Música...e um novo ano

Estou num café. A janela dá vista para a Masjid Kampung Kling,  a mesquita sul-indiana que é a mais antiga de Malaca (século XVIII). Lindíssima. Arquitetura sul-indiana e sumatrana com influências chinesas e européias. Dá para ver o cemitério e a fonte.

The music streaming out of the loudspeaker is bossa nova - muita calma prá pensar. I remember listening to it at Wilhelm's apartment in Tamboerskloof, a quaint traditional neighbourhood in the heart of Cape Town and in the folds of Table Moutain.  Wilhelm has been a lover of bossa nova for many years. We then had long conversations about all things under the sky, Brasil included. Muita calma prá pensar is according to him untranslatable in English: a lot of calm to think sounds prosaic and does not therefore translate the nuances of the Brazilian original. He also reminded me of other songs: Insensatez, Meditação, Samba de uma nota só...Wilhelm calls himself a Zona Sul colonizado, that is, someone who has been colonized by the middle-class culture of Zona Sul in Rio.

As a lecturer of Italian, Wilhelm also knows a good deal about Southern European culture that me familiar to me as a former learner of Italian in Brasil and resident of São Paulo. Together with Buenos Aires, the local accent has been highly influenced by the intonation and speech of the millions of immigrants from south Italy who first started moving to both cities well over a hundred years ago. Partly because of that (and other European) immigration, Buenos Aires is still a largely white city to this day, whereas São Paulo has a very sizeable white population - the country's largest, in fact. Also, both are South America's largest cities. Santiago de Chile is also quite white, and Montevideo is certainly the whitest large city in the region (the population also descends largely from Italian immigrants). If I remember right, Caracas can also be fairly white (and just as São Paulo it is fairly violent too). This creolized world of partly European origin is almost invisible outside the continent. In Malaysia people are always surprised at my being Brazilian, just as many people are surprised to learn that Wilhelm was actually born and raised in Africa (he has a slave ancestress, however, a Bengali woman, if I remember right; I have orang asli ancestry on my father's side).

I find the combination of green roofs and white washed walls of Masjid Kampung Kling and bossa nova music appealing. Now it is in fact a Brazilian singer who is singing a Japanese song. Brasil has the world's largest population of Japanese origin outside of Japan, and São Paulo is not only Brasil's largest concentration of European descendants in terms of sheer numbers, it is also Latin America's largest Asian city, even though in terms of percentage both Georgetown - not George Town, Penang, but Georgetown, Guyana - and Paramaribo in Suriname probably have majority populations of Asian origin. It is believed that Japanese may be the second most widely spoken language in Brasil nowadays even though Japanese Brazilians make up a tiny percentage of the total population.

Now they are singing the Girl of Ipanema. As a former boy of Ipanema, I like this oldie. Masjid Kampung Kling and the Girl of Ipanema. The song was famously composed by Vinícius de Moraes (one of our leading poets) and Tom Jobim when they were sipping their drinks on a sunny day and a local beauty, Heloísa Pinheiro, walked by on her way to beach. At least that is how the story - now turned into legend - goes. The restaurant where they sat and supposedly started composing the song on the spot is now a well-known tourist destination (and the street is now of course called Vinícius de Moraes). The international aiport is called Tom Jobim. As far as I know Heloísa is still around (now she is a grandmother) and is occasionally seen on television.  She still looks good. And of course the song is still broadcast on radio every now and then (in Portuguese more often than not). All of Jobim's albums and all of Vinícius's poetry are still available in shops in Rio. Even people who are not particulary fond of either know about them or at least have heard the song some time. Though it is a musical heritage that belongs to a certain age (the 1960s and 1970s) and a certain location (Zona Sul in Rio), it is at least widely known to many people in Rio and even Brasil. 

As a man of Tamil origin, I assume that the famous Munshi Abdullah went exactly to the Masjid Kampung Kling. After all, he was a Kling (namely a South Indian). Yet his books are apparently not for sale in Melaka. I assume that therefore he is officially celebrated in local museums and through a street name but is otherwise not really part of local culture any more.

It is a bit of an unfair comparison, however. The Munshi died in the Hejaz in the mid-1850s during a trip there (that is Saudi Arabia). I can still remember the old faces of both Jobim and Vinícius as they were interviewed on tv.

Though it is a bit of a an unfair comparison, I cannot however help making it as I sip my local coffee looking at the old cemetery below - it is shaded by a large mango tree. It is in blossom and there are unripe mangoes hanging from it. Mango in Portuguese is manga, just like Malay mangga. My father is very fond of all kinds of manga as he grew up on a farm.

I wonder what kind of manga the Masjid Kampung Kling grows. There are so many types - espada, coquinho, áden, rosa, etc. The fruit is smallish and round and it looks pink too.

Maybe it is manga rosa.