A gentle story of a singular Konkan family in Chicago
The konkans are the “Jews of India” who knelt before the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s sword and Saint Francis Xavier’s cross, abandoned their Hindu traditions, and became Catholics.

Tony D’Souza’s novel shifts between this larger narrative of the Konkan community and a small human drama of an immigrant family in far-flung Chicago. In an almost-anthropological, thick description, it places the story of Francisco D’Sai, his American mother, his Indian father and his beloved uncle Sam in a rich, informing context that has everything from questions of colonialism and its afterlife to minor details of Konkan weddings.

But for all the amplitude of its terrain, what The Konkans does superbly is document the cruelties of a long marriage, which are routinely verbalised and which run too deep for words. The bond between the narrator’s parents, Denise and Lawrence, chafes as she yearns for her brief, vivid brush with India, while his life is one long project of American self-fashioning.

Lawrence is obsessed with surfaces and seemliness, and even his concern for the single status of his younger brother Sam stems from a profound standing on ceremony. Sam, by contrast, is an easy-come easy-go second son who never quite falls in love with America, takes the long route to enjoy the trees along the highway, cooks Konkan meals, tells stories and has fitful dreams of returning to India. It is Sam who unstintingly helps an ambitious Indian cousin across, moved by his emotional appeal. When Lawrence tells his son a tale of cheesy uplift, about his grandfather’s steely courage assisting the British, Denise and Sam fill in the gory gaps of that story, on how his grandfather made a minor fortune from sandalwood smuggling and exploiting local Hindus. Sam and his sister-in-law are allies, friends and, finally, lovers — and the novel is really the story of their relationship.

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