Probably you never heard about Denkorpint. He was the hero of a story my grandmother told me while I was a little boy to put me to sleep. As I mentioned in my book Goa to Me, I would fall asleep before she completed her stories. Though my granny lived and died in the last century I can now perceive that her stories always carried some message.
Once upon a time, in an obscure region of Sunaparanta, when the freedom of the animals was not yet destroyed by mahars and other aborigenes who took over their land, there lived a middle-aged agrokasov, called Denkorpint. He belonged to a flat-shelled brand of turtles. These were originally from the olive ridley family and arrived from the South China seas, but in time adapted themselves to sweet water ponds and the surrounding marshy land of Sunaparanta.
Denkorpint was his nickname. He suffered from bile (Pint in his language) and that made him belch (denkor kaddunk) loudly and with unusual frequency. But he was good at turning a shortcoming into strength, and even succeeded in gaining the upper hand in his community as self-appointed moderator in the panch meetings. Woe to those, including the veterans, who dared to confront him, and worse still for anyone commenting about Denkorpint’s belchings. His language could be foul, but that was how he understood the functional democracy.[http://bit.ly/1Nnetxa]
These turtles had their own language, but every community picked up languages of the neighbouring communities without any MoI policy, simply because they valued the social and economic advantages of harmony. Their most feared common enemy helped to promote their unity. The only serious conflict was caused once by Denkorpint’s proposal in favour of enforcing konklish, which he defended as a strategy to establish a timely alliance with a distant community of Queen’s turtles that were planning to take over the region. Denkorpint retraced his steps fearing that he may be viewed as a traitor.
Secretly he was proud of his ancestry which he believed to hail from lion-turtles from South China seas with super skills to create their own ecosystem. Denkorpint had been dabbling in the mysteries of the Avatar cycle and was convinced that his ancestry would enable him to escape the extinction of lion-turtles. However, he also felt himself caught by karma and the spirits of the region where he was born.
For the communities of Sunaparant their immediate common enemy were not distant imperialist turtles, but local man’gim, voracious muggers that later collaborated with the Muslim occupants of the land, by keeping Mandovi river safe for them. Denkorpint had specialized in the eating habits of man’gim, and his advice was eagerly sought for training the community youth in martial arts, even though his methods of teaching were equally dreaded.
Even simple pranks crossed his red line. Some students dared once to contradict professor Denkorpint, and they disappeared mysteriously in the days after, without leaving trace. Apparently, they had questioned Denkorpint’s obsession for Strunk and White. He never allowed them to opt for Wren & Martin. As gossip would have it, Denkorpint mistook Wren & Martin for a brand of drink that was not his favourite Big Boss cashew feni.
Even without a Ph.D. which he was eager to acquire, Denkorpint kept himself abreast of the latest info in his area of interest with extensive reading of abstracts, but before he introduced to his pupils any specialists he would first talk about their ideas as if they were his own, inducing them to believe that others may have appropriated those ideas from their teacher.
Denkorpint was by then convinced that struggling for a Ph.D. would not yield more dividends, but he hated to see his rivals parading Ph.D. degrees. This feeling of insecurity made the frequency of his belching more intense .
Denkorpint had anticipated a doctrine of avatars and had predicted that future gods of powerful civilizations would discover the heritage of the turtles as kurma avatar. He felt proud of contributing methods of safety and tricks of survival as an aquatic crypto lion-turtle.
Guru Denkorpint explained the evolution of life on earth from matsya and kurma to the earliest homo sapiens sapiens to his inner circle of sishya, but kept it studiously secret from the rest of the community. It was not really Wren & Martin that had decided the tragic fate of the above mentioned truant disciples, but their loose tongue which divulged guru’s secret knowledge.
Seeing me falling asleep my granny ended the story abruptly saying: Pretensions and clever tricks have their end. We die as we live. She used Konkani proverb – Rogot sorlam, pint urlam (blood is drained, bile remains). I woke that night with a nightmare. Denkorpint was in agony, belching painfully and calling upon Hari and Wan, his ancestral deities to assist him. He had adapted the classic mantra and chanted: Hari Wan Tat Sat. I also heard some ahs in between, but no bahs.
(Teotonio R. de Souza – Founder-Director of the Xavier Centre of Historical Research, 1979-1994.)
