As we recall, few months before Francis was born, unemployed Frank Mendez was dispatched to Bombay, now called Mumbai City. Because of the tension he created at home, and Mariam’s pregnant condition, he was more or less, kicked out of his own ancestral home. Actually, this Popeye the Sailor Man, went to Mumbai happily as if his parole was over. He worked as a kitchen helper in the Prestigious, Hotel- Taj Mahal, built at Colaba Harbor on the Arabian Sea. This stately, European Renaissance style hotel stands in front of the Monument, famous as ‘Gateway of India,’ erected by the British to commemorate His Majesty, King George the Fifth’s visit to the Jewel of the Crown colony-India, that is.

From his kitchen window, Franky, as his coworkers addressed him, smelled the sea.  The joyous moments, and the pleasure events of that life in the shipping lanes of Persian Gulf was the only fond memories he treasured. With every breeze  his yearning for that life left behind increased and miseries replaced the joy of living in that overcrowded metropolis. Upon arrival to Mumbai, he found a bed renting home where a single bed is rented by for eight hours, typically to two individuals, one working on day and the other, on the nighttime shift. In this arrangement, one occupant of the bed leaves for the work when the other arrives from work to sleep in.They rent the same bed and the owner of the bed gets twice the income the others who rent a bed out on the sidewalks of the city.  The arrangement works fine for the folks like Franky who have arrived from a small town or village in search of employment, which is available instantly, but not a roof over head. The circumstances create needs and the needs spawn entrepreneurs. Apart from the bed renting, storage and guarding of same individual’s measly material possessions is a business in itself and it too flourishes side by side in the places like this.

The working a slave shift, from six in the morning until ten at night, had tied Frank’s feet to the kitchen table. He just could not seek out former friends and colleagues hanging out in the brothels and make inquiries about the Khalasi (Deckhand) job or for that matter, any job on any vessel going anywhere, out of Mumbai Harbor. Finally, the Lady Luck turned around and smiled at him. One day, the original renter, who had sub-rented the bed to the nightshift guy showed up when Frank returned early from the work. When two came face to face, both jumped with joy. The newcomer was no one but Frank’s old buddy. from the Muscat to Alexandria Route. Abdul Sattar and Frank were together for many years from the day he sailed out at sea after marriage. Both were identical twins in habits and philosophy of life. Neither practiced their birth religion and liked the women of same sorts. Free as the migrating birds, they roam the hinterlands of ports.

When they parted company after ten years of seafaring on the same vessel, it was with a promise to get together whenever they were in the same port. Then such promises are like the writings on the sand on a beach -Time, like the tides, wipes everything, to make the slate clean.  After gallivanting together for a week and staying away from the work during that festive time, Frank got fired from the job he was happy to leave behind. Abdul helped his friend to get on a freighter heading for the South China Sea ports. As it is Frank had emotionally left everything in Goa behind and now at sea, he left his motherland for good and did not step on her shore ever again. India was of no interest to him anymore. Being born in a Portuguese colony, he was not a citizen of India by birth and now, he was without a country by choice.

Years added up and twenty some years passed without him noticing any changes. To him, sea looked the same every time he looked outside the porthole and land was nothing but a rim around a body of endless water. Ship after ship he floated around first in the Chinese waters and then in the Western Pacific, the Caribbean isles, and eventually to Brasilia. He jumped the ship in Rio, paid few thousand US Dollar to a pimp and recued a young, native Mulatto woman. She brought him to Sau Paulo’s slums and then in the next ten years he settled down with her. Finally, the craving for the Sea had left his soul and he became a land dweller. The present restaurant and two boys came during that time when the children bearing his last name were living a well-settled and prosperous life in three different continents.

The unexpected arrival of his last child- Francis was a traumatic event for Frank. The news of a birth of his new child did not reach to Frank in Mumbai and on his part; he did not even imagined, leave aside making an inquiry out of curiosity, if not for the joy of fatherhood. The father actually was as close to the place of childbirth, as one-day bus trip but leaving Goa was like surgically removing an organ to him. After decades past, now, here in Sao Paulo’s market square, he was getting drunk with the same son he never held in his arms as a baby.

One wonders, who the hell runs this business of arranging the human life-events. May be, it is more than one entity that is playing a board game of imagination and all living things are the pieces to be used like the Logo set, which kids use to build something they imagine. Rosita and her friends would have fainted if they saw these two together, swapping stories in that squalid room filled with smoke blown around by the old man’s smoking of the Goan, hand-rolled, mini Cheroots. For the first time since his arrival from the outpost, Father Francis Mendez was laughing and clapping like a child without any inhibition. The cheap whisky was working miracles on his libido.

 There was a sense of freedom around him; no one was watching or holding him in any high esteem. They were two Goans having a rollicking time with singing old Konkani songs long forgotten and never heard by anyone around them. The smell of dried Mackerel baking on coals, took both, the father and son to their childhood in Punjim town in Goa. In that merriment, swapping of important information and presence of Pascu, the eldest son, in their city was forgotten. They simply were enjoying the union of a son and his prodigal father.  They would have partied all night but Frank’s age and that uncontrolled Diabetic condition ended the show.

When Francis went to bed, he could not fall asleep. A strange sense of freedom and a carefree attitude replaced his usual, depressive thoughts, which kept sleep away from him. Perhaps memories of childhood took him back to the high school wrestling days. That afternoon he broke good number of rules that the RC Priests are expected to obey. Rosita’s overpowering personality had affected him in a manner, a weak individual comes under a dominant peer’s influence and begins smoking or snorting the controlled substances. Freely they laughed at each other’s jokes, and to her surprise, paid attention to her explanations about different merchandise in the stores.

For Francis, that evening culminated in an unexpected round of merrymaking and reminded him of the tribal celebrations of Amazonian natives’ festivals. There away from the modern civilization, he was without inhibitions of any kind. Pure joy of being one with the nature and her worshiping children, Francis found salvation but returning back in the folds of manmade world, in which he found the freedom suffocating society and has been struggling to fit in. Unexpectedly he found the Oldman who also had escaped from that restrictive environ. Listening to his biography and sensing the yearning of his soul wanting to return to the oceans of the world, Francis found similarity. For that short time of few hours, they both had returned to that domain, as if the booze was a magic potion transporting them to the lands of their heart’s desires.   In the bed, his mind began indulging into the contents of that Pandora’s Box, kept shut tight for three decades.

 From nowhere, memory of that night with Monsignor Eduardo Giovanni came alive. After thirty years, he was visiting that suppressed memory. In the past, he had taken subterfuge in the repetitions of Hail Mary chant as soon as his mind would drift into that minefield, Tonight, he did not feel guilty about anything that happened between the handsome young priest and him many years ago. The sensations and joy of sex he had then experienced was no longer a soul degrading and a forbidden feeling. That moment, he did not agree with the Biblical statement- -What God made- crooked, no human could make straight. Contrary to that, Francis felt a sense of completeness of his body and the Holy Spirit within it. He recalled words of Jesus quoted in the Elaine Pagels’ transliteration from the Coptic Text in the book -The Gnostic Gospels:
          
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”.

“I must bring forth my true nature without breaking the oath of celibacy,” he told himself and continued with the same thought wave, seeking some sort of self assurance and making efforts to set sails again. Life has to be dynamic in order to reach where one's destiny lies and the providence always helps those who have made up mind to face the storms that are sure to rise with the same winds which power the sails.

"My place is not in the Cathedrals of Rome, or any city. I cannot be true to my nature in this bourgeois world of ambitions and the constant struggles for the dominance of others. I must stay with my dad and together, live a life we both can carve out for ourselves." With that resolution, and satisfied with his plans for the future, he fell asleep like a child.