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Our minds are surprisingly gifted with this innate ability to omit events that we do not to wish to revisit. But a slight trigger and the mind retrieves them for us, playing them out in technicolour.
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The ladies saw this as the perfect occasion to bring out the cloth fans they had been desperately waiting to flaunt since after summer. The striking paintings of lands unknown on their fans notwithstanding, their eyes still wore the glint of envy as they observed with awe the handiwork of different tailors on other women. The richer among them had come in gowns embroidered with sequins and accessorised with rows of gold necklaces encrusted with coral or pearl.
It was as if they had emptied their jewellery boxes to flaunt their family wealth when the church always harped about frugality.
The men who had come in three-piece hand-me-down suits that had long fallen out of favour with fashion, settled for their kerchiefs or made do with the faint warm air that passed their sides ...
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Always fidgety and nervous, with his round face suspended from his short and portly body like that of a Kuchipudi dancing doll, Fr Augustine’s demeanour forever perplexed me. Everyone else, however, including my own family, was smitten by him and described his reticent nature as the trait of a true servant of God.
As he said this, he heaved a sigh of relief, grateful that he had finally unburdened himself. I looked at him
with pity but chuckled inwardly, resisting the urge to laugh out loud. God would have too.
This pigeonholing was the machination of part love, part hate and a lot of envy.
He wouldn’t eat a morsel of food, not even his favourite bhendi aani sungta chi kuddy (okra-prawn curry)
The mother and daughter turned to the new chapter very quickly. They forgot that they were characters in a novel, not a short story. In this novel, every chapter was connected to the others. And retribution was not too far away.
The first task was to wean Joe off alcohol. The bait was Meryln’s masala tea. For an extra salary of five rupees, Michael’s maid would deliver a flask of the tea at Joe’s dorm every morning, before he could wake up and take
a swig of his country liquor. The alcohol didn’t stand a chance against well-brewed chai.
Time heals the broken. Sometimes, the healing is slow. Sometimes, it is slower. You cannot predict how long it will take before one forgets what
it all felt like—heartbreak, the pain, the anguish, and that emptiness. Years could roll by, and you’d have done ten million different things to keep yourself from thinking, and yet, the mind would remember that moment when your life fell apart and crushed you whole.
The idea of kids moving too far away from parents has always discomfited me. I know that’s
life and all, but still. Imagine if I had abandoned them when they were younger.
Suleman had started his passion project in 1953 in the foyer of the family-owned Botawala Chambers on Sir Pherozeshah Mehta Road, Fort. Soon, the store became the haunt of bibliophiles looking for rare, unusual reads. The most purchased were the DC and Dell comics, American and British magazines, the romances of Mills & Boon and popular pulp fiction, with James Hadley Chase and Surender Mohan Pathak’s books topping the list.
The obsession with white skin—paklos, as fair-skinned people were called in Konkani—was a trait that came with being Indian and most importantly, Goan. It wouldn’t have otherwise taken the Portuguese four hundred years to leave the Indian Catholic heartland.
ending sometimes with ‘men’—a word that has been part of the Goan lexicon since time immemorial and used for punctuating effect instead of a comma, full-stop, exclamation or question mark—and
‘Nothing lasts forever, baby, but it also depends on what your forever is. Is it a day? Is it a month? Is it a year? We make our own forevers.’
