Of Vibrant Hybridity
Mala Pandurang
LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT QUINTA by Savia Viegas Penguin Books, 2012, 253 pp., 299
July 2012, volume 36, No 7

Savia Viegas’s debut novel Tales from the Attic (2007) brought to life the fascinating but fast vanishing world of a Catholic community in South Goa. The novella’s protagonist Mari is in an operation theatre for hysterectomy. In the process of losing consciousness under the care of an impatient anesthetist, she reminisces about her childhood in a village in Salcete where every one ‘had the same surname and shared a blood kinship and had big empty houses. Empty because an entire generation of adults had not married, or the young people had emigrated to Europe or simply because the couple in the house could not bear children’ …’ (p. 5). In Let me Tell You About Quinta, Viegas reemploys the motif of the ancestral home to chronicle the lives of three generations of the Portuguese speaking ‘bhatkar’ (landed) family of the Viegases. Their sprawling, albeit dilapidated, pretwentieth century mansion called ‘Quinta’ is one of the last remaining icons of a feudal way of life. We are forewarned however that this is not a tale of entitlement by the opening lines of the narrative: ‘So you see, This is how it ends. The pride of big houses’ (p. 1). While still presenting a grand façade on the exterior, the crumbling interior spaces convey a sense of sadness and desolation, aggravated by ageing, decay and death.

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