diaspora Wilderness.

Doctoral Thesis, Taleigaon, University of Goa. Tiatr Academy of Goa. Machado; Duarte Drumond Braga eds. A History of Church Architecture in Goa. Guha, Sumit , Beyond Caste: Kamat, Pratima , Farar Far: Lustosa, Isabel , Insultos impressos: Dayanand Bandodkar and the Rise of the Bahujan in Goa. Orient Blackswan [1 st ed. Pereira, Rui Gomes , Gaunkari: The Old Village Associations , vol. Gomes Pereira, Printwell Press. Translated by Angelo das Neves Souza. Kuala Lumpur City Centre -actually no city centre whatsoever, but that's how the estate developers have named it.

From the canals from where women removed buckets of mangrove smelling mud in the southernmost tip of the Indian Subcontinent we ended up in the world of underground air-conditioned labyrinths linking shopping malls to skyscrapers. The praise to the global city is a lie. By uniting the world under the same signs, the global city flattens the diversity of such a multicultural society as the Malaysian and reduces it to its least common denominator: Now, Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur follow them in substituting the streets by the corridor and the horizon by the skyline.

In the rest of the world, steel and glass erection of the global city expulses the local life. London runs away from the City as soon as the working hours end. They are foreign to us. Finally, the privilege of taking a glance of the panorama from the Petronas Towers costs queuing up before 8am to fight for a ticket.

Maybe things went this way because of speed the Asian economies are growing. They are evicted on the grounds of a shinier future, and paid a compensation to live away from it in the suburbs or council estates. What kind of identity survives in such a place? Daniel, our host, works in the same Kuala Lumpur company for the last two years and all he knows about his city are the blocks taken by shopping malls around the building where he works. Maybe a bit more to the right? He only does not seem to worry about reading these books nor to have portraits to fill the frames.

E que identidade urbana sobra nesse lugar? Talvez por isso se cadastrou no site www. Talvez um pouco mais para a direita?

February 6, by willvieira. A choreographer with three well paid shows set to next week and a perfect English that answers the frequent calls from friends, Karan is a successful man. The only thing bothering the fashionably dressed caramel skin guy is his heart. He no longer wants to pay for sex. So he is astonished to hear about gays in Brazil. Being homossexual in India is at least a complex issue. Straight men have sex with gay the same way they do with prostitutes, but all is covered by the veil of fraternity. Bollywood, the local film industry, portrays gays dancing in a sensual way, but rarely mentions their relationships.

But a new ingredient spicied up this massala July last year. But how far is the change going to be real? Does this decision really mean a shift in the Indian conservative behavior? By legalizing such a conduct, he says, police will not have the same weapon to use against gay citizens.

But the shift tends to be slow. That is why Karan keeps strumming his cell phone keyboard, checking messages from gay promoters. In India, gay parties are still secret.

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There are no gay nightclubs in Delhi, only gay nights in ever changing fancy restaurants and five-star hotels. They could allege anything. So restraint is the rule.

Shy male couples dance together, hand in hand, but only one single kiss is seen in the whole night. And at a glimpse. Middle class has leaped from 25 million in to almost million today and the GDP per capita is now three times bigger. In this context, a margin of safety, or maybe tolerance, has been set for Indian gays. While NGOs working with the cause could have members be arrested by police, now they pop out even in the medium cities.

Delhi had its first gay parade in , as had Bangalore and Kolkata. The change has spread to the rest of the country in the last 15 years, scholars say, confirming the theses that the sexual repression is deeply connected to the British colonization. It was the British Empire who created in the infamous section , recently expurgated.

What in the West would be seen as a gay behavior, here it brings no sexual label. Also the gender segregation before marriage tends to reinforce the homosocial ties, since the social spaces are separated between men and women. It is natural for men to be always together, touch each other. Or at least it was. Now gay starts to be a meaningful word on TV, and even the gay movement, while advertising the existence of a defined homosexual orientation, has changed this relations among men — the number of them who fear to be seen and labeled as gays is growing fast, what supports another kind of anti-gay reaction.

The fashion producer Eric, 22 years old, lives in the fashion bubble of New Delhi. His TV set only shows the catwalks of Milan. His clothes stamp always Armani or Gucci tags. His room has two shrines: Eric defines himself as gay. Eric is now dating Khabir, an Afghani refugee who trades his body in bed for a little help to steer his model career. Eric takes Khabir and his Afghani friends to private parties, all willing to drink a beer and discharge some testosterone with his gay friends.

Even though Islam condemns male to male sex, Khabir regards it as natural. Eric and Khabir portray the new trend. One is the emancipated gay that conquers respect with money. As long as there is a marriage. Red glasses, tight pants, Fred Mercury mustache. At night, Ajay fictitious name goes to gay parties thrown by friends that live the urban gay middle class lifestyle in Delhi. All of them drink, smoke, talk about men, fashion and men. Ajay does the same.

But during the day he has a completely different, never talked about, life: To the vast majority of Indians, marriage is not an option, but a social imposition. The family accepts to ignore the homosexual relations if the son is able to marry, have kids and build a family that would make him socially accepted. But conservative resistance in India is not small and includes some spokesmen from the past.

The first transvestite in India with national visibility, Sylvie or Mamma, as her gay followers in Delhi like to call her really tried to do everything she could to please the religious believes of her mother, a catholic Goan singer. As Sylvester, she went to medical school in London, worked as a doctor in India and even tried some flirts with girls.

In the streets they would offend me, humiliate me, laugh at me. That was back in One of them is managed by her son, adopted from her sister. I am not ashamed of anything in my life My life is an example. Sylvie says she can barely go to bars or clubs, since the amount of men trying to talk to her is boring.

But Sylvie is afraid that they turn her life into nonsense drama. Ao ouvir falar do Brasil, pergunta: Desde julho de , um novo ingrediente engrossa esse caldo. O organizador da maioria delas, Manish Sharma, explica: Suas roupas trazem o selo Armani ou Gucci.

Todos bebem, fumam, falam de homens. Mas, de dia, Ajay segue uma vida jamais comentada: Uma faceta oculta de sua vida.

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Mas a vida dupla de Ajay pode acabar: Na rua, me xingavam, humilhavam, riam de mim. E tem negociado com cineastas para fazer um filme baseado em sua biografia. January 24, by willvieira. It sounds difficult to believe, but after almost four months we finally left India behind. What demands a farewell with a conclusive flavor —at least a goodbye that has tasted, chewed and digested all the flavors good or not and impressions that only India can give you.

But how to amalgamate all the differences of this melting pot country in a humble post? Religion is not the answer. There are Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jainnists everywhere and not even the Hindu majority, with its myriad of gods that gain more arms, colors and names as you go up from Kerala to Delhi seems minimally homogenic. Neither the language is the key —it changes every thousand miles, always with a few or a lot of thousand people speaking it. What, then, is able to reunite all these pieces into a conclusion —to synthesize a portrait of this puzzle sewed by the independence from the United Kingdom?

The answer make the papillas shiver. Poor ones, they are now tired of daily game of seasonings that defy the most modern food engineering. Our papillas were the most tenacious witnesses of all experiences we had in India. The marriage, I should say, was the last coup, with his tables jam-packed with dishes with all the chilies and peppers that fit in a stew. The unbeatable, never tiring and omnipresent masala that every Indian shove in every meal and it every single day of their lives.

Ignore this flavors would be ignoring the country essence. So we swallow it day after day. Red chilies are a staple --for a couple of Ruppees one can get a handfull of them, sold at any street. Our last days in Delhi were as spicy as the other twenty and so that we had spent there. Our fault, one could say, as our dear host Amrit, used to cook dinner every night, politely asked: Of course, we quickly answered. We love to taste each country we visit. But that was in the first day.

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From then on, while we slept under that welcoming roof, we cried every single night with his spices. From the market he would come smiling with two plastic bags. One filled with legumes: The other one always carried boxes of mixed spices. Those were the famous masalas that cover some shelves in every market in India, dozens of different possible mixes, one for each dish you can imagine.

One mix usually carries large amounts of fenugreek, asafetida, cumin, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon and peppers white, or green, or black or all of them ; most of them have cardamom black or green , turmeric, garlic, ginger, curry leaves, chilly, paprika; frequent add-ons are cassia, bailey, coriander leaves and seeds ; and, depending on the objective of the mix and the region it is made, there come mango powder, tamarind, pomegranate seeds, dry lime, sesame, mustard and saffron.

Put ten or twenty spices together and you have your own signed masala. Of course, some of the mix are known by fixed names, what does not help to make the recipes clear. Like the most used of them all, added to everything despite the others: Garam means hot —and the Indians take adjectives very seriously. That is how, in our sadist Indian witch host hands, we ate eggplant stew with lady fingers; fish in bamboo shoot sauce; lentils and chickpeas with paneer. Everything tasty —but God, how spicy it was!

Because Amrit would make sure the spice was enough by taking from the kitchen cupboard, while the dish was almost ready in the pot, bubbling with all the previous spices, a bigger box, red, covered with images of big red chilies. That was the routine —and how we ended up drinking around one litter of water every meal. The lack of two teeth in the front of his smile made the blue of his eyes pop out while he hold us with a thin white trembling hand. He wanted a yes or a no. John criticized the Western arrogance. Capitalism turned life into a empty search, what convinced him to change his life as a Australian hippie for a Alabama hippie life as soon as he met this Hare Krishna man…the story is long, as is the way to the temple in this slow bus.

But since then and that was , he comes to Vindravan every year and stay three months to purify in the brothers presence. Nights are passed dancing the kirtan, a non-stop ceremony that goes on since , 24 hours. And meals are made in the same temple not in the grubby thalis for free, but in the expensive and clean annexed restaurant. It will help cleaning your soul. The menu was short and the food simple. Vadas doughnuts of tapioca with no taste immersed in a strong masala sauce came with vegetables even spicier that induced a kind of trance or cosmic dance in the mouth —or was just the throbbing tongue?

We got tired soon, not only of the food, but of the city. Hot, noisy and smelly, the main road in Vindravan had no pavement but many mud ponds, sewage leakages and a hell of honking cars and rickshaws that fought in a dark nightmare —there was no light bulbs. What saved us from erasing the experience in the city forever were the humble clay cups filled with hot spicy milk that we took in the two nights spent there.

From one meter diameter woks, little men in dothis cooked, for hours, a thick buffalo milk with cardamoms, sugar and saffron stems. An iron jar would dive in the wok and came back with the smooth mixture, to fill our waiting clay cups, soon covered with the cream formed in the wok edges. Some stems were added at the end —esthetic touch. And the milk would quickly go down our throats, drowning the mystic chaos of Vindravan in the sweet flavor of the masala.

It's beautiful to see so many spices, but it's so painful to feel them We arrived too soon. It was five in the morning when we got close to the central ghat of Varanasi, the most sacred place to bathe in the most sacred river at the most sacred city in the world. But we did not pass the night awake could not sleep with so much to talk about to go there and do what all the families that came in huge packed buses from thousand miles away to bathe together and purify their souls once in a lifetime.

Not like the men with round bellies in underwear and old ladies with their breast popping out of the colorful saris, that shivered and chanted together in the cold black water. We were there to take a ride in a boat. The most touristic act in the world. But it was too early. So we went to the only and dodgiest place we could find, a tea stall that gave us the proof of the improper time: We ordered two cups. Slowly the boy threw three handfuls of ordinary black tea, the leaves so small they looked like instant coffee; three handfuls of granulated bad refined sugar; a jar of milk and other of water.

And started then to smash a large chunk of garlic, dozens of cloves, one dozen of black peppers and cardamoms, green ones.

All that boiled for lazy ten minutes in the wood oven —the fire was supposed to be raged by an old metal fan, soviet stile that insisted to turn off. But half an hour later we were sipping the very same sweet as hell chai that a good billion of people all over the country drinks every single day —that was being part of India. A flavor that lingered in the mouth while a quicker boy was driving us in his boat, cutting the now blue waters of the Ganga. Varanasi is the most interesting city in India. Those pyres burn dead people. The sleepy stomach getting nauseated with the lack of rest and the nonsense of the scene.

But the setting was perfect to the other side of the river: Tea was our host in the most well known spice shop in Jodhpur. But not the ordinary masala chai of the stalls. We were invited by the owner to sip a delicate jasmine tea and whatever else we wanted —please, take a seat my friend, you want a mango tea, very special? Or maybe a rose one? Sure that our wallets would open to the shelves filled with packages and names in English that hypnotize as much as the smells, he points out his relics one by one. Here, North Indian Curry. Safron here is a commodity. Ask for a lassi in a stall and it will come yellow, floral flavor and a nothing conventional top of saffron stems.

The vanilla beans, he measures with a square: We bargained, menaced, stood up and seated back a couple of times and the price of everything dropped suddenly to a half. Anyway, we spent around three thousand Rupees. But left the store happy with the scenic spectacle.

Or we tried to, as our friend grabs our arms, bags full of tea and spices hanging, to offer a photo with him that turns into a spicy political argument. They wait, the Muslims, until the night come and we sleep to cut their head and limbs and let them bleed to death.

What can they do, the cows? So the Hindus set their mosques on fire. Once he was in a local train when witnessed a barbaric scene. Te train would not leave so the passengers got tense. The station manager insisted in the contrary, but soon a mass of furious Hindus, now forgotten about the delay, demanded the car to be verified. When the doors finally were opened, big round stupid bovine eyes found others, small and raging.

And using our trains? But these Muslims are always armed. But we were more. The finger now points out at a placard in the wall, where a cow is pregnant with a hundred gods in its innards: So everything that comes out of it is sacred. Her susu you know, the piss is sacred. Or so we believe. Ayurvedic institutes produce urine pills to cure the leaver diseases. Even eye drops are made this way. The dung is used as incense in temples. From the cow, all is used. Silent with the discovering we go to post office. The idea is to send our purchases to Brazil.

But then a new chapter in the spices soap opera begins —immersed in what V. Nothing in India is supposed to work properly or to solve a problem. It is meant to show that it should be done and it is being done, even dough it is not. The rule to send parcels in India is to sew it in a rough cotton fabric. Not that it protects against any damages. So we found the only man in the city that can do it, outside the office, a old short man in a little stall there only for this purpose. He tries to extort us.

We play the little drama and got half of the price, accusing him of being a mafia. At the counter, in the waiting line, we fill four different pages of a same declaration form. But seal with what? The same old man in the stall welcomes us with a smile. You say, sew and I sew. It is like a medieval heraldic serving the king of Scotland. And that is how our parcel gets the air of a distant Europe and is ready to arrive in Brazil by ship —three months later of our masala mafia odyssey.

In Jaisalmer, the Golden City of Rajasthan, at least for us, it was the masala from the box that seasoned the vegetables with chapatti we ate every day. There we were to go on a tour at the Thar desert, border between India and Pakistan. Of course, on a camel. To walk down the streets of the magnificent fort built by the Raj-puts in the XII century was nice —but it was far more exciting to spend three days shaking on Mr.

Our group had ten people, but we pushed on first, ignoring the pictures of misery in the villas that the Americans and Koreans took in dozens. We just wanted the silence oh the desert, a sky of stars over our heads and the back in cold sand —only the touristic peace. Rajil took care of everything. He made us run burning our behind against the camels back so we could get always the best spot first. Under a tree he would always set a bonfire and cook our meal, not before serving a masala chai. Then lunch and dinner would follow. But in that setting of dry sticks and skinny goats, with no other sound than the fire and the wind, everything tasted marvelous.

What divided lunch from dinner was a slow shakingthree hour ride in the camel, a couple of more hours reading under a tree and a pink sunset that blooded scarlet the India skies. But the real taste in the two night around the fire was given by the spicy tales of the camel man. Rajil, 28 years old but a 40 years old sun cracked face lacking two teeth, remembers the story of a poor fat woman.

The strategic silence is only broken by the cracking fire. At night she told me she had only one boyfriend, but he left. I felt sorry, you know. But made my bed far from her. And the young Israeli that insist on smoking weed while on the camel?

And the Canadian couple that broke up in the dunes —he went for her at night and found her with a Chilean man in the bushes? And, God, the laughs are loud, his cousin. The face always covered. And nothing to do now, man, have to face it! But wait, the best is coming. He inflames the fire. So night falls and the man takes pills and so many whiskeys and asks me: So I am there making dinner when I look ti my side and he is on top of her, fucking by my side, man!

So I can see everything for free! She is a prostitute, he pays her money. She needs a man. But I can, you know. Imagine if the old man wake up and shoot me in the face? Next morning, after masala omelet and masala coffee and the butt again suffering on the camel, he shares the cherry of the sunday. Artist of prose, he nows shows his musical talents.

The desert silence is interrupted by Aqua pop junk, of course, brought into Indianreality. The train wound its way down India map. To our left, the throng of passengers without a ticket trying to spot a place on the floor; to our right, seen beyond thegrid window, the Arabian Sea.

We had left Rajasthan behind towards paradise, but Goa seems so far in this slow motion rhythm. After 14 trains all over India, we entered our 15th car waiting the same show. And it is there —the train has barely moved and an army of short men in blue and red check uniform come to sight shouting their mantras. Coffee tchai, tchai, tchaeee! In the train, at least in our second class, the gastronomy scenario is theirs.

Every stop they change theirs faces; the baskets are refilled; the menu grows fat; and so do the bellies fulfilled with the carbs, fat and sugar of its always fried delicacies. A train trip in India is always a food adventure. But go from Jaisalmer to Goa, 52 hours watching time pass through the landscapes in three different trains, is a little more.

Reframing the Nineteenth Century

The day begins with a chai garam, the traditional milk tea with spices and sugar, loads of it. We just move the arm by mistake and reach a vendor with a basket of samosas, fried pastries with potato, chilly and masala.

Lunch is a byriani, fried rice with chicken and masala. A piping hot thali, boiling in masala, is the dinner. Two more chais and we are ready to sleep, full, if not fulfilled, with the improvised banquet. Then the lights are turned off and all the crowd fall asleep, hands on top of the belly. If we wake up the next day with a stomach ache and quick bowels, the eys are caught looking for safe industrialized cookies and Lays chips in the station shelves. Thinking of it we stop at a station to buy the most important news magazine in India.

180202yueqin

The cover story is about the election of the Indian national dish, the masala dosa. Of course, we laugh, masala won. But the poll is questionable. Only 12 options of dishes, arbitrarily picked by the magazine, are there to be chosen by the public. That was an unfair issue in a country where the epic and unbalanced fight between the women roles bended always to the mother figure, having as background the brutal force of family matters in Indian lives.

But a series of articles about local peculiarities among the regions made us wash-mouthed. That was also unfair. Where, in that train car, were the magnificent Punjab byrianis, the paneer and coconut dosas, the special fishes of Kerala and all the food printed so beautifully in the magazine? Not in the train. And since there was no even a little note about food eaten in trains and the Indians spent part of their lives here , we were stunned. No chai chai garam. But that was OK, we were heading to the paradise. Goa would feed us with health and fresh flavors from the sea. No more fried fried food, that was for sure.

But life is a quimera…. Goa is a guaranteed paradise so it could be left aside by this peculiar blog. But every cent is worth it. Fresh grilled fish with lemon —and masala; crispy calamari with potatoes —and masala. Feel free to write your own travel guide —and pay for it! From the plane window, south India is a never-ending coconut grove. Kerala is the coconut land.

But why there are so much coconut here…I have no ideia. We had arrived in Kerala to say good bye to India. It is from the coconut groves of Thiruvananthapuram, in the far south of the country, that the cheapest flights leave to Asia by AirAsia, the budget company. But the little boats, the coconut trees and the never ending easy smile of people —here darker and happier than in the north—got our hearts.

At this point, our run from masala was obvious, as realized the waiters in the local restaurants when we asked for non-masala fish in coconut sauce and they had to say, no sir, not here, not there. But finally we came to a confident menu —would that be possible? But the fish, poor one, came drowned in a yellow sauce, thick of coconut and all peppers and curry leaves and cardamoms and yellow powders as always. That was the proof we wanted —the confirmation that the masala breaks any difference in latitude and longitude, altitude and attitude that make this country so culturally heterogenic.

If the color of skin, the clothes, the gods, the language and even the per capita income changes so much from Delhi to here, what could explain the omnipresence of masala in the subcontinent? It is like the coconut question above: But we can, indeed, explain that it is in Kerala that the Indians chose to set the Spices Board of India, organ that take exclusivelly of the flavours of the country that, says the departement, produces more then half of all the spices known in the world. We could also remind you that Kerala is historically known for the best pepper ever, the jewel of the crown of the spice route between India and Egypt two thousand years ago and the reason that drew the Portuguese seamen all the way through the Indian sea around five hundred years ago.

When they first came found here the holly plant that still coil around the necks of other trees, producing the green spheres that dry, turn black ans suddenly starts to smell deliciously. That is the tale that our guide tells us when we leave our boat to step in a village house. He points at a pepper plant, we say wow and then he points a tall tree, a regular one.

So a bud is seen by a tourist and panic starts. It is a clove. The group joins the astonishment, while sharing the green clove in deep sniffs and long sighs. The dammed clove seem to bite a mysterious region in the brain that controls the stomach as much as emotions —because suddenly there is this sensation of living again, through the smell of that centimeter of green clove, not only these four months in the subcontinent, but all the chais, all the pakoras, all the curries and byrianis and pulaos —all the masala that touched our mouths and attacked our stomachs and made us love and hate India second after second.

This is how, when we left India running away of masala, we ended up being friend again. But we are sure that a life without spices is not worth it. And that if there is somewhere in the world where the spices can reach this magical dimension, this place is India.

Good bye masala, we finally say entering the plane. A resposta arrepia as papilas gustativas. Coitadas —cansadas dos jogos cotidianos de temperos que desafiam a engenharia de alimentos, elas foram as testemunhas mais tenazes de tudo o que vivenciamos por aqui. E merece ser contada em detalhes. Isso foi no primeiro dia.

Do mercado ele vinha com duas sacolas. A outra trazia algumas caixinhas de temperos prontos. Garam quer dizer quente. Tudo saboroso —mas como era picante! Ou a Vindravan, distrito onde ficam os hare krishnas. E, claro, come no restaurante limpo e caro do templo. Aquela comida vai te limpar por dentro. A comida eram vadas roscas de tapioca fritas sem gosto algum, mas imersas em um molho picante de masala e um refogado de verduras com a mesma masala picante.

Pedimos dois copos e esperamos. Aquelas piras queimam os corpos. Mas tem gosto bom igual. Que mal elas podem fazer? Quando as portas foram abertas, os olhos redondos e burros das vacas olharam para fora, encontrando outros olhos, pequenos de raiva. E usando os nosssos trens? O dedo aponta para o cartaz na parede, onde uma vaca carrega nas entranhas uma centena de imagens de deuses.

Queremos enviar nossas compras para o Brasil. Ele tenta nos extorquir. Mas selar com que? E o mesmo velhinho da barraquinha nos recebe com o mesmo sorriso. Rajil cuidou de tudo. Nos fez correr, com o traseiro assando no lombo do camelo, para chegarmos primeiro no melhor lugar a cada parada. E os israelenses que sempre insistem em fumar maconha montados nos camelos? Pior, o primo dele, coitado. Casamento arranjado pela familia com uma menina da vila, filha do melhor amigo do pai. Nunca a vira na vida.

O veu sempre no rosto.

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