02 To The Manor Born

Once the baptism ceremony was over, I walked down the church aisle, to be greeted by the other church members who warmly welcomed me into the fellowship of the Bombay English Church of Seventh-Day Adventists.

Besides me was my Mother who earlier that year had been baptized into the Adventist Church. Looking at her, I could not help but go down memory lane and reminiscence how all this came to pass! Was it my mother’s conversion that influenced me – the answer was both yes and no, as you would see later on in my story and how the conversion dynamics played out. But then we are getting ahead of the story!

Our Family belongs to the small, close knit Gowd Saraswat Brahmin community popularly known as GSBs, whose mother tongue is Konkani and are typically found settled down along the western coast of India, stretching from Goa to Cochin (now Kochi) in Southern India.

Tracing the roots of my immediate family, I discovered that we had fled Goa about 300 years ago, to escape religious persecution and forcible conversion by the Portuguese who came to Goa in the early 16th century. Earlier legend says that the GSBs had come to Goa from the banks of the now extinct Saraswati river in northern India, sometime in the dim past.

My ancestral history also tells me that our whole family especially from my mother’s side had settled down in Calicut: now known as Kozhikode, in the Malabar area of the present State of Kerala. Calicut in those days was ruled by the Zamorin who had welcomed Vasco Da Gama, the discoverer of India. Again, historical records show that my ancestor had lent money to the same Zamorin, who had in turn given as mortgage, a large house in the Taleel area of Calicut which my family occupied. Apparently as the Zamorin was unable to return this loan the house came into our ownership.

This property in relationship to those days was fairly large and the house was commodious with about 22 rooms; and adjoining this house was situated a ritual bathing pool. The name of this manor is Swargmadom, or the Heavenly Abode, and I was born in this house just past midnight on the 1st of November 1951.