THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN

June 2023

You live in a cosy home in Baroda and spend your days finishing college, socialising with companionable folks, and helping your mother turn fresh tomatoes into ketchup.

“In our home, the first chapati was given to a crow, the second to a cow. It was a close, friendly neighbourhood. We would visit a market called Paanch Seri to buy in bulk.”

Life flows at a sweet gentle pace, the kind of pace that can lull anyone into love. And love, as we know well, can be highly disruptive.

One fine day, without much warning, you get shipped off to Birmingham. Your mother sees this as the only way she can have you shed your teenage romance with a neighbour and get serious about life.

“I was 16 then.”

It takes you just five days to realise that Birmingham is not it. You move to London and then decide to leave the UK altogether. You land up in Rome and cat-sit there for a stranger because you are broke and you see an ad in a pizza shop.

“The cat was called Poochie … It was 1977.”

In another few weeks, you find yourself in Tanzania walking behind a troop of female chimpanzees, dutifully taking notes on who is socialising with whom and how. You have just been hired, given your post-graduate degree in statistics, maths and economics, as a research assistant by Dr Jane Goodall.

Oh, and in between, in Dar es Salaam you get married too, and to that neighbourly boy you’d been sent away from.

All this happens in a matter of months.

A Zigzaggedly Path

“I was born in 1954 in Pune and grew up in Baroda,” Heta Pandit tells me as we sit one midsummer morning under a yellow parasol in the blue and green verandah of her white Goan heritage house in Saligão.

She asks her man Friday in Hindi to get us some coffee and then takes a call. I hear Konkani.

What’s your mother tongue?

“I speak Gujarati, Marathi, Konkani, Hindi, English.”

It is easy to discern that she is at once singular and several. Her being polyglottal is no surprise.

She shares vignettes about those coming-of-age years in a tone of amusement. There is no drama in her telling, howsoever theatrical many episodes in her life might have been.

When she was suddenly flown off to the UK, she stayed in the college in Birmingham only for five days before moving to London.

“I used the fee to send my boyfriend an air ticket to London, but he was not allowed in, he didn’t have the papers.”

Her London roommate had said Tanzania was beautiful, so she decided to go, with a free stopover in Rome.

“Then we flew to Dar es Salaam. It had started raining so we sat in the empty airport. An Air Italia manager of Indian origin took us and put us in a motel. I saw a cluster of Gujarati boys hanging out on a parapet in the evening. I asked if they knew Nainesh Patel, our only possible acquaintance in the country. They didn't know him but asked me to go to Patel Club to look for bhaniya - nephew in Gujarati.”

Nainesh Patel, the nephew, was found soon and the boyfriend landed a job in a company. She got some clerical work. They were given a small car and an apartment.

“Once the car stalled somewhere. An Englishman stopped by to help. His name was Tim David and he asked us to stay with him. We even got married, a gunshot wedding, just to please the company bosses.”

Through Tim, Heta met Rosy who worked with Jane Goodall. Rosy, who was quitting, recommended her as replacement.

“I became Jane’s research and field assistant for the next four years. My job was to follow the chimpanzees from 7 am till 7 pm. Jane would give me the females with children. Every five minutes I would have to write down what they were doing."

Weren't you afraid?

“Fear has not been part of my vocabulary,” Heta says. “I was called thanda paani ka matka. I got my fearlessness from my mother.”

Perhaps that’s what makes her all that she is: animal lover, writer, entrepreneur, heritage activist and advocate, and environmental activist.

Homes are Family

Under that parasol, over a heady cup of locally sourced filter coffee, we delve a little more into her early years, skim over some of her decades, which include her divorce, and then fast forward to her present.

Memory is random and so is our conversation. We let it flit about in the unarranged, untidy manner they always do, like children dancing.

After a few years as a tea planter in Kerala, Heta decided to buy a 1936 heritage house, Maia, in Goa in 2006, and dropped anchor.

“The homes I own have personality, they are family … Goru and Potio (little boy) are immediate family. Goru had been hit by a car and came to my compound. I was on a trip to Bombay. When I returned, I saw that Goru had adopted Potio.”

Both the dogs are inside, sprawled in slumber. Potio emerges briefly, sniffs me out, and then returns to his mat.

I ask about the cat I had seen a few weeks before. “Ginger passed away on March 6. My first cat was called Catalyst.”

All her four houses are named after girls. The Bandra house, which is given for film shoots, is Tehmi Terrace “after my granny Tehmina”. The Panchgani Airbnb is Dhun-Heta. Dhun is her brother’s name. And the other house is Jena.

“We make the house work for itself. A house is like a member of the family.”

Man Friday Om Prakash drifts by, carrying soapnut to dry. “We use reetha as detergent,” Heta tells me.

Of the 10 books she has written, nine are on houses in Goa.

“Heritage movement is an environmental movement – it’s recycling. And you are preserving the collective memory, the intellectual property.”

In 2020 she co-founded with two architects the Goa Heritage Action Group. It’s at their annual festival, which I had found entrancing, that I had first run into her.

I ask what she thinks of the way Goa has changed.

“Goa has changed drastically over the past years. There has been rapid and unplanned urbanisation. There’s been ad hoc permission to builders, infrastructure is not considered. I am really disappointed that the government has not taken stock of heritage.”

Where do you see it going in a few years?

“I’m being optimistic. There will be a turnaround. Now there’s more awareness on nature, heritage, planning.”

I am beginning to sweat in the midday sun. I ask if this is a good time for a tour of Maia, the house every passer-by looks at because of the remarkable mural on the outer wall.

At 90, Maia is an opus on art and personal history.

We start with the mural, a portrait by Solomon Souza of Sakrula, a local legend in Saligão who imagined he was St Anthony’s incarnation. He wore coconut husk as halo, and a brown cassock. Children would run out of the classroom asking for his blessings.

Inside the house, amid the many pieces of artwork, we pause by a few: Sonia Rodrigues Sabharwal’s rendition of Chikal Kalo which celebrates Krishna’s playing tug-of-war in the mud in the first rain; a painting by the graphic novelist Amruta Patil; and the evocative menstruation series by Kausaliya Gadekar.

Heta pauses to light a Parsi diya for "Zarthosht Sahib" by the window. I am fascinated by the floating cork wick. She gifts me a box.

We traipse through the bathroom, which she is particularly proud of, to the dining room with the old blue easy chair, then to her guest room with a high bed, to the living room.

The large wooden chest, she points out was a local seed bank.

On a wall, framed in glass is her grandmother’s wedding blouse, “at least 125 years’ old”, and her mother’s jhabla when her mother was six days old.

“The sixth day angels are supposed to come down and write the future of the baby.”

The kitchen cupboards too are full of heirloom and memorabilia.

“This is at least 110 years’ old. My cousin Gool, which means spring, gave it to me,” she says about the tea cosy I have been staring at.

I am reminded of my grandmother who loved crocheting. One white tea cosy had managed to keep its place in the corner for years.

The sun squeezes through the kitchen vent, lighting up the edges of a longing.

“When I got divorced, I had just one regret,” Heta says, “that I didn't have a daughter. But the universe heard my prayers and after all these years, now I have a daughter.”

She shows me a picture of a young Chinese couple with a little girl. “I have an adopted daughter, Naomi. She is in China. She wanted to learn English and had once come over. It all just happened … I have had a rich, blessed life, very fulfilled.”

I feel that this sums her journey well: It all just happened.

Or as the title of her tenth book, her autobiography, goes, There’s More to Life than a House in Goa.

~*~