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| Edited By: DNA Sunday Team |Source: DNA |Updated: Dec 05, 2017, 01:57 PM IST
At the start, let her own words speak for Roanna Gonsalves, author of this brave new collection of short stories that should not be approached as just another diaspora offering. The setting may be diaspora — Australian, antipodes. The circumstance may bring to mind the Green Card, holy grail of Indians going West, here defined as Permanent Residency, PR for short. The sensibility is that of someone straddling two countries with ease instead of angst, as she tries to make sense of one in relation to the other.
Her words, taken from "Straight, no Chaser". "She went home with a man from Cavana. The bike ride was sweet, laced with letting go. It was a surprise that she went with him at all. But Cavana is a place of promise and forgetting. Of moons that sweeten skies with roguish delight."
One of the few stories in the collection set in Mumbai isn't even about the quest for the PR, but for another, more important quest, control over one's life after the wedding is over, the children born, the husband, almost inevitably, philandering across countries and continents. Inevitably too, most of the protagonists are women, facing the realisation that relocating their lives puts the onus of change mainly upon them, that men will by choice be the observers, thinly attached to shifting realities and changing narratives.
The other stories are anchored in Australia, land of the Big Sky and the bigger Wet, where you venture in on a prayer and then spend half your life waiting for the PR to come through, so that you never need go 'home' again even as you helplessly navigate the treacherous shoals of memory and longing that keep pointing you towards a shore you would rather forget.
In story after story, Gonsalves emerges as the master of the original metaphor, the artist of analogy, so that the familiar becomes almost exotic, the cultural peculiarity becomes the quirkiness next door. Meanwhile, steeped in the Goan Catholic traditions of a Mumbai origin, she brings to her stories the rich flavours of a past existence co-existing easily with the present. Hers is a voice we look forward to hearing again, sooner rather than later.
