In Victoria High, the parish school I attended in Mumbai, the class divided itself effortlessly into Moral Science and Scripture for Period One. I thought the Christian boys all went to learn Scripture and the other boys went to study how to be good. Then Samuel joined our class in Class IV and he went off to study Moral Science too, because he was a Protestant and his parents did not think the Scripture — same book, different interpretations — would be right for him. It was my first introduction to how the Christian community could slice and dice itself.

But then I went to college and found that the other monoliths in which I had been thinking were also frangible. In Elphinstone College, I found that the Muslims were either Shias or Sunnis; it was the time of the Iran-Iraq War and there were Irani boys all over South Bombay, taking multiple degrees so that they might extend their student visas and be safe from conscription. (I would later learn that there were many more sects and subsects and there were representatives of all these communities in my city.) In similar fashion, the Hindus broke down into castes and communities and state allegiances; no one seemed to have a good word to say about another community. 

Our ability to hold together is superficial. Prod a little and a thin integument — knitted into place largely by outsider viewings and exonyms — splits and we are revealed as the little islands that we are.

So what can I say about the Christian community except that it does not exist? What would I have to say to those bishops in Kerala who urge their communities to support the BJP because they have the same terrible disease of Islamophobia, which they have not diagnosed themselves? How do I understand what it is like to be a Christian Dang or a missionary in Orissa made to drink cow urine and eat cow dung and chant Jai Shri Ram? What would Lord Rama make of this Ram Rajya where his name has become a source of terror for all minorities?

I am comparatively safe as a Roman Catholic of urban origin, with a certain level of urbane sophistication. I am not discomfited by the accusation of being a “rice bag” — a pejorative term thought up by communal minds that refers to the possibility that one of my hungry ancestors may have converted for a bag of rice. Any word of abuse reveals something about the insecurities of those who deploy it. That is valuable information.

But could it be that my privilege allows me the distance that is required for this word not to hurt? How would it be if I were the last person left in a family that had been burned to death, as the Staines family was? When Gladys Staines visited the college of her husband Graham Staines in India, a Hindu friend of mine — it is odd to think that I had never seen him as a Hindu before — went up to her and apologised on behalf of his community. She accepted his apology gracefully and quietly. Would I have the grace to follow the ruling of the Man on the Cross who said, ‘Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do?’

Here, then, is the conundrum. I have probably been asked to write this piece because I was born into a Roman Catholic family but also because some part of my identity has floated free of this label. This happens to all of us but the tags are sticky and when it comes to a dinner invitation, they surface.

For God has now been turned into the Grand Old Dietician in the sub-continent. God is constantly scanning our plates, looking at his watch, considering the calendar, asking if it is “your Friday” or “your Thursday” (communities have different meatless days).

Food is a minefield for the privileged and here, ‘privileged’ is to be read as anyone who is not too concerned about where the next meal comes from. For the underprivileged, it is what is edible and available, and what you can eat without being killed.   Where other nations may have vegetarians who have opted out for a variety of reasons — health, animal rights, ecological respect — India has a preponderance of vegetarians who are vegetarian on religious grounds. I remember the late Dr Jehangir M Jussawalla (father of the poet Adil Jussawalla) who was a vegetarian and won the Dhanvantari Award (for Ayurveda) in 1989, telling me that most vegetarians were vegetarian for the wrong reasons. It had to be a scientific choice, he maintained. I thought then of that last temptation in Murder in the Cathedral by TS Eliot: ‘To do the right deed for the wrong reason.’ I remember another Jussawalla, Dr (Miss) Mehroo Jussawalla taking us through this. She was a great scholar but the truth of this hit me with such force that I didn’t hear the rest of her lecture. 

Right now, the community is beleaguered, uncertain, and this is not paranoia. The new amendments to the Foreign Contributions (Regulation) Act, which tightens conditions applicable to organizations which receive foreign aid, prove this. The Christian community was once a model minority, excelling in education and health care which was offered to everyone, regardless of caste or creed. (Even writing those last five words seemed old-fashioned, as if they came from a prelapsarian time.) Now, they are a minority under threat.

Has the answer been flight?

A Pew report says that the minorities are on the move. An article in The Federal says: While Hindus form 79% of India’s population, they form 41% of the population migrating out of India. On the other hand, Muslims form around 15% of the Indian population, but constitute 33% of the migrants from India. The contrast is even sharper in the case of Christians. They form around 2% of the nation’s population, but form 16% of the migrating population from the country.

Goa has a long history with the Portuguese, longer than India’s encounter with the British. They were the first to come and the last to go. For a while, Portuguese passports were seen as a way out. That way is becoming increasingly difficult, often taking years and expensive agents. It is also now looking bleak because there is a rising tide of racism around the world. 

A Hindu friend — what am I doing, denominating my friends in this way? — married to a Roman Catholic British man, asked me to stand godfather to her children. Her mother-in-law was appalled. ‘You’re not telling me he’s a real Catholic,’ she said. 

She was a Tory, of course, the kind of bigot who thinks Jesus was golden-haired and blue-eyed when in reality, He probably had much more in common with me — physically at least — than with her.

Another moment: I remember when a British publisher came to India and a number of writers were lined up to meet her.

‘This is Jerry Pinto,’ our host said.
‘Pinto?’ she said. ‘Is that a Jewish name?’
‘In some parts of Europe, it is,’ I said. ‘I’m Christian.’
‘You’re Christian?’ she looked startled at the thought. I might as well have said, ‘I’m a unicorn.’  Then she said, ‘There’s a book in that.’

I went home. 

Only, right now, no one knows where home is. If it is where you are accepted as you are, then where would I be accepted? Elements in India say I should go to Italy. Only, Italy has no place for me. To be a minority is to live between fight and flight ― a life of constant negotiation.