By Jessica Faleiro
Your first book Shadow of the Palm Tree (2019) brought to light the presence of the slave trade the Portuguese brought to Goa. Your second book when god died (2023) brings to light the Goa Inquisition, another significant historical event in Goa that isn’t talked about very much. What was the motivation or inspiration for choosing to portray this particular moment of history in your latest novel?
By Heta Pandit
Why do we call it a book release, Rochelle? In fact, isn’t it just the reverse of release? Holding, reading, and experiencing a book is an inhalation, a holding in of your breath, a waiting for a revelation. That is exactly how I felt when I began reading Coins in Rivers. I wonder why the perpetrators of all the atrocities described against women are men. You write as a feminist; you see and understand scars. Even the ones under the skin. And yet, I see a soft gentle touch, not the caustic, harsh, and scarred perspective of a hard-core man-hater.
By Selma Carvalho
My anecdotal observations suggested that Goans were leaving Goa for a better life. At the same time, many others from across the country were moving to Goa for a better life too. Hence when I moved to Goa during the pandemic, I grappled with fundamental questions about modern migration, indigenous cultures, and identity: Where is home? Where do I belong? What is culture? How do I connect with my culture and community?
By Selma Carvalho
Longlisted for the Asian Prize for Fiction 2023, Mrinalini Harchandrai discusses her book. This story was inspired by my mother’s childhood experiences in 1961 Goa. So quite a fair bit of the details of life then have been reaped or borrowed from family stories itself. I myself spent my childhood summers visiting my grandmother’s home in Goa, so perhaps some facility with the tongue and an understanding of mindset nuances seeped into me over the years.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no 26
Icarus is dead, Icarus is alive. He resurrects himself in all of us as surely he must, in that tiny seedling hope, reaching for a dream which lies beyond our grasp. This then is the premise of Reshma Ruia’s haunting novel, Still Lives (Renard Press, 2022), drawing the reader in immediately and imperceptibly into a brooding sense of loss, a palpable dissolution, a wounded self, searching through the gloaming.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no 25
At the heart of the controversy lies Teha’amana, his muse, barely thirteen (or was she eleven) when forty-three-year-old Gauguin, by arrangement with her Foster Mother, took her as his ‘bride.’ Could Teha’amana give her consent in such an arrangement? And if we assume some diluted and distorted form of consent, did she have any agency in this action?
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no 25
In 1877, urged by the British, Barghash formed an army and it is customary within British military tradition to have a band attached to battalions, in order to perform marching and ceremonial music. What is extraordinary is that in a time of colonial hierarchies defined by race, the intended band for Barghash’s army would comprise almost entirely of Goans from the west coast of India.
By Shazia Shaikh
Issue no 25
In a place like Goa, known for its glitz and glamour, its parties and perversions, a family of farmers have managed to continue their quiet and dignified lifestyle. The simple pleasures of life like family and love is the driving force of their life. At the core of it is their connection with nature. This photo-essay documents the women as observed in their house and working on the plantation over a period of one month.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no 25
Devi’s writing is an exquisite capture of mid-century Goan society, mores and landscape. The detailed descriptions of the houses and households in particular are of interest for the sheer opulence they conjure up, a gilded age indeed which faded far too soon, and it is easy to see why for so many Goans, there persists a saudade for a paradise lost.
By Jugneeta Suda
Issue no 24
Artist Julio D’ Souza has rendered the Last Supper many times in the last 13 years. When I talked to him he said, “Irrespective of how many I have painted, when I set out to paint again, for me, it’s One Last Supper” Every-time. Without exception. The magnetic pull is the metaphor in the painting, a family/community coming together to partake of a meal at the dining table. A masterpiece embedding the dance of ‘Light & Shadow’, the polarities are palpable.
By Kavita Peter
Issue no 24
The 18th century British poet and abolitionist Helena Williams, summed the Christmas spirit brilliantly in this excerpt. Where else can the confluence of taste and memory of joyous times come true but in the baking of Christmas cake? We can all agree the “Cake” that Williams calls “Life’s calendar of bliss and pain” is a good and sweet way to round up the year. Culinary historians attribute its origins to the plum porridge in medieval Europe. After a day of fasting, this warm and nourishing meal was what people ate on Christmas.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no 23
Reshma Ruia is an award-winning British-Asian writer. Her first novel, Something Black in the Lentil Soup was described in the Sunday Times as ‘a gem of straight-faced comedy.’ Her second novel A Mouthful of Silence was shortlisted for the SI Leeds Literary Prize. Here in conversation with Reshma, we discuss her newly released collection of short stories titled Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness (Dahlia Press, 2021) exploring characters who are trying to heal from their wounded selves.
By R. Benedito Ferrao and Deborah Julia Al-Najjar
Issue no. 22
The past stays with us, this we know. But what we can be less certain of is how the future possesses us even before we arrive at it. Before 1991, India had only one television channel. That changed with the dramatic overhauling of the country’s economy in the last decade of the twentieth century.
By Marlon Menezes
Issue no 22
It was on the 2nd of August that I woke up to the familiar wail of Arabic on my radio, but I immediately realized that I was listening to the wrong language in the wrong country. I was in Canada and the Arabic I heard was a plea for help from Radio Kuwait that was re-broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as a lead-in to their headline story that morning.
By Noor Alhuda Aljawad
Issue no 22
I was born in Southern California in late August 1991, a year and a few weeks after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. I say Saddam’s invasion, and not Iraq’s, because every Iraqi person I have ever known, be they family members or friends, opposed what my great aunt Raja’ described as اعتداء, an act of aggression.
By Shahd Alshammari
Issue no 22
Teta came to Kuwait long before she knew that home could be a place you called home. Long before she ever heard the saying “Home is where the heart is,” and long before she hung a plaque with these words on it in English – a language not her own – on her kitchen’s wall.
By Dena-Al-Adeeb
Issue no 22
Disturbance is a visual and performative memoir presented as a triptych video art project. The piece is comprised of three videos, entitled 1990, 1980, and 2003 –– years in which the first Gulf War erupted, the Iraq-Iran war started, and the US invasion and occupation of Iraq took place. 1990, 1980, and 2003 correspond to the artist’s displacements due to the same events.
By Dina Lobo
Issue no 22
My father recalls a humbling moment three months into the Gulf War in Kuwait, in which food was scarce. He walks me through his sensorial recollections of 1991. Black skies for weeks as he was unable to distinguish morning from night due to the firing of oil wells. The background echoing with noises of rockets, explosions, and gunshots that made sleep difficult.
