Strangers in a new land
The Konkans, By Tony D’Souza, Harcourt Trade, 320 pp., $25
In India, the Konkans are "a small Catholic people in a sea of Muslims and Hindus." With a history dating back to Vasco da Gama, they are a proud, ambitious, and not a little contentious minority. In America, the small enclave of Konkans who settle in the Chicago of Tony D'Souza's new novel are also a minority. But unencumbered by long-held, often archaic traditions, they are free to give vent to expansive hopes, dreams, and expectations - as well as disappointments. D'Souza's compelling tale of one extended family's trials and triumphs in a foreign land is an astute glimpse of the challenges, dangers, and rewards of assimilation.
The story is told in the first-person voice of the young, innocent Francisco D'Sai, the firstborn son of a firstborn son. He recounts his family's history with a soft heart and a wry, detached tone, unquestioning and accepting of their flaws as well as their accomplishments. His father, Lawrence, is his extended family's Babu, the sophisticated, snobbish patriarch in America who shoulders all the familial responsibility. "My father wanted to be a British gentleman above and beyond all else," Francisco tells us. "He had two fine children, a home in the suburbs, an Audi, an improving golf game. As he'd sip his evening tumblers of scotch in the basement and look at his painting of the lonely rider slumped over his donkey in the desert, he'd tell himself he was happy."
Lawrence fell in love with and married Francisco's headstrong American mother, Denise, while she was serving in the Peace Corps in India, drawn to her blond hair and blue eyes - "white women are the most desirable and forbidden in the world," Francisco explains. But while Denise fell in love with India and its rich cultural traditions, finding it the ideal escape from her "gutter trash" Detroit family, Lawrence sees his American wife as a way into the larger world for his family. He longs to escape everything about India that Denise has fallen in love with - "the flowers in the women's hair, the call of the fishmonger in the mornings, the fuss and hullabaloo that went along with every simple transaction in the market for the day's salt and rice . . ." They move to Chicago, and Lawrence immediately plunges into the American way of life, while Denise struggles to preserve and cherish the Konkan heritage her husband tries to leave behind.
Into this fray comes Lawrence's brother Sam. As expected, he follows his brother to America, only to find how much of his heritage he regrets leaving behind. "I feel here that I'll never get to discover who I am," he tells Denise. "What my capabilities are and what I can do. Here, I am another unfulfilled face." While Lawrence blithely embraces the American dream, Sam is the family's tether to India and tries to retain the heart of Indian identity. He and Denise develop a special bond over their sense of loss and cultural displacement. When Lawrence, always working, travels to expand his business, Sam and Denise forge a grand friendship of "long and aching desire." Then, as family dictates, a marriage with a traditional Konkan girl is arranged for Sam, and what little self-fulfillment he has grown to cherish is mired in family expectations.
"The Konkans" takes a while to get going, to make us care for the characters. And the tone wanders from a light-hearted tale of family dysfunction to a dark, disturbing chronicle of broken dreams. But along the way it offers some fascinating glimpses into the complex, often contradictory facets of the Konkan culture, including relations with Hindu and Muslim countrymen. There's an especially vivid description of a traditional Konkan wedding, which, despite loyalty to Catholic doctrine, draws freely from prevailing Hindu traditions as well, like the painting of the bride's hands and feet with henna in "the same filigree designs of the flowering of life that the Hindus paint on their brides' hands, though the Konkans would never admit that this is a Hindu tradition." In fact, as Francisco admits, the Konkans admire the Hindus. "Though the Konkans know that the Hindus are all going to burn in hell in the end, still, who can't help but like all that music and dancing?"
Karen Campbell is a freelance writer based in Brookline. 