Jerry Pinto on how Nisha da Cunha understood the broken-hearted like no one else

As every good literary journalist did in that time, I turned up at a cottage off Mumbai’s Peddar Road and interviewed Nisha da Cunha on the release of her first book, Old Cypress (1991). The stories were veined by melancholy but it was of a kind I was familiar with. There were many women in my family who had had their hearts set in aspic by the kind of circumscribed lives they had led. I was charmed by Nisha who gave off an artless privilege that invited you to forget concerning it as we discussed the joys of Henry James. She seemed timeless in her elegant grey skirt and pink sweater: it feels almost unbelievable that she passed away on August 11 at the age of 92. Not Nisha, surely?

Our circles did not intersect back then; she was very much part of a social and intellectual elite; the kind that produced me uneasy because I was sure they were judging me. When I had made my peace with them for I had been judging them too, Nisha produced her way across a crowded Chemould Art Gallery where Mehlli Gobhai was having an exhibition, nearly 20 years afterwards. Her brother-in-law, ad man Gerson da Cunha, and I were talking about the paintings and she wanted to say a few nice words concerning my novel, Em and the Big Hoom.

“You must have read it,” she remarked to Gerson.

“I am afraid I have not had the good fortune,” said Gerson, turning a phrase elegantly as always. “I get no time to read.”

“No time to read?” Nisha looked at him aghast. “What can you be doing with your time?”

“There are many important things…” Gerson began when Nisha shushed him. “Do not be pompous, Gerson. It was ever your besetting sin. Not have time to read!”

She spun on her heel and left us. Gerson raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

“Dear Nisha,” he said, his tone suggesting the exact opposite. “Ever the teacher.”

An Old Bombay story

We had a Cult of the Teacher of English in those days. There was a pantheon of them: Eunice de Souza and Nisha at St. Xavier’s; Soonu Kapadia and Mehroo Jussawalla at Elphinstone. There were some must-haves to be admitted to the pantheon: elegant English diction, starched cotton handloom saris and a savage line in student put-downs. I did not study English literature formally, merely auditing classes in blessed silence and so I could watch these women work their magic without ever feeling in thrall to it.

Nisha came into her own after retirement. There were rumours about her time at St. Xavier’s College being vitiated by a war with Eunice de Souza but now both are gone and neither ever spoke about these matters, so we will never know the truth of it. When Nisha wrote her first short stories, Dom Moraes likened her to Katherine Mansfield and he was right. There was no one who could plumb the depths of the broken-hearted who carry on anyway. She captured the zeitgeist of the comprador class of Goa, those women who were left behind when the somewhat ragged and forlorn Portuguese empire finally limped away from India in 1961, the first to come, the last to go.

And so when I met her the first time, I took her to be a Goan Catholic born and bred. Of course, she was not. She was one of the three daughters of the legendary H.M. Patel, former Union Minister. They were a Chekhovian bunch of sisters: there was the one who sold eggs out of her farm, there was the other one who sat on the board of Amul with Verghese Kurien, and there was Nisha who married Sylvester of Da Cunha Associates. Is that how Da Cunha Associates got the Amul account? Anyway, they scripted the Amul success story that wiped out Polson Butter. It was idiomatic (Polson mat lagaanaa yaar… one said. ‘Don’t try to butter me up.’) Eustace Fernandes designed the iconic little girl in the polka-dotted dress.

If this sounds like a script out of an Old Bombay film made by Merchant-Ivory, that was how it was remembered. Artist Gobhai remembered a beautiful bungalow in Mazagaon with a huge dining table presided over by the Da Cunha matriarch. Nisha told me of Dona da Cunha’s last days. “She would only eat tongue and lemon sweets,” she said. “And I had to find both for her.”

Exploring personhood

Towards the end of her life, I would meet her sometimes at the Yacht Club into which she had moved with her husband Sylvester. This person needed nursing because of his Parkinson’s disease.

“Are you writing, Nisha?” I asked her once.

“There is nothing left to say,” she said and I thought of A.L. Kennedy in a hotel room at the beginning of On Bullfighting. She is depressed, she has nothing left to say. And so she has agreed to write a book on bull-fighting. It is a magnificent book but, in the end, Kennedy is still where she was: facing silence.

“You could always write a memoir?”

“I lived those times. There is no mystery to them,” she said.

That perhaps may have been at the heart of her writing: the exploration of what it means to be another person, a woman unfulfilled, a woman abandoned, a woman out of step with her time and place.

The writer is a poet and novelist.