By Jessica Faleiro

Vatsala Mendonça de Sousa is a journalist, editor and scriptwriter. She has contributed extensively to leading national newspapers and magazines, and was responsible over the years for launching several niche publications. She has co-edited This is Goa, a collection of historical and cultural essays, and authored the Cathay Pacific Gentleman Guide to Business Travel. She has been associated with theatre and television and has scripted several corporate films and documentaries. A lecturer in English Literature, copywriting and journalism at several Mumbai colleges, her debut fiction novel Shadow of the Palm Tree (2019) was shortlisted for the First Book Club at Jaipur Bookmark 2018. It explores the fates of the Abreu family shaped by the nefarious slave trade the Portuguese introduced to Goa. Here, in conversation with Jessica Faleiro, the author sheds light on the impact of the trade on one family who act as a metaphor for the collective Goan consciousness.

Jessica Faleiro: Your novel is full of rich and colourful characters.  We really get to understand them because we read about events in the household from their points of view. But, overshadowing everyone’s narrative is the presence of Imaculada’s spirit.  “Everyone knows of Imaculada’s presence in the Abreu home. It is she who reigns over it.  It is a dark reign and so it is a dark household.”  So Imaculada, a traditional healer from Mozambique is the overarching character that weaves through the book. Tell us about the curse of Imaculada’s presence over the Abreu household.  How did it come about?  And what was the inspiration for this particular supernatural element of your novel? 

Vatsala Mendonça de Sousa: Some years ago I came upon an article on traditional healers in Mozambique. They number over 70,000 even today as opposed to around 1500 professional doctors. These traditional healers or witch doctors call upon spirits during the healing session. Many of these healers are believed to live on after they die, their spirits helping their protégés administer health care. As I researched these witch doctors some more. I realized that Imaculada, who had already begun to dominate my pages, had to have been a traditional healer. Only then could I give her the powers she had. The power to cure. The power to curse. The power to cure Imaculada passes on. The power to curse dies with her though her curse never dies.

JF: In your book, you allude to superstition and beliefs in the supernatural in equal measure.  There are curses, exorcisms, spirit hauntings, and more.  Was this just about presenting these spiritual beliefs of a culture in as accurate a portrayal of Goan culture and society as possible, or do you feel there is a more nuanced meaning to the presence of these elements in the book?  Do the hauntings and exorcisms have a deeper meaning or representation about Goan society that you’d like to talk about here?

VMS: The mix of myth and reality, or reality and non-reality is something I have always been drawn to. It is the familiar becoming strange and the strange in return becoming ordinary. For me magic realism, which became the unwitting genre of the book, is the telling of a fantastic story that is grounded in reality. So yes, it is implausible that an African slave could haunt a home 170 years after she died. Yes, it is unreal that all her progeny look pure African even though Goans and Portuguese have contributed to their gene pool. Yes, it is impossible to believe that her curse could be so potent that it affects generations of Abreus. But all this fantasy, all these magical elements are grounded in reality --- the presence of African slaves in Goa, many of whom brought with them the powers bestowed on them by their ancestors, many of whom were ill-treated by their owners, Portuguese and Goan. The combination of African and Goan sensibilities in the story created a landscape that had magical elements in the most pedestrian settings. The supernatural blended with the real. And so besides ghosts who have taken residence in homes for 200 years, we have exorcisms, phantom pregnancies and the power of traditional healers.  

JF: An author’s first book is always the result of a long gestation period.  What was the inspiration for this story? Was there a long gestation period? And what finally triggered you to write down the story and publish it?

VMS: I think this story has been dancing inside me from the time I was around ten. It was my first holiday in Goa. I remember seeing this tall, beautiful African woman in our family home. I was enchanted by her imposing presence. She was introduced to us as the family poskem. But she was all African. I remember inundating my aunt with questions. What was an African woman doing in Goa in the ‘70s? Where had she come from? What was her story? There had to have been a story. I received no answers. In truth no one really knew. In time the line between reality and fantasy, for me, became blurred.

Decades later when I was researching the Siddhis in Karnataka I felt I had finally found the answers. The Siddhis in Karnataka (as opposed to those in Gujarat and Telangana and even Pakistan) are believed to be descendants of runaway African slaves from Goa. These Siddhis, even today, speak Konkani and Marathi. Many of them are Catholics with surnames like Sousa and Fernandes.

I knew I had to write a story about the presence of African slaves in Goa.  The Portuguese, besides being major colonisers in the Age of Sail, were also the flag-bearers of the slave trade. It is estimated that they were responsible for 4.2 million Africans being transported across the world. A very small percentage of these slaves were brought to Goa from the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique. They laboured not just in Portuguese military and religious institutions but even in wealthy Goan households. Over the years some Goans were expectedly lured into joining this lucrative enterprise. 

 Shadow of the Palm Tree was shortlisted for the Jaipur Bookmark’s First Book Club 2018. That was a stroke of luck. As a result a publisher present at the event signed me up. It was released in Jaipur at the start of this year. I have been fortunate to have had launches in Mumbai, Goa (at Sunaparanta) and Pune.

JF: I find the structure of the book fascinating.  The story begins with a mother’s suicide by jumping into a well.  But each chapter is told from the point of view of a character from the household who is affected in some way or the other by her death, including her children.  Through their narration, we learn about other Abreu family members.  What inspired you to develop the structure of the book in this way?  Did you consciously set out to tell this particular story from multiple points of view?

VMS: Instead of an omniscient narrator who knows the viewpoints of each character, I used five different voices – the three sons, the daughter of the family and the poskem or adopted daughter. It turned into a kind of choral book where each character presents his perception of a common reality. I also didn’t want every character to be a handmaiden to one character’s trauma.

I liked being able to give my characters different voices. Take the three sons. Luis, the lawyer, is pretentious, Joseph, the doctor, is emotional and Miguel, the priest, is pragmatic. Anne, the daughter born after three sons, a tiklem, fated to be alone and lonely, is sensitive. But, for me, the most exciting voice to create was that of Claudinha, the adopted daughter. She is the descendant of Imaculada, a slave from Mozambique who served in the Abreu household over two hundred years ago. In my mind, Claudinha speaks a patois, a mélange of Konkani, Portuguese and Makhuwa, a Bantu language which has been passed down from one generation to the next, from Imaculada right down to Claudinha. She speaks in short, staccato sentences. I feel her voice turned out to be the most compelling because of its simplicity.

JF: Through the telling of this story, you reveal the complex layers of Goan high society and everything they hold dear including casteism, property and societal strictures. Every character has and knows their place in society and what is expected of them.  It affects their behaviour and reaction to the events in their lives.  Do you feel this is an accurate portrayal of contemporary Goan society?  Do we still highly value these things or have we moved beyond this?

 VMS: Shadow of the Palm Tree opens in the 1920s and ends in 1961, the year of Goa’s liberation. As you say quite rightly, I attempted to shine light on some of the ills that plagued Goan society of that period. But I realised that the Abreu family became a petri dish of humanity. One besieged by societal and cultural bacteria. Though in Goan society, today, caste has been brushed under the carpet, it still rears its ugly head. The power of property, wealth and the vacillating opinion of society, continue to play a role in contemporary Goan lives. In every family, life lived in front of the curtains often differs from life lived behind those curtains. Behind the curtains, life can be filled with nuances of tragedy, inflections of tradition and intonations of culture. That is what enthrals me.

JF: The novel has several interwoven stories.  First, there’s the ongoing affair between Senhor Salvador and Aurora, which sidelines his wife, Dona Teresa.  Then, there’s the story of Sebastian and his virginal wife Rosa, who resigns herself to a life of fake exorcisms enacted annually because her husband is a closeted pedophile.  Tell us about the journey you had with these characters and what you intended to portray by bringing them to life on these pages.

VMS: Shadow of the Palm Tree opens with a heart-rending tragedy: the death of a mother at her own hands. Yet the shadow of sadness cast on the Abreu family took shape much earlier, in the 1700s, when the family not only converted to Christianity but joined one of the most lucrative enterprises of Christian Europe — the slave trade. This unfortunate career choice would bring the Abreus power, prestige and wealth but also a curse that would snake treacherously through the centuries. From the day Imaculada, a traditional healer from Mozambique, entered their home, she mated her destiny with that of the Abreus. Immaculada cursed the family. She vowed that no Abreu would ever know happiness. Over the years, no Abreu ever did.

For me, the curse translated primarily into unhappy relationships. For instance, Teresa falls in love with the poet but has to live with the man.  

Rosa’s marriage ended the moment her wedding ceremony did. She is unable to get a divorce because the Catholic Church believes in the sanctity of marriage however virulent its state. All these are stories soaked in sadness yet the one that broke my heart was Anne’s. Her relationship is thwarted because of the timing of her birth. She is a tiklem, the daughter born after three sons, a girl fated to bring great unhappiness to the man she marries. Because of this surreal superstition, she is denied happiness.

JF: Tell us about the bhatkar, the mundkar, the tiklem, the poskem, the ocolbai and your choices to portray them so vividly as such.  Do you believe these labels still hold meaning in contemporary Goan society and if so, what meaning do we ascribe to them?

VMS: Each community has its set of legendary characters and Goa has some of the most enduring. Even though many of these characters today have been divested of their prestige, power or position, they continue to hold a place in the community’s collective imagination. Take the woman believed to be cursed with the evil eye. Even today, each of us has her own childhood story of the woman whose visit to our home was immediately followed by the nostril-burning ceremony to ward off the evil eye.

JF: Are you working on a second book of your own?  Please tell us about what other literature or writing-related projects you’re involved with.

VMS: I have been writing professionally for over three decades and have enjoyed stints as a journalist, editor, copywriter and lecturer. But I have never enjoyed anything as much as writing this novel. So even though I sometimes think I may be just a one-book novelist, I have started a sequel to Shadow of the Palm Tree. It has been catalysed by a question I was asked at nearly every one of the book events. What happened to Esperanca’s baby? I realised that people wanted the answer and I wanted to stay with the Abreus for some time more.

Shadow of the Palm Tree can be purchased here.

Jessica Faleiro is our commissioning editor.