Geetanjali Krishna: One carpenter too many

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

Nine, ten, eleven...and look!
Here's the twelfth! "" cried my eight-year-old during a walk through Benaulim village in Goa.

What was he counting, I asked? "Carpenters," he replied, "isn't it funny that we'd find so many of them in this village?" It was, I agreed, for surely there couldn't be such a large market for furniture in Benaulim "" one of the larger villages of Goa, but certainly not large enough to support so many carpenters.

"There isn't that much of a demand for furniture," agreed Pascal, our local friend, "except for the cupboards that parents traditionally gift to their daughters when they marry...but still almost all the boys in the village learn carpentry." I wondered why everyone would want to acquire the skill, when it was obvious there were more carpenters than furniture buyers in Benaulim. He laughed, "just tradition, I guess...even I tried my hand at it for a while!"

When we saw the thirteenth carpenter's shed, I was just too intrigued to pass it by. Workmanlike to an extreme, it had lots of wood stacked outside, but no finished pieces of furniture, or evidence of any work in progress. Itching to find out what sort of furniture was made there, and who bought it, I walked right in. A sleepy old man emerged from its dusty depths, looking at me inquiringly. His name was Joaquim Fernandez, he said, and he was one of the oldest carpenters in Benaulim. He specialised in making cupboards, no surprises there, and took us within to show us what he was working upon. It was a handsome three-door piece with a secret drawer that opened with a catch cunningly disguised as a regular brass nail.

"I still have to sand it a little more for the grain to show," said Fernandez, "even after all these years as a carpenter, I enjoy seeing the grain of good quality wood emerge under my hands!"

The man was obviously a good craftsman, and loved his work too. But, I wondered, did he have enough work to sustain him throughout the year? "It takes me about fifteen days to make a cupboard like this one, and I'm usually able to sell one such piece once in a month for between Rs 16,000 to 20,000," he said. "I also sometimes sell smaller chests and carved altars during church festivals," he added. Once, he even managed to sell three cupboards in a month: "but that," he said dryly, "was an unusually romantic month, and consequently, I had to work very hard."

Fernandez said he didn't make much money even at the best of times, for his raw material is expensive. "Also, during church sales, the competition from other carpenters is so great that I sometimes have to reduce my prices substantially to stay competitive," he said without rancour. Why then, I asked the question burning in my mind, were there so many carpenters in Benaulim?

Fernandez took his time to answer. "Many reasons, I'd imagine," he said. "First, since there's such a fine tradition of carpentry here, young boys find plenty of good masters to get apprenticed to. So every boy who hasn't managed to find any other job becomes a carpenter. Also, there is a fairly regular demand for cupboards and altars." Then he smiled and added, "Being a carpenter in a village of carpenters also means that I have plenty of time to pass the time of the day in the local toddy tapper's verandah. At sixty, even if I worked hard and made myself a fortune, what would I do with it?"