The bus driver’s family

In the neighbourhood is a simple, hardworking Muslim family that makes nonsense of the poor, deprived Muslim stereotype.

The family lives in a little tiled cottage with two pleasant little rooms, a small kitchen, a loo outside in the village tradition. The man is a bus driver. Every morning at 7.30 – Sundays included - he cycles to Palolem to begin his duties. Every evening round about 7 pm he returns looking tired. His wife is a big, strident woman with strong arms and a girlish smile. In the tourist season, unknown to her husband, she is a masseuse, using her strong arms to pummel the flesh of stressed-out tourists and thereby earn some extra money. For her children she has ambitions.

Afsana, the elder daughter, is a thin shy pretty girl with thick long hair. Two years ago she completed her tenth standard exams. Now she is doing a tailoring course, where most young Goan girls prefer to work as shop girls. Afsana does exquisite embroidery, so her plump younger sister Asma informs me. Asma is moonfaced and bright-eyed. She is in class eleven, likes studying, plans to go to college, and wants to be a teacher. Seeing her eager face you know it’s not just talk. The son Aziz, nineteenish, twelfth-standard pass, moonlights as a bus mechanic late into the night with the aid of an emergency lamp. By day he is doing a course in computers.

They are simple people, but the girls are always beautifully dressed and have wonderful manners, as does the son. Unlike most villagers, the bus driver did not inherit the tiny plot on which he lives. He bought it some twenty-odd years ago when land was cheap.

Down the road is another Muslim family. Two brothers, one a tailor, the other a ration shop salesman. Every evening the two little giggling daughters, heads covered with a dupatta, skip to the mosque for their Islamic studies. In the morning, dressed in neat brown pinafores, they go to the local convent school where, presumably, they sing hymns in assembly.

It only happens in Goa, I think.