Alito: He confronted his own mortality
He was a brother from a different mother. The only way to describe a friend of four decades is by borrowing from the vocabulary of the African American not the Anglo Saxon. It was more suited to his personality. Alito Sequeira, the quintessential rebel, the challenger of orthodoxy in all its forms, whether of caste, class, academia, and nationality has left us, his job incomplete. Alito whose heterodoxy was built over many battles of the mind gave courage to the suppressed voice, and the hesitant scholar seeking to be heard and understood. Read his blog ‘HanvKonn’ and you will know. That is why calling him my ‘brother from a different mother’ is more apt than describing him as my ‘best friend and companion’.
I have known Alito for long, first through the youthful politics of the 70’s, when we joined the protests movements against the old order, then as a colleague at the young Goa University, where he became my main interlocuter, and later, over the years, as we sustained a conversation on Goa as a place and an idea. My relationship with him was both frustrating and exhilarating, frustrating because he did not readily endorse my views (he always had to think about what I was suggesting) and exhilarating because his ideas were insightful and his initiatives refreshing. Alito knew Goa well from the dynamics of the GKVD communities to the politics of the Bamon-Chardo social groups, from the Confrarias to the Mazanias, comunidades to panchayats.
He could explain, as well as anyone could, how Bahujan got taken over by Saraswat, and how the Inquisition is both never forgotten and never remembered in Goa. Alito was the first person to meet if you wanted to understand Goa and the last person to talk to when you wanted to affirm your understanding. He knew Goa, its villages, its archives, its cultural forms, its past. He thought about Goa’s future but did not easily divulge these thoughts. You had to earn them.
Alito saw the games people play and played a few himself. That is what made him so interesting and such a delightful jousting partner. He was predictable, you could trust him, and unpredictable, you could not take him for granted. During the times when I was coping with issues of ill health, his support was unshakeable. He would drop everything to be by my side. In the last few months when he was diagnosed with cancer he handled the illness with remarkable equanimity, no self-pity, some anger, considerable curiosity, and philosophical detachment. He treated the illness like a class assignment. We discussed people, shared thoughts on investments, laughed at jokes, went on drives, tried to deal with the cancer by being normal, by being pragmatic. His karuna was legendary. The way he dealt with his cancer was a lesson in openness and courage. He often said to me, in these last few weeks of his illness, that through it he had discovered his own mortality. As profound and as banal as his realisation is, it enabled him to deal with the progression of his illness.
His was an extraordinary mortality. He was compassionate, caring, playful, and principled. He was my friend, companion, and brother from another mother. I was privileged to have shared some space on earth with him. Farewell bro. Tell us the answer to the question ‘HanvKonn?’
- By Peter Ronald DeSouza | 09 Aug, 2019, 05:16AM