Monsoon

An actor of traditional Hindu dramas meets an adolescent girl who turns out to be his half-sister. A man returns to Goa from Mozambique to father a child for a family whose unmarried daughters has produced no heirs. Another man feels out of place in his family home after returning from Portugal to get a university education, as a woman waits faithfully for him to return. A forbidden romance blooms between a Christian girl and a Hindu boy.
 
Through these stories, written with a mix of poignant nostalgia and sharp criticism, Vimala Devi recreates the colonial Goa of her childhood. First published in 1963, two years after the Portuguese colony became part of India, Monsoon is a cycle of twelve stories that vary in tone. By turns satirical, desolate, tender, humorous, and dramatic, they come together through a subtle interplay of echoes, parallels and cross-references to form a composite picture of a world gone by. They delve into divisions of caste, religion, language, and material privilege, setting them off against a common historical experience and deeply felt attachment to the land.
 
Including a critical and contextualizing introduction by Jason Keith Fernandes, this rendition of Monsoon allows contemporary readers a rare peep into a colonial society that was significantly different from the British Indian mainstream.
 

Vimala Devi is the penname of Teresa da Piedade de Baptista Almeida. Born in 1932 in Portuguese Goa to a family of Catholic landowners, she pursued studies in Portuguese and English. In 1957 she moved to Lisbon and began to work as a translator. Along with Monsoon, she has published several collections of poetry, a memoir, and coauthored a two-volume critical essay and anthology, A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa. She currently lives in Barcelona. Paul Melo e Castro lectures in Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is a regular literary translator of Portuguese-language fiction.