Jane Borges

The landscape of Goa in Writing

The landscape of Goa in Writing

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.

Bombay Balchão: Inspired by Family Histories

Bombay Balchão:  Inspired by Family Histories

By Selma Carvalho

Issue no 16

My great-grandfather Ignatius Borges was from Sadashivgad in Karwar; he worked as a motorman for the railways and travelled often. His younger son, Stephen, my grandfather, served briefly in the army, before moving to Bombay in the 1940s, where he lived in a kudd, a short distance from Cavel. He got married to a Goan bride, my grandmother, Anna Vaz, and got himself a job as a tailor, and settled on Grant Road.