Joao-Roque Literary Journal est. 2017

By Jane Borges

It all began when Mai started remembering. On loop. Repeating snatches from her memory none of us had ever heard about. Hers was a small life, lived between different chawls in South Bombay. The tiny rooms she inhabited with her husband and children was a space of survival, crammed with people, spare furniture and objects. The proximity was suffocating. More so the routine.

By Selma Carvalho

Lindsay Pereira’s fourth book is titled Super (Harper Collins, 2026), a pun on the word which the protagonist Sukhpreet Gill is fond of using to express appreciation but is also a job commonly undertaken by immigrants in North America, that of superintendent or maintenance man of a block of flats, the popular contraction being “super.”

By Selma Carvalho

Here amidst the well-preserved wooden boxes and files was almost a Pompeiian preservation of how Goans lived in Zanzibar, the quarrels they had, the estates they left behind, their obituaries, registration of contracts, and most significantly their quasi-political role within the Portuguese consulate of Zanzibar. Here they existed not as someone else’s perception of them but as blood and bone, kith and kin.

By Gargi Guha

Rains, 
Yet again,
Through a curtain of coconut fronds. 
I know, I must forget plans 
or try to be practical. Or nice.
For, this is a call 

By Gordon Pires

The cotton of my shirt clings,
a heavy second skin
glued by the salt of a Goan afternoon.
In this heat, the mind is a dry well,
no plots,
no movement

By Salil Chaturvedi

A mother calls from a thousand miles
and tries to swallow her daughter whole through the earpiece of a phone.
Amidst the cacophony of frogs, her silence is borrowed
from the trees, as are the mauve flowers
that sprout regularly in her hair.

Review by Michelle Mendonca Bambawale

Tale of Two Kitchens: A Culinary Journey through Cochin & Goa (Books etc., 2026), is a charming, all-colour tribute to the author’s life in food. Crescentia (Cres) Scolt Fernandes is an Anglo-Indian (of Portuguese and Dutch descent) chef and restaurateur, her husband Chrys is of Goan descent from Divar. She writes this memoir with recipes that document her history through two cultures on the same coast—Kerala and Goa.

Review by Selma Carvalho

Imagine the fear that pervaded Goa in the December of 1961. At least one section of Goan society knew with absolute certainty that their lives would change forever. It sometimes amuses me when we speak of Goan identity and its imminent loss. Goa has always had a plurality of identities coexisting. The culture of the Konkani speaking agriculturist mundkar in rural Goa is as divorced from the Portuguese-speaking Goan of literary societies and leisure associations as it was from the Marathi speaking Goan of the hinterland.

Review by Michelle Mendonca Bambawale

During the pandemic, Sharbelle discovered a shoe box tied in a faded red satin ribbon stuffed with a few of her parents’ letters to each other. The paper was frail, the handwriting faded, but the box had survived seventy years, shifting times and places, harsh Goan monsoons and a termite infestation. Reading them, Sharbelle learned about her parents lives before they had even met each other. She says in the Prologue, “of the hundreds of letters Mum Marge wrote over the span of six years, only fifty or so survived the termites’ assault. Of Dad Rodrigos’ only three.”