The next time you cannot make it to Goa for your dream vacation – or perhaps even if you do find yourself on its beaches in pleasant contemplation of your next culinary high – read The Baptism of Tony Calangute.
For you do want to “soak in” Goa, don’t you? Not just the partying and the merrymaking but also the history and the people, the countryside and the culture, and of course, as almost everywhere, the dark underside not far below the surface?
Vivid yet typecast characters
Sudeep Chakravarti’s tale of the plunder of Goa is wrapped around the lives of several of its residents, and is in that sense, an allegory. The characters that populate the novel are all emphatically Goan as they ought to be, and are delineated with great insight. Consider this aside on the thuggish businessman, the central antagonist – “staunch, even violent self-belief is a prerequisite for leadership” – which will ring true for many readers when they think of at least some of the “successful leaders” they know or admire.
Having said that, the characters in this book are perhaps a tad overdone – the grasping, vulgar second wife, the crass and lowlife policeman, the idealist jholawala who wants to save Goa, the graceful and artistically inclined woman who comes from old money, and of course the evil politician. Just a little bit of deviation from these typecasts would perhaps have made readers more expectant, wondering what lies around the bend.
A tryst with history
There is a large dose of history of course, for the dual reasons that Goa alone among our modern day states has still-surviving bits and pieces of its rich Portuguese past, and also because Chakravarty is an accomplished historian. In fact, the plunder that is brought out in vivid detail is not only the ruination of the pastoral idyll that Goa once was – not so long ago – but also the violence and banality which has replaced the ancient regime.
Although the blending of history and narrative is for the most part a happy one, once in a while things are stretched beyond belief. It seems unlikely, for example, that a brutal, wife-beating, virtually illiterate and grubby businessman would reflect on the outcome of a distant British end-of-war election on the slender logic that he shares his name and certain characteristics with one of the protagonists of that faraway, almost forgotten, poll.
Another niggling complaint is that translations are not provided for the large number of Goan words used, and although some can be deciphered from the context, footnotes would have helped.
Evocative and wry
One of the best aspects of Charavarty’s writing however, is his wry, understated sense of humour. About the evil usurper-businessman’s first meeting with a woman on whose business he has designs, Chakravarty writes: “Winston thought he wanted Charming, but he was certain he wanted her business.” About an everyday table condiment, he writes, combining great writing, history and sly humour in one fell swoop: “Pepper made for fruits of the sea or heavy meats on board great ships and on the great tables of Europe to be better preserved, more palatable and, during the stately journey through the innards of sailors and society, also made it easier to pass wind.”
In essence, this is a novel of great personal anguish, and Charavarty’s brutal prose conveys it like no other:
“New land. New business. New money....They want it all. They want to build hotels, resorts and clubs, bring in pleasure women and men, trance, everything. They even control the charter businesses, which brings along with a fig leaf a captive audience...Visitors come to Aparanta for instant therapy, but what of our illness, what of our poison that mixes with the poison of visitor residue? We are steeped in toxicity and yet so few notice.” He exhales, “The couch itself is in need of therapy.”
Interspersing such bouts of pain, though, are lilting descriptions of the land and the sea with which Chakravarty is clearly in love: “There are stories in these sands that drape the coast like a wedding sari. There are stories in the waters that nourish this land. There are stories in these seas that once shaped the history of the world.”
Read the book then for the stories and for Goa.
The Baptism of Tony Calangute, Sudeep Chakravarti, Aleph Book Company.