By Selma Carvalho
Poet and playwright Owen Sheers thinks landscape is what happens to nature when humans arrive. We create landscape, otherwise nature exists, forlorn, desultory and on its own. In every manner the newly released anthology The Brave New World of Goan Writing & Art 2025, edited by me and published by Cinnamon Teal, encapsulates this ethos of Goans interacting with the land of Goa. Identity is that most unknowable thing, constantly changing, a mere shadow on the edges of our consciousness, and yet if something were to exist as Goan identity than that something is our love of the land. There is a beautiful rendering of it by the poets in the anthology. Salil Chaturvedi in “Ghosts of a Grove” writes, “You wake up and it is already late August. At ten-past-six the kingfisher leaves its perch with an ear-splitting call. It’s a silver morning chiming with the sounds of doves, orioles, prinias, coucals, drongos and a solitary orange thrush which sings with great enthusiasm.” Or, Tino de Sa’s homage to Goa’s seasons, in “Three Months in Goa,” “April, Briefly April leans in like an unlatched door— not quite May, but no longer the half-hot half-cool riddle of March. The sky forgets its lines—murmurs cloud-script in looping cursive.”
This exquisite anthology comprises twenty-six contemporary writers, including such luminaries as Victor Rangel-Ribeiro, Manohar Shetty and Jerry Pinto, and consists of three sections short-stories, poetry and essays on Goa.
The short-stories are varied in theme from queer writing to dystopian worlds, but quite a few of the short-stories writers express a deep sense of loss for Goa’s changing topography. There is a battle on at the moment for Goa’s soul—trying to educate people who don’t understand the gentle rhythms of this land, those who see everything through the prism of transaction—reckless development, commercial real estate, cowboy tourism. Glenis Mendonca translates into English from Konkani, Menino Almeida’s “Dumingo’s Fields,” which wrestles with land being usurped for a developmental project. The protagonist watches helplessly as everything he loves is destroyed: “Some others planted with chillies, olsandde beans, lady fingers, and greens, peeking their heads just high enough to catch the eye. The trucks unloaded on the freshly sown crop, destroying the farmers’ labour.” In Nathanial D’Costa’s “Snapper,” the love of the land shines through in his exquisite descriptions: “The leaves on the jackfruit tree have spotted the sun and they slowly stretch out in the light. The familiar honk of the baker follows him into our lane. I call out to him. Two of the hottest loaves of bread, I say. Buying the morning loaves used to be a ritual for Gina.”
There is a lot of talk these days about new settlers in Goa feeling excluded. How do any of us come to belong to the lands we adopt as home, we become interested in them, in the people, the land, the traditions. Nilankur Das is one such new settler who already understands that to be Goan is to respect its land. In his two short-stories he explores this theme. His first lines in, “The Shawarma Conspiracy,” express a deep sense of loss, “The rains had passed, the earth no longer drank but let the water fester in shallow pools, the smell of rot rising, clinging to the air, to the walls, to the skin of those who moved through it. In the village of Assolna, between the rivers Mandovi and Sal, the people had learned to accept what was given to them, the meat in their curries, the water in their wells, the news that came to them in murmurs from one mouth to another.”
The essayists too are concerned about land, landscape and how we leave our stamp on it. Michelle Mendonca Bambawale, in “Haruki’s Siolim Vaddo Walks,” longs from respite from the onslaught of developmental works. She writes, “Every few days we ventured to the low lying paddy fields, the Chapora backwaters or the cashew plantations on the hill. We took in the green and the peace and could feel ourselves slowing down from the hectic pace of our Bombay evening walks.”
What happens when humans interact with nature. We landscape it with homes. For over two decades Heta Pandit has been invested in Goan homes. In her essay titled, “The Goan Home,” she observes the evolution of a Hindu home. She writes, “You approach the house from the frontend along a red road, a tambdo rosto. On your left is a field where the family is growing paddy, nachni, hog millet and a few vegetables. Green mangoes hang on the big old tree to the left of the fields. Some of Lakshmi’s colourful sarees are tied between bamboo poles to keep the goats out.”
What writing does is it captures a moment in time: the view from a window, the smell of the sea, the quiet of rain, the stillness of graves. This is our life, this is how we embrace it, and this is how we preserve it, by creating a memory of it.
Available for purchase at Dogears Bookshop, Margao or online.
Banner Cover image by Anhelina Osaulenko downloaded from Unsplash.com