It’s raining the day I decide to visit Martha Aguiar. Not a soft rain but a hard lashing. I persist and brave the rain. It will be the last time, I see Martha.
A narrow road takes me through Raia past the peculiarly named Our Lady of Snows Church. The houses grow scarce as I wind my way uphill, a sort of untainted serenity envelops these hillocks. Martha welcomes me warmly and ushers me into the mosaic-tiled reception hall. She sits on a black sofa. Just above her head is a framed picture of Manual Santana Aguiar better known as M. Boyer. We talk animatedly about family. We have plenty in common. Boyer’s father and my grandmother were brother and sister.
“Boyer left for Bombay in 1952,” Martha tells me. Possibly, his first performance was in 1952 and he made a more permanent shift in 1954. Assolna de Kamat took the young Boyer to Bombay to act in one of his plays, Gunneanv Tuzo, staged at Bhangwadi Theatre in Dhobitalao.
In Bombay, Boyer stayed at the St. Michaels of Raia kudd and worked briefly for a press, possibly the Bombay Chronicle, but an industrial accident – his finger got caught in the press – prompted him to leave. It is against a backdrop of chawls, kudds and the working class Goan population of the Mazagon Dock and Port Trust, and the massive Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT) blocks, locally called cement chawls, who packed the halls, cheering and booing as the curtains rolled up and a magnificent orchestra struck its opening notes, that Boyer fine-tuned his instinctive talent for developing storylines, songs, technical aspects of stage production and that perfectly timed comedic delivery – later perfected to “number eight” – which would become his trade-mark.
He performed alongside stage veterans such as C. Alvares and Anthony Mendes appearing at the Bhangwadi, the Birla Auditorium, Rang bhavan and St. Mary’s School hall, most of them in and around Goan enclaves of Dhobitalao and Byculla. By 1954, he had written and staged his first production Bekar Empregad. While in Bombay, he met Eufrezina Martha de Souza, daughter of Apolinario de Souza and Maria Saldanha of Dhobitalao. Martha was still a student and they courted for a while before getting married. The patriarchal tradition of seeing sisters married off before men committed to a relationship – a responsibility Boyer took seriously – meant he would only marry at 36, prompting his mother to remind him that by that age, his own father had sired an entire family and died.
Boyer’s father, Sebastiao Floriano Aguiar, married at the age of twenty-one the seventeen-year old Mariquinha Luis. After the birth of Boyer on 11 October, 1930, following three girls – two more would be born after him – the family leased coconut trees for toddy-tapping at Pequeno Maddel, which lies at the mouth of lower Margao. There, they built a fairly large thatched dwelling just above the fallow fields and grazing grounds. At 37, Sebastiao died from a gangrened foot. He had fallen off a coconut tree and pricked one of his toes. When the gangrene set in, he refused to have his leg amputated.
The indomitable Mariquinha ran the toddy-business by herself for some time, but eventually returned to her ancestral house. Her father, Joao Jose Luis or Joao’ze as he was known, also ran a successful toddy-tapping business in Raia, and by family accounts was quite wealthy. Joao-ze’ son, Joao Anton Luis, was a talented musician who played the violin for film orchestras in Bombay. Luis had a profound influence on Boyer’s formative years.
On 26 April, 1966, Boyer and Martha wed. Almost immediately in May, they returned to Goa. By this time, Boyer had spent a considerable amount of his earnings on building a house at Raia, meticulously supervised in his absence by his mother. The move to the house marked a moment of true financial independence for Boyer.
Not far from Raia is the Damodar Vidya Bhawan (Comba, Margao), a one storied building painted in pastel pink like a pretty cake. It’s a theatre, established in 1916, now in a state of disrepair. It was here that the young Boyer had spent many a day, watching performances. The large arched wooden doors and darkened hall still echo the laughter of days gone by. This was theatre at its best; an unkempt audience, sons of the soil, in a space where they were as important to the play as the actors on stage. The ardent fans upfront; the hecklers, the cat-callers, those who would shout, annoy and disrupt with a “voosh” or encourage with an “ani eke pati” at the back. These audiences smelt of the village, and they saw people just like them up on stage, parodying or bringing to the fore issues relevant to them. At the time, nobody suspected that within those walls, one of Goa’s most emblematic cultural revolutions was taking place, one that would outlast the fados being sung in the grander reception halls. One that would make Boyer a Padma-Shri award-winning star.
(The writer is the author of Goan Pioneers of East Africa)
