Book: APPETITE: NEW WRITING FROM GOA

Edited by Shivranjana Rathore and Tino de Sa

Published by: Ebury

Price: Rs 499

In 2012, on Republic Day, Goa won the prize for the second-best tableau that featured the elephantine bust of a scarlet-draped king. Words: Rex Goa, Pax Panjim. Revelation. As a tween, the dominant view of Goa to me was of palms beaming off a Mercedes cabriolet in Dil Chahta Hai. College-going kids still queue up to dip in smooth sand and the spirits of a man who sells jamun liquor, sea-foam collecting in bags of vinegar chips.

This new collection, edited by Shivranjana Rathore (who also illustrated the cover) and Tino de Sa, dull the sheen of a staid thoroughfare through the former foreign colony. Spittle-rum-shingles-shellac. Goa is ensouled with its own natural interiority, the collated works argue, the thumb to the Deccan palm, abutting it, pivoting it, reifying it.

One rejoices in the consummate editorial skill on display. Even in the choices of motifs and glyphs, it’s akin to finding a hairpin or ammonite on the pavement. Appetite performs a very difficult task with technique where each of the thirty-four works, comprising stories, poetry, critical essays (one of which is purely graphic), has its own metre. It has frequently become the onerous onus of themed collections where a monoculture is employed to safely package it. In Clyde D’Souza’s domestic bedlam titled Sorpotel, frequent vowelled exaggerations in dialogue remind one of caricatures: but it’s what it is. This is not seen again. Take Michelle Mendonça Bambawale’s The Real Housewives of Assagao: the integration of regional languages (Konkani, Marathi, sometimes Hindi and Kannada) follows a gradient. The central characters here are non-natives, and their total removal is apparent from their first sentences — because of the negative-space context provided by the other works. I imagine it may almost be a rush to locate people by their first names or their last names, their preferred expletives, the amount that they sweat, the drinks they consume, across the grid of the state down to the nearest ten miles. This careful balance of rapport and insularity owes much to Goa Writers, membership to which requires, in some way, a certain Goan concert. The pacing and the placement of the work give it a radiant literary parallax where specificity in some collected works foregrounds the general life of a time and place and otherwise foreboding themes of horror, mischief and philately, sex and swooning, roll on like steam in the background.

Many reviews of food-adjacent books make the mistake of titling themselves around some variant of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast but conflate that with a New Yorker article titled “Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast”: Hemingway alludes to a feast whose date moves across the calendar, whereas Bourdain’s, well: imagine a buffet on a bus. When Sunburn Festival announced it was leaving Goa for Mumbai, it was because native Goans protested against the inevitable nonsense that eighty lakh people can wreak upon a place… but, careful: it was shifting from North to South Goa in its final Goan year, like, as locals argued, a tornado that just got second wind. In Tino de Sa’s Happy Hearts Beach Resort (part of the collection), the Goan hosts of a tourist resort supplicate in amazingly noisome detail until something breaks.

Is this relocation of aesthetic and economic priorities a break in a long historical timeline? Not really — and who cares? The pearl of the Orient sheds its oyster very slowly. And then all at once.