A Naxalite in Tony’s Farm

Even as the mining mafia ravages beautiful Goa, a magnificent struggle is unfolding around the sacred groves and pristine rivers
Hartman De Souza Cavorem, Quepem (South Goa)

Mid-40s something and attractive like only someone like Tina Turner could be, Cheryl Marina D'Souza, twice tragically widowed, single mother of 10-year-old, Aki Zafran and wearer of many colourful hats - a history graduate, drop-out final year law student who turned boat-builder, furniture designer, antique-restorer and then successful, honest, beyond reproach entrepreneur for 17 years, big hip-hop fan who loves bass boosters and thinks George Clooney is very cool. She is now a top-drawer sales manager who's making money to keep her late husband, Tony San Francisco's farm going. 

She is a woman who likes following the revs on the Gypsy's dashboard as she changes down to third, then makes them climb as she drops smoothly into second, wheels digging in with a screech, bright headlights marking the road as the jeep takes the sharp corner past the Forest Gate near Cavorem at speed, to drop Aki at school by 7.30am and make it to the gym before she goes to work at Margao, some 36 odd kilometres from the farm. She is most definitely not your 'normal' Naxalite. 

Although that may be her essential being as she sits at the carved Webster dining table with six matching Webster chairs that she made with her old carpenters when she ran her high end carpentry business, dressed in a loose black top and purple wrap-around, bra straps fashionably showing,  glares draped back on her long hair, hissing smoke and getting ready to chair a war council comprising her aide-de-camp, the tall, lithe Aki Zafran, who's brought her notebook and pen out ready to make notes and figure out what she's going to tell the minister for environment every morning when her mother is in jail - what do I call him, she asks Cheryl? Call him Uncle Minister, suggests her grandmother; yes, I like that... okay, Cheryl tells Aki, start writing your questions down, I need to see them after this meeting. 

There's her 80s something feisty mother, Dora, who's in a class of her own, who happily slapped the police inspector's hand off when they loaded her in the back of a Gypsy the last time, saying take your dirty hands off me, don't touch me, you're destroying Goa's water and you're a devil. Now now bringing her diary to the war council where she's listed the questions she's going to ask the chief minister, a man, who, for some perverse reason, she insists on calling Ali Baba.

There's also the two family retainers at the table, Rita, who joined Cheryl and Dora for their one night in Aguada Jail last time and who still gets palpitations when she thinks of sleeping in a large airless room where one of the inmates calmly explained that she was in prison for killing her husband and cutting him into seven pieces. And Shashikala, who stood with them in front of Tembechem Dongor, the sacred grove that close to two years after they blocked the entrance is no more, thanks to a Congress politician wanting to emulate the infamous Reddy brothers of Bellary.