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.
In conversation with Rochelle Potkar
Issue no 19
As these stories organically came about, I gleaned that the common thread was Bombay, later Mumbai. As one consumes the ebb and flow, sea-breeze, buzz and bustle, march and spring, it puts you into the rhythm of its heartbeat and the city speaks to you. There is a hum that I have not felt in other cities of the world, rare like Bombay blood group. This hangover is one of memory, in and outside the city then. More so, of the joint march of its citizenry of all classes—industrious as bees and ants.
In conversation with Vatsala Mendonca
Issue no. 14
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.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no. 14
Canada has been in the news lately for the implied racism of its prime-minister Justin Trudeau. Perhaps what’s relevant to the large number of Goans settled in Canada is not Trudeau’s faux-pas but questions about Canada’s history of racial exclusion and how it might have impacted their lives.
In conversation with Janet H. Swinney
Issue no. 13
My approach anywhere I go is to be an observer. And I mean observing without any preconceived idea of what it is you’re looking at. Looking and trying to figure out why things are done in a certain way, which may not be your way. Trying to figure out what the rationale is – because there will be one.
In conversation with Suneeta Peres da Costa
Issue no. 12
Jessica Faleiro in conversation with Suneeta Peres da Costa discusses Costa’s latest book Saudade. This is a coming-of-age story of Maria-Cristina, told from her point of view of growing up against the tumultuous political backdrop of pre-Independence Angola while still under Salazar’s rule.
