Josephine Noronha is not an easy woman to follow. Her rubber slippers appear nothing more than a blur as she walks through the maze of lanes in Margao’s central market. The pile of brown cartons on her head doesn’t slow down the 60-year-old. Noronha neither twitches nor fumbles as she frees herself of the boxes, arranging them neatly in a corner outside a busy store. “Why are you surprised? I have been doing this work for the last 30 years,” she says, adjusting her rosary and scapular with her deceptively frail fingers.

Noronha belongs to a tribe that has only a dozen or so members left: bhadels (women porters). And Margao is the only market in Goa where you will still find these women — all of them senior citizens — in action. “I worked in the fields ages ago, but when I married and had children, the money was not enough. So I started looking for work as a bhadel ,” Noronha says even as another customer, owner of a palm jaggery and candle store, instructs her to fetch goods from a tempo. “ Mashe rao (please wait),” she tells him, puts her wages into a purse tied at her waist and goes back to work again.

Loading and unloading of goods is a round-the-clock affair at Margao’s busy covered market. Called New Market, though it was last renovated in 1889, the bhadels’ workplace is a crisscross of narrow lanes. In one such lane you will find Caitana Maria Borges, 76. “The women worked as porters even when the Portuguese were here,” she says. A bhadel for over 60 years, Borges picked up the baton from her mother-in-law. She says, “I was married young, and my mother-in-law was a bhadel . She got me here to work. Most of us are from one waddo (sector) in Borda (a suburb of Margao); a few are from Davorlim or Navelim, which is close by.”

These hardworking grandmothers get ₹2,000 a month under the state’s senior citizen scheme. But that’s too meagre to run a household. “We need the money, even though what we earn as bhadels is not great. And we are not as strong as before,” laughs Jacqueline Carvalho, 70, from Navelim. Just like the other bhadels , her printed sari hangs a little above the ankles and a towel is tucked at the waist. “I work for two days, and the next two days I have to rest. But I can’t sit at home. Who will help us? Do you think the new daughters-in-law in jeans will share the load?” she asks.

The honesty of the bhadels is legendary. And every store owner in the market vouches for the same. “I can give them a parcel of ₹1 lakh and not be worried at all,” says Prashant Naik of AR Naik and Associates, a kitchen appliances store. The porch outside his store is where most bhadels break for lunch. “Our store is over 100 years old… We sold cloth, rice, spices and gold earlier. These women have always been here. They have watched us grow up,” says Naik.

“Our shop has been around for 50 years. Both my grandfather and father employed bhadels ,” says M Shetti, a rice merchant, who works with Carvalho on a daily basis. “We can leave our shops to them, and go home for a break. They are honest, reliable and don’t charge too much unless it is really hard work. You don’t have to follow them, they will return with the goods,” adds Shetti. He teases Carvalho on his way out: “Do you want me to tell them how mischievous you are?” Pat comes the reply, “Yes, please tell them that I slapped you when you were a little boy.”

The relationship between the trusty porters and the traders, however, will end in a few years. “Their numbers are dwindling, they are old and no young woman is interested in this job. The Howrah Express and the Konkan Railway trains have flooded the markets of Goa with thousands of labourers over the last decade. We will soon have to depend on non-Goans who can’t speak Konkani,” says Shetti.

While the world around them has changed, the burden on the heads of these women porters has not eased. With rates of ₹30 for 25kg or ₹10 to carry a shopping basket from the shop to the car park, it is little money for the effort. As widows whose sons don’t earn enough as daily wage labourers, these women are still the breadwinners for their families. Cristalin Carvalho, 76, says, “I come at 9am and leave in the afternoon, exhausted. My sons are dead. And no one from the new generation wants to join me in doing this kind of work. The grandchildren live with me. I need this money.”

Bhadels take a break only after the shop shutters are drawn for the siesta, and the market is relatively quiet. Their steel tiffin boxes are filled to the brim with rice, fried fish and a smattering of red curry. Between morsels, eaten in silence, one of them says, “We are the only ones left. You won’t see more of us soon.” The rest nod in agreement.

Sharon Fernandes is a Goa-based writer

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