Book review: 'Let Me Tell You About Quinta'

Let Me Tell You About Quinta
Author: Savio Viegas
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 254
Price: Rs299

In Tales From The Attic, Savia Viegas’s first book (2007), the central character Mari recalls a childhood of darkened spaces.

These spaces are both literal and figurative, a young girl’s getaway in an attic, as well as her cloistered, troubled childhood. We are introduced to a small world of tradition and anxiety, a world mostly located in the family’s old house in south Goa.

In Let Me Tell You About Quinta, Viegas’s second book (Penguin, 2011), Mari wakes up one night from a dream about a ladder walking up and down looking for her: “It was a ladder with two eyes and a slight twitch on its third rung”. The characters of the first book return in Quinta, as do references to events from the first book, such as a violent incident involving a pushed-away ladder.
The perspective of the attic — of retreats and stored-away memories — also recurs in Quinta. For example, on difficult occasions, as a boy, Mari’s father Tito secretly enters the house through the attic by climbing a tree. In Quinta though, the lens is wide-angle and Mari is part of a larger narrative that spans four generations and several decades.

The geographical pivot of the story is Quinta, the family’s ancestral house in Carmona. This space is populated, directly or indirectly, by various real or fictionalised Viegas family members and associates — Preciosa, Piedade and Pedrin, Mariquinha and Milagrosa, Tito, Tish and the dog Tome, and others.

In Quinta, time is elliptical and braided narratives emerge from or return to the same character or event. Like the changing rhythms of the region’s river Sal, the entwined stories unfold against a changing landscape — from colonial Goa to the arrival of the first Western beach-dweller “hippies” (“…Bai, you should see them, they look like Jesus!”), to the advent of another colonisation by the land sharks.

Along with the shifting narrative and temporal planes, the prose moves between wry description, easy immediacy, and magic realism (teeth lying scattered and chattering; a car transporting a pregnant woman filling up with amniotic fluid). Sequencing through these cadences, Viegas tells a gentle story that is both particular and universal — of a Goa that has faded, and of the quiet violence and love and longings of families and people everywhere.