In December, the table would groan with Christmas goodies of unimaginable variety, all personally prepared by Alice and her daughter-in-law. I haven’t seen Yessonda for a good four decades the last time I met her was when she was around ten, a moon-faced plump child, with a translucent complexion, exceptionally tall for her age.ĭuring vacations, the mansion of Alice- mann, the niece of Angelo da Fonseca in Carmona would be abuzz with visiting relatives. At the time of his death in 1967 due to cerebral meningitis, he left behind an extensive archive of 1,000 works in gouache, watercolours, oils and soft pastels, now housed in Goa and different parts of the world.Īt the Cumbarjua Ferry point, the old colonial-time ferry chugs back and forth chopping through the waters. Several other awards and honours had brought recognition to his work. He had played a vital role in India’s movement towards inculturation receiving the papal knighthood in 1955. The artist had moved away to Belgaum, Poona, Bombay, Calcutta and Poona again, to spend his adult life. Delfina - Yessonda-the 53-year-old daughter of the iconic artist and I have decided to journey to the neighbourhood in Santo Estevam that once was the estate on which the ancestral Fonseca home stood. The woman shifted her gaze from me, fixed it on the floor as if thinking, then asked me nonchalantly in English: ‘Which Angelo you want Baie, the bakerman or the tailor?’

The artist was a household name in his native village, I reckoned.

‘Could you help me locate the house of Angelo da Fonseca?’ I said in Konkani to the woman who unbolted the door. On my last mission to his natal island village of Santo Estevam, to locate the Fonseca home, I knocked on the door of a significantly old house. My efforts to trace the legendary Angelo da Fonseca’s Goa ties were impeded by too many cul-de-sacs mental and geographical erasures had thrust the artist into an abyss of oblivion.

Where the Light Plays by C. Fonseca