What is a community? A group of people who share something in common? But what could qualify as that ‘commonality’ that a group must share in order for it to be considered a community? A living space? A past? Interests, hobbies, occupations, beliefs, attitudes? Blood? Can a community share all of these, and more? Can you be part of a community without wanting to be part of it? Can the community be part of you, so intrinsic and deeply embedded in your personality that it does not leave you even in death?
Jane Borges, in her debut novel Bombay Balchao, examines an interesting, often-stereotyped community: the Catholics (and, even more specifically, Goan Catholics) of Bombay. She sets the story in a fictitious enclave she calls Cavel, where, in a building named Bosco Mansion, live the Coutinhos (among others). Octogenarian Michael Coutinho is the first to be introduced to the readers, reminiscing in 2015 about a long-ago day when he, as a teenager, witnessed an event that became lore in the Cavel community.
From the teenaged Michael to his sister Annette, getting engaged to the fiancé her parents didn’t approve of; from Michael’s young and very withdrawn friend Mario, who could only truly express himself when he had a pencil and paper before him—the story wanders, skipping back and forth across timelines, moving not in a strictly linear way, but one which reveals layers and relationships as it moves now forward and now back. At first, these anecdotes seem to be mere vignettes.
However, as the book progresses, they resolve themselves into something more: an insight into characters and communities, into minds and hearts. Spreading across many decades, this is a story of a family, its friends and associates, that comes very vividly alive. The stories are simple but not simplistic, each of them contributing to revealing the character of the individuals and the community they are part of.
Borges’s writing manages to strike a fine balance between fact and fiction. It’s obvious that she’s done a great deal of research into the history of Bombay, but she does a good job of incorporating that history—from wartime Bombay to Chic Chocolate, to the relations that developed between East Indians, Goans, and Mangaloreans, and more—without making it tedious. The history is woven into the lives of the characters, along with their patois, their eccentricities, their loves and hates, in a way that makes it what heritage really should be: an integral part of modern life.
Prawn balchao, that classic Goan pickle, is, at its best, a mouthwatering melding together of flavours: of tartness and chilli heat, of sweetness and the fragrance of spices. Bombay Balchao is aptly named, for this too is a blend, a good balancing act between the individual and the community, the old and the new. Between someone living with the ghosts of the past, and someone looking ahead into the future. There is pathos here, sheer heartbreak—and there is also a deliciously wicked humour at work in several of these episodes. There is passion, enmity, hatred, disappointment, ambition: all the emotions that make up human life. Borges tells her story well and with an empathy that one cannot help but warm to.