Driven By Distraction
—Sopan Joshi The violence remains with the reader long after the last page is turned
The creeping devastation of a beautiful land is a story that resonates everywhere in India. Sudeep Chakravarti’s novel is set in Goa, but its rapacious developers, mournful lookers-back, see-no-evil bystanders and raging activists might be from anywhere. In a house built with love mixed into its mortar lives Antonio, who keeps a hotel and preserves a gracious way of life. His cousin Dionysus fights doubtful land deals through newsprint and lawsuits, and ultimately pays a hideous price.
Some characters, like Antonio’s tearfully childless wife and his trashy stepmother, remain cutouts, but the villainous are painted in intense colours. Winston Almeida’s ambitions make him the ideal broker between the Russian criminals who plan to buy up the village of Socorro Do Mundo and everything nearby and the buyers who must sell to them whether they want to or not. Even the trustees of Save Goa Society are for sale, it turns out.
Chakravarti is a lover of Goa. He distracts us with recipes for vin-d’alho or descriptions of hand-painted azulejos between a question and an answer, and it’s hard to remember how a conversation connects to what came before or after. There are sentences that make one think, I wish I’d written that: “The quiet was loud here.” And then there are ones piled so high with descriptors and allusions that they lose their punch.
The violence remains with the reader long after the last page is turned. A slender hope rises at the end, but what delights us throughout is the dialogue. Goans will know whether Chakravarti has captured the rhythms of speech exactly, but to the reader it is the jewel of the novel.