Review by Selma Carvalho

I am a firm believer that all things Goan need to be documented, for I, in an ever-growing sense of foreboding feel like we are living at that perforation, where worlds and societies tear apart, where tradition and history blur and we stare endlessly into a new future rearing up, having lost sight of the old. Of course, that doesn’t really happen, for we live in an ever-near past, and what really happens is that we see our present as an extension of this near past, and we become neglectful of preserving it.

The tail-end of 2021, sees the release of the anthology Outside In (Goa, 2021) edited by author Ben Antao, which goes a good distance in this process of documenting things Goan or at the very least things definitively literary and Goan. That a few of the stories first appeared on the Joao Roque Literary Journal and are now curated into a print shelf life, gives me great pleasure, for they will live in the archives of a library and be read by generations to come. This is a fine collection of short stories, memoir and a novella—there are so many familiar and acclaimed names the reader will recognise: Salil Chaturvedi, Anita Pinto, Jessica Faleiro, Yvonne Vaz Ezdani, Nathaniel da Costa, Veena Gomes-Patwardhan, Bina Datwani, Pantaleao Fernandes, Edith Melo Furtado, Sheela Jaywant, Jeanne Hromnik, Bina Nayak, Kornelia C. Rebel, Alisa Souza, and Alexyz Fernandes, who all have work included, and every piece deserves commendation but for the sake of brevity, I will limit myself to a few which speak to larger societal issues.

‘The Middle Room,’ by Anita Pinto is a deeply unsettling story about the vulnerability of children. It unfolds with chilling tension where the reader is only slightly ahead of the narrator and can anticipate what is about to occur, but wishes to be proven wrong. It goes to the heart of a parent’s dilemma about entrusting young children into the care and custody of strangers. She [Maryann]was six years old when she went with her parents to visit Aunty Greta and Uncle Thomas. They were not really her Aunt and Uncle but in small towns in the 1970s, all older people were addressed as Uncle or Aunty. Aunty Greta was a small frail woman who hovered around her husband like a bee. But Maryann recalled the vision of Uncle Thomas. He had a round circle of hair on his head and a wiry little moustache that trembled when he spoke.

I’ve been impressed by Nathaniel da Costa’s writing ever since I first encountered it as a submission to the Joao Roque Literary Journal. He has that remarkable quality of residing in the ordinary and presenting it to us as something extraordinary, a quality English poet Phillip Larkin cultivated throughout his career. Costa’s story, ‘A Day in the Life,’ is a beautiful evocation of personal loss running in tandem with the greater loss that accompanies all change. ‘The villagers say that the dunes were as big as the hills that lay to east of the land and used to tower like old sentinels protecting the village from the storms that came in from the sea.’ There it is, that grief over something that used to be, and now only exists in memory, inhabited by ghosts.

Similar sentiments are echoed by Jessica Faleiro in, ‘Changing Seasons in Benaulim,’ a triptych which in part observes, from her window, the changes taking place across from it: I watched the wetlands in the abandoned property across from my balcony turn into a smorgasbord for feasting water fowl and heron. The two red-billed kingfishers that sat on nearby power lines held court, diving down only when they spotted the fattest frogs darting about. It took me a while to learn how to gauge the changing season from the birds that arrived and departed.’ The observed migrations are not just of birds but of humans too, who depart from their habitats and new residents move in, and although change is inevitable in human societies, there is the loss of the familiar, which we can’t help but mourn.

Two works by Yvonne Vaz Ezdani and Jeanne Hromnik resonate because of their similarity. Ezdani has documented extensively the oral histories of World War II Goan evacuees from Burma, at times forced to trek across treacherous malarial forests. An extract of her wider work, appears in the anthology titled, ‘The Great Trek.’ She writes about a survivor: Lena Rego too went through the experience of having to leave a family member behind when they evacuated to India by ship. She recalls, “My mother was very worried about my brother Lucas who had been left behind in Rangoon and cried all the time for him. Hromnik grew up in Kenya, and although her piece ‘Fairy Tales,’ is an interrogation of Goan folklore, specifically as rendered by Prof. Lucio Rodrigues, the following lines are of interest: In a parallel universe, which is to say analogous but not the same, the stories fed to me in my childhood may not have been those of the Brothers Grimm or Hans Andersen but those collected by Professor Lucio Rodrigues, reflective of a very different way of thinking and manner of living and indeed culture. I believe I was a happier child in that parallel universe, more securely rooted in my environment and with a better sense of myself and my people. Both Ezdani and Hromnik speak of displacement, Ezdani of a physical nature, and Hromnik of a metaphysical nature: a sense of belonging to something and yet not entirely, an understanding that home is a nebulous concept, and an encountering of a consciousness which grows outside of what temporal states impose on us.

One story that stayed with me long after I’d read it was ‘Date at Miramar Beach,’ by Veena Gomes-Patwardhan. Even as I was reading it, I felt there was something novelistic about the piece, and was pleased to read the footnote which stated, it was the opening chapter of a novel, Patwardhan is working on. It opens with a lover’s tiff, but soon delves into issues of class inequality among Goan Catholics. At a wedding: The comical sight of a couple she knew — a gaunt gentleman and a stout lady with puffy cheeks — waltzing clumsily past to "When the Girl in Your Arms, Is the Girl in Your Heart" made Debbie smile. As the couple staggered across the floor, she turned to Lucio, playfully nudging him with her elbow. "Gosh! When will our tarvottis learn to dance with some grace?" he said with a sneer. Lucio who comes from a family of doctors, lives oblivious of his privilege, and how his actions, although seemly innocuous, effect Debbie, the daughter of a tarvotti (seafarers). Although issues of class are endemic in all societies, in Goa, they are intertwined with caste privilege, a system which insists on creating hierarchies based on imagined superiorities, inherited at birth. No amount of economic mobility can wash away the stains of caste, and so even though tarvottis have lifted their families out of poverty, they remain stigmatised as uncouth, nouveau-riche buffoons.

The anthology opens with a novella by Ben Antao, titled, ‘Kusum.’ Antao is known for creating traditionally Goan characters, and his preferred period is the 1950s, the decade leading up to Liberation. Here too, Antao does not disappoint with his storytelling of the eponymous young woman, who is fortunate enough to attract a well-heeled man, willing to marry across caste barriers. But Kusum in a moment of emancipatory zeal, forsakes the comforts of marriage and embraces her mother’s profession, that of being a concubine. Antao, faithfully recreates for us the Margao of the 1950s, exploring beyond the binaries of history, the impact of Liberation. ‘It was the month of January and quite pleasant around 5 pm when Suresh rode to her house to pick her up. He made one turn around the municipal rectangle in front of the Camara building, and parked on its sidewalk. “Let’s go and sit on that bench,” he said. Kusum allowed him to take the lead, thinking more like a friend than a future wife. They sat on a bench set between a lime tree and a couple of young coconut palms across from the Banco Nacional Ultramarino. A scent of fresh lime greeted them.’

The anthology is a worthy addition to the canon of Goan writing in English, and would make an ideal and unusual Christmas gift this year.

Outside In is stocked at Dogears Bookshop, Margao, and can be ordered online here.

Banner image is by Ravi Sangar and downloaded from unsplash.com