História de Pudim

What brings people together within a common, shared heritage? The answer is easy: pudim de leite and country music.

When I meet Torres, Melino and the other guys again after many months, I am very surprised because in the intervening period they seem to have graduated from a little Portuguese to an amazing amount of phrases and vocabulary. I also meet the girls for the first time, and they all seem to know some Portuguese. Of course, they all know Tétum quite well, and this is a language heavily influenced by Portuguese (probably as heavily as Malay was influenced by Sanskrit). I wonder whether Tétum is their mother tongue (half or more of Timor usually knows at least one other language), but then their life has been made of some many displacements that the question may be hard to answer. They were flown out of Dili by a Bandung-born Australian citizen brought up in Germany with the very Portuguese surname of Noronha. The Malaysian forces in Timor thoroughly supported her and the children eventually landed in Melaka (I guess because they were Catholic and somehow Lusophone too). Their first abode here was with the nuns who however promptly expelled them. They then led a wandering life from house to house until their doctor - who had been with the Malaysian forces in Timor - eventually lent them a large house of his which had been abandoned and fallen prey to drug addicts and other people looking for shelter.

They were offering a Christmas Eve dinner for all of us, a group of more than a dozen adults, mostly the people who had given them support through their years in Melaka. One of their supporters is Marina Mahathir, but she went to India instead. The children - a couple of them are now in fact grown up men working in Lumut, Perak - seem to know what is going on in Timor Leste. And one of the things that has been going on is something that is being hailed as the revival of Portuguese in the country, after its suppression during the years of Indonesian rule. Brazilians are part and parcel of this revival, from what I heard back home, and some of them have settled in the country to work there, also as teachers. The public secret is that, Indonesian rule notwithstanding, not much Portuguese was ever spoken in the former colony, in tandem with what happened in fact all over former Portuguese Asia, whether in Goa, Macau, Damão, Diu, Dadrá or Nagar-Avely. In Melaka, just as in Sri Lanka and formerly also in Kerala, Portuguese only survived into the twenty-first century by becoming a heavily creolized language much influenced by Malay and other local languages. In fact, even in Brasil it can be argued that most people do not really speak the European medium but instead use only a semi-creolized language that moves ever further apart from the official language. In Timor, what used to be called tétum-praça (and is now simply Tétum) exercised a similar function as lingua franca. At any rate, Tétum is the lingua franca in Timor now just as until about a hundred years ago in Macau the lingua franca was Patuá, and not Cantonese nor Portuguese (much less English which even nowadays is far less widely spoken in Macau than in Hong Kong). However, whereas Patuá is in even direr straits than Melaka Portuguese (there must be only a couple of hundred speakers left, mostly middle-aged and elderly people), Tétum is blossoming and is one of the official languages in Timor Leste (together with Portuguese). It is also written with some frequency, whereas to this day there is no agreement on a common orthography for either Patuá or Melaka Portuguese (and neither is taught in school as far as I know).

Now Timor finds itself in the interesting position of being neighbours with Australia (who is trying very hard to pilfer their oil fields as well as dump all kinds of asylum seekers on them), family with Indonesia (Timor Leste is less than half of Timor island), and distant cousins to a good deal of strange people such as Angolans, Brazilians, Indians, Macauans, Moçambicans, Portuguese and so on. They are speakers of various local languages as well as speakers of Tétum, are about to become speakers of Portuguese (whether once more or for the very first time), will certainly have to learn English, and will probably never really forget Indonesian, especially as it is spoken by their immediate neighbours in Timor itself and is at any rate a far closer and easier language to learn than either Portuguese or English. The children are in this way in a good position to become citizens of the young nation as they have been schooled in English and Malay, have not forgotten their Tétum, and are learning Portuguese fairly fast.

So perhaps the children are catching up with developments in Timor by brushing up their Portuguese so that when they eventually go back they will not be too out of tune with local realities. I try and help by insisting in using Portuguese as much as possible. Of course, the Portuguese they remember (or have just learned) is not the Portuguese I speak. I try and explain that to them. The vocabulary can be different and the pronunciation is certainly very different. I remember that in Macau I often simply could not make out what my Portuguese colleagues said even when they repeated it at my request. It was particularly bad when I was listening to a friend, a linguist - or rather a philologist and educationist. She has an alert mind and often knew at once when I had not understood what she had said. She is perhaps the best Portuguese language teacher of the university and consequently one of the best in Macau. The Macau Cantonese students however were hopeless learners of the language, and found her too strict. I wish someone like her could be seconded to Melaka. She would certainly be much more useful here than in Macau where people are strenuously striving not to learn the language even though they often attend courses of Portuguese (now in the postcolonial era they also have the opportunity of not learning English and even not learning Mandarin well. This can in fact be read as a quite successful instance of cultural resistance). The Portuguese in Macau (that is, the Portugal-born Portuguese, not the Cantonese Portuguese passport holders who make up about almost one third of the city's population) however usually understood me as they were exposed to Brazilian soaps at an early age. I must have watched my first Portuguese movie at the age of thirty or later. The film was subtitled (sic). The children complain that even in the Portuguese Settlement they cannot use Portuguese as the people there do not easily understand them. I must admit it takes an effort though it is not impossible to talk with each side keeping more or less to his or her own version of Portuguese. They have nonetheless friends and acquaintances in the settlement. On this Christmas Eve some of them are even going there for a party.

I have an incredible conversation with Torres and Melino later in the evening. It is incredible because I cannot picture myself having a conversation like that in Brasil - ever. That is because the subject of conversation simply does not belong in my circle of friends and acquaintances. It is about Luciano and Zezé Di Camargo, two brothers well-known for composing and singing Brazilian country music. Many foreigners think the quintessential Brazilian music must be samba. They are thoroughly mistaken. Samba is a minority taste in the country, and probably always was (it has been around for a hundred years or more now). It is also probably easier to meet a Melakan who can read Jawi fluenty than a Brazilian who can dance samba well. Actually, dancing samba is fiendishly difficult. You have to learn your steps and then perform them at an extremely fast pace without making mistakes and without moving your legs or hips. It is definitely not for amateurs. No wonder the best passistas - samba performers during and outside carnival - often become celebrities. Of course, samba is also very black - and therefore somehow African. Country music is not. Torres and Melino are in fact aware of samba being difficult to dance, though they admire the rhythm anyway. My feeling is that they would have liked very much to be able to imitate it. Actually, they seem to be much taken by anything Brazilian. Hence perhaps what is to me their amazing infatuation with Luciano and Zezé Di Camargo.

I must confess however that they are in excellent company. My lack of interest bordering on distaste for Luciano and Zezé Di Camargo and their music is certainly not shared in the least by tens of millions of my countrymen and women. For many of them, both singers are artists of almost mythic stature. In fact, Brazilian country - a very hybrid genre that has adopted freely from local music, Mexican genres and last but not least American country - is a huge industry in much of Brasil. If it is not a majority taste (perhaps an impossible thing to aim for in a country as large and as varied as Brasil), then it comes fairy close to being one. That is perhaps not surprising. When I was born - a long, long time ago - most Brazilians lived in the countryside (and most women worked at home). Now the vast majority of Brazilians live in cities (many of them in very large urban centres), and most women work outside their homes. As rural origins are never too far away (just as with many South Africans, for instance), a taste for country music comes certainly much more naturally than a taste for, say, samba (a thoroughly urban product and on top of it from a very specific city in the country, namely, Rio de Janeiro. That is not to say that samba has not been popular. On the contrary, it certainly has had a wide appeal. It is of course also often considered to be more authentically local than country music which has given it a good deal of legitimacy. Its close association with the Rio carnival has also given it international visibility of a kind Brazilian country music can only dream of). A long time ago country (that is how it is often called in Brasil) was música caipira (musik kampung), and the duos who sang it were duplas caipiras. It is something familiar, rural, quaint and also distant from us (but not too distant). Now it is a multi-billion real industry. The kampung has taken revenge on the bandar.

On my father's side, the entire family has rural origins (my father included as he grew up on a farm). We however never grew up with any country music. My father would instead listen to imported records of rumba, jazz and other foreign genres (grafitti, pre-vynil records). The only time country music played any part in our lives was during the festas juninas - the June festivals especially São João and São José. Then we would dress up in what even today seems to me a parody of country dress, and dance to country music (or perhaps again a parody thereof). We would also eat country dishes and drink quentão, a drink made of cachaça (distilled from sugar cane but tasting very different to rum) and cinammon and served hot (which is quite adequate as June in the south of Brasil is winter).  A quintessential creolized colonial rural drink as it blends a sugar cane product with an Eastern spice (and is very cheap and easy to make). In São Paulo those festas were particularly important just as in a good deal of Brasil. We reminisce and relive then our country origins (and perhaps, more distantly, also our colonial ones). In fact, it could be said that we are basically a nation of caipiras - orang kampung.

The details of what Torres and Melino were enthusiastically relating to me (a third boy joined us but kept mostly silent) were somewhat vague to me. Of course, being from Brasil it is almost impossible not to know anything about Luciano and Zezé Di Camargo as the details of their life and career are regularly fed to the public through various media. At first I got them confused with Leandro and Leonardo, another famous couple of singers (they are usually male and come in pairs, preferably brothers), from the capital of Brazilian country music, namely, Goiânia. This last is a modernist-inspired city constructed in the 1930s to be the state capital of Brazil's cattle-growing state of Goiás which is almost synonymous with rurality. It is just south of another, much more famous modernist city, namely, Brasília (this last is however not synonymous with rurality but rather with centralized state power). But then slowly my recollections of old media items about the two brothers came back. They belonged to a largish family - probably with small town or rural origins - that presents a very united image. Families are of course very important in a good deal of Brasil; also, they are traditionally largish and family members are supposed to be quite united. I still remember attending a wedding of one of my cousins - that is, one of the daughters of my mother's elder brother- when I was twelve and being introduced to dozens and dozens of so-called cousins: in fact, out of the seven hundred odd people reportedly in church and afterwards at the reception, a good two or three hundred were supposed to be family.

So Luciano and Zezé Di Camargo played the family card to the media quite well. The boys had culled their information - and I assume their admiration - for the dupla (pair) from a movie made by their family. In fact, the movie highlights, from what they related to me (I have never watched it), the efforts of the father to make his sons nationally famous (Torres and Melino in fact said, perhaps more appropriately as this was being related to me by two timorenses in Melaka, internationally famous). In reality, they later told me that they had not watched the movie but only a trailer (I assume probably downloaded from the internet). They also mentioned their famous handicapped brother who has to use a wheelchair. This brother became famous as he was the victim of a typical kidnapping: the kidnappers as usual wanted millions to release him. The kidnapping industry spares no one, as even middle class people can become victims, let alone celebrities and their relatives. Of course, the kidnapping attracted enormous media attention at the time, not so much because the brother had been kidnapped (that had by then become humdrum) but because of his famous singer brothers.

It is a strange experience to have something (un) familiar related to you many years after the fact in a context far away from home, and on top of it by two young men from Timor. Perhaps there lies the key - namely, they are Timorese who escaped the Indonesian ravage of their country- as much as in any general admiration for things Brazilian - to understanding those boys' admiration for the history of the family of Luciano and Zezé Di Camargo. It is a family who was not originally wealthy, and therefore had to work hard before the brothers would attain fame, and then again face more hardship as one of its members was kidnapped and (if I remember right) almost killed. It is also a family that presents itself to the media as a united family. Accordingly, Torres and Melino related to me how the father had devised several stratagems so that his sons would not only go on radio to sing live, but also get so many requests to sing again the song they had composed that this last eventually became famous. The father simply paid colleagues at his workplace to call the radio station and place a request. That the film whose trailer they watched is in fact a family documentary is also interesting in this regard. Maybe however the boys admire the story of the family of Luciano and Zezé Di Camargo because it is a good story after all. As I said above, in any case they are in good company.

Melina (in fact, Melino's twin sister) asked me about my family and how I usually spend my Christmas. It was a slightly tricky question to answer, especially in an environment where people are obviously fairly religious as in Melaka. I have not had a family Christmas in a good many years, especially as my family split a very long time ago, each going his or her own way, though we still keep in touch. Also, I - just as several of my friends in São Paulo and Rio - am not interested in Christmas. In fact, one of my friends, Denise, has just happily boarded an Air France flight to Paris, where she will get her connecting flight to Casablanca. She was in particular inordinately happy that by flying on Christmas Eve she would save half of the price of the ticket. I do not miss Christmas. To me it used to be a sad reminder of family feuds, dissension, insatisfaction, and unhappy lives lived behind a façade of family unity. However, as a child I did enjoy the food and I simply loved the gifts. They made up for all the bickering, if only briefly. Melina ended up understanding the way my family life works by candidly telling me that the same happens in her family. Namely, all family members live their own separate lives. 

Of course, at the house belonging to Dr Izham, the children's cardiologist, there was a proper Christmas tree (and outside the front door a crib), and under the tree lots of presents. Dr Izham and his family also attended and wished everyone a Merry Christmas. Late in the evening people - meaning the adults present - were called by name and handed their gift. In fact, I became slightly embarrassed because I found that I was inordinately anxious to have my name called so that I could get my gift. Nobody seemed to notice anything, however, probably because they were also enjoying the expectation of getting their gifts. I got a candle made by the children themselves. The only thing that I found funny was that the children did not unwrap their own gifts. They would probably do it after mass or early in the morning. As a child in Brasil, many years ago, I would have been quite resentful if I had been made to wait that long. But this is not Brasil.

The Indian driver who would soon drive the children to Missa do Galo - the midnight Christmas service whatever it is called in English (in Portuguese it means the Cockerel's Mass) - was there already. He had a very nice smile. Josephine - who has had a hand in helping the children since the beginning - was praising the man to the skies as he turned out to be quite an improvement on the previous, quite unreliable driver who would always take the children to school after the classes had begun. The new driver had obvioulsy been to the Hindu kuil earlier in the evening as there was a mark on his forehead. The mass would be held at St Peter's, a Igreja de São Pedro. It was a colonial building from the Dutch period and its façade looks Dutch colonial (at least to someone who got some visual training in Dutch colonial architecture through living in Cape Town and spending some time in Curaçao and Suriname as well as in Fort Cochin, Kerala). Next to it there is a nondescript modern building that is thoroughly air-conditioned. I went in there for Easter earlier this year. It was chokeful with people of all kinds attending the Easter mass: Hindus, Muslims, various Chinese. A decaying grand old house also stands on the church grounds. The rest is tarmac and next to it there is Bay View, a highrise hotel that looks like it has just fallen from outer space. The interior of the old church is sober. In Brazil, an old church so deprived of decoration and grandeur would have been historically the church of a community of fairly modest means. Indeed, the Melaka Catholic community was traditionally just such a community, especially, I guess, in the early eighteenth century when the church was built. Many of them were also the descendants of slaves and other humble people brought from India and certainly also from Africa, whether or not they also had any Portuguese origins as such. They held some advantages during the colonial era - meaning the British colonial time - as they had access to the lower rungs of the public administration (the upper rungs being of course reserved for various British expatriates) of this former colonial outpost. That is however long gone. A couple of years ago the government belatedly decided that they could enjoy some of the benefits reserved for the sons of the soil (i.e. bumiputra, a quintessentially Sanskrit coinage). Perhaps however the church looks somewhat bare to me because it was built in the Dutch period (Dutch churches, particularly Calvinist ones, are famously bare) and then survived through the entire British period in a 'sleepy hollow' as Melaka was dubbed after most of the trade moved to either Penang or Singapore (the city accordingly lost its status as capital of the colony to Singapore).

There is a good deal of coming and going between the bas sekolah and the house (sekolah is incidentally a Portuguese loanword: escola. Bas isn't). They would clearly not arrive at midnight for the mass. We are already in the car after many minutes of endless greetings whereby we wished each other Bom Natal or happy Christmas again and again as we slowly inched our way out of the house. The boys would hug me and the girls politely extend their hands (no pecks on the cheeks as would have been the case in Brasil). Everybody was warm, smiling, charming as well as very well-behaved. The evening - according to Jo the very first the children had organized themselves - had been a success. A sense of satisfaction as well as slight fatigue hang in the evening air. The house was set right against a huge boulder with woods on top of it in a fairly isolated neighbourhood. It is at the very end of the street. It is quite large and spacious and seems reasonaby comfortable. My impression was that it had taken us ages to reach it earlier in the evening. Melaka is not a huge city but it certainly is a sprawling one. The children are driven to school on the bus every morning and then back in the afternoon. There is a lady in the house (that I took to be Malay but possibly she is an Indonesian as most of the household staff in town) that takes care of them. Jo would talk to her in Malay only. Most of the children are girls.

I forgot to tell the story of the pudim! Fica para a próxima vez. Agora é hora de uma Tiger!




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