Let me tell you about Quinta | Savia Viegas

Provided its fatty meat has been carefully salted, chillied and stewed beforehand, a pork pie can be preserved for months if left to hang in a husk of banana leaves. This traditional recipe is one Savia Viegas relates comfortably, having been raised in Carmona, a small town in south Goa.

In a new novel, Let Me Tell You About Quinta, Viegas applies a similar technique to the history of Goan agrarian life, keeping it fresh by wrapping it in a few layers of fiction. The book has followed on the heels of a project to assemble a collection of Goan family photographs spanning the late 1800s to Goa’s 1961 independence, another effort to cement in memory a Goa that is rapidly being tilled under by the forces of what is called development. Like her other projects as an academic and activist, Let Me Tell You About Quinta rings out as a labour of love. But it’s also a laborious read.

The novel follows three generations of a fictional family, also named Viegas, whose house sits, in all its colonial glory, in the not-at-all-fictional Carmona. Over the course of a century, the family’s patriarch witnesses the arrival of both the automobile and the hippies. The most momentous change of all comes with independence. To an entrenched feudal society, the departure of the Portuguese brought rapid change that pitted the bhatkars, Goa’s landed gentry, against the mundkars, their tenant labourers. After 1961, with the assistance of protective legislation, many mundkars finally managed to untether themselves from the land and left for good, paying jobs abroad, or on the high seas. Many Goan landholders could not reconcile themselves to the new order and spent their waning years in Portugal. Bhatkars to the bone, the Viegas family defends its plantation against an onslaught of intrigues, real and perceived. Viegas’ account of the bhatkars’ role is a balanced one; for all their cruelty towards their lessers, they are credited with bringing “agricultural self-sufficiency” to the region by taming the river with bunds.

For the most part, however, events are slow to arrive at Quinta. As secrets spend much of the book’s length submerged like buried treasure, the narrative lurches over the old house’s floorboards and out into its fields in pursuit of uncles and sisters, giving the reader’s attention too much time to wander. This is the sort of book that requires repeated references to a diagrammed genealogy, not a family tree so much as a crooked shrub in need of pruning.

Me Tell You About Quinta: Penguin India, 264 pages, Rs 299.

Viegas has an ear for the tuneful cadences of Goan English speakers, and the novel’s inclusion of phrases in Konkani and Portuguese (though its Hindi may be somewhat misplaced) does much to bring out Goa’s richness and variegation. Readers uninitiated in the vocabulary may find themselves occasionally confused, as with this lush passage: “One afternoon a handsome Gaudi woman in a bright red sari with a bamboo basket laden with mangoes, fresh fish and a huge bebinca, called out”. Many Indian readers, one suspects, will have a colourful time gauging the size of the woman’s bebinca.

Viegas frequently invokes the adjective “turgid” when she means “turbid”. Neither a puddle nor a pot of nachni porridge can be the former, though a river can be either. Viegas’ style tends towards the latter. Though Viegas writes with a confidence that should have earned her an attentive editor, it’s not the minor slip-ups that are troubling.

Rather, one has the creeping suspicion that a pastiche of Gabriel Garcia Márquez is in the offing, a sort of One Hundred Years of Leave Us Alone. The deadpan tone can be mordantly hilarious when used to make hay of present-day family arrangements and modern customs. Instead, the residents of Quinta receive visions in their dreams. Omens are seen in broad daylight. Superstitions disregarded wreak awful consequences. Whether a nod to magical realism or not—Viegas might protest that such beliefs are commonplace in Goa, with its mixed African and Arab inheritances, its Catholic piety and its sultry nights—such devices are difficult for a reader to accept unironically.

The landlords’ wringing of hands and writhing through history reminds us that they are not the masters they think they are. Entombed in mind as much as ultimately in body, they are finally servants to the house that makes them who they are.

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