Doll-Rice…what is that? It looks like daal-chawal,” This innocent observation of a friend in response to my utterance after seeing the contents of my lunchbox, was perhaps the first realisation that I was different from the rest. As an impressionable eight-year-old, it was the only version of the pronunciation for that staple that I had heard being used by my parents, uncles, aunts and cousins. I recall returning home that afternoon to ask my mother why we pronounced it differently. She smiled, “We are Anglo Indians [AIs]. That’s the way we heard it from our parents because they did the same from theirs. We are a bit different from the rest.” And with that one line, my curiosity was sufficiently piqued. Over the years, I would keep throwing all kinds of questions [often of the silly kinds – like ‘Why can’t we have our own country?’] at my mother, who would take great pains to offer logical, simple explanations. “We are a mixed-race community, with ancestral roots either in Portugal, France, Holland or England that emerged due to several waves of migration over centuries from Europe to the Indian Subcontinent. We adopted Western ways and habits, including an anglicised speech while speaking the local language, be it Hindi or the regional language of the state that the community had settled in. Remember, English is our mother tongue,” she explained. It’s a fact that I have repeatedly found a challenge to convince people about. My Portuguese-sounding surname compounded matters.

Post Independence and the countless waves of immigration to other countries over the past six-seven decades meant that Bombay is now left with comparatively minuscule numbers. Till date, AIs are a speck in the presence of other Christians, like the Goans, Mangaloreans, East Indians and Malayali Christians. And yes, we don’t qualify under the generic tag that all Catholics in the city have -- ‘The Macs’.