Skip to main content

Gods and Ends

 

Book Review

Title: Gods and Ends

Author: Lindsay Pereira

Publisher: Penguin Vintage, 2021

Pages: 205

This is a book which presents characters taken from real life. You will think, as you read the novel, that you know this character and this and this too. Only the names sound different, even exotic: Vaz, D’Souza, Sequeira, and so on. All the characters are Goan Catholics living in Orlem, Mumbai. All the major characters are tenants of Obrigado Mansion, a rundown building belonging to aged Francisco Fernandez who lives with his daughter-in-law, occupying two of the rooms in the mansion. All other rooms are occupied by families that are grappling with quite a few problems.

There are five families plus one widow who lives alone in one of the rooms. Each one of these characters catches our attention with their unique earthiness. The Sequeira family in Room 108, for example, is headed by Jude Sequeira who is little more than an alcoholic. He has a job in a factory. But since his education hadn’t gone beyond school, he remains on the lower rungs in the factory’s hierarchy and it does add to his frustrations a lot. Once he got a kind of promotion by grabbing the supervisor by his balls and making an emphatic demand. Brigette, his wife, had lost interest in him soon after their marriage. Their first love-making was a brutal rape. Jude seeks to dump his lust on his pubescent daughter, Philomena, whose obesity makes her a butt of many a joke at school.

Peter Vaz lost his job in Kuwait following the Gulf War. He is back in Room 103 with his wife Gracie and son Gavin. Unlike Brigette and Philo, Gracie and Gavin refuse to accept Peter’s drunkenness and crudeness. They leave him for good. And thus save themselves. Peter stays on in Obrigado Mansion watching the people of Orlem go by while he is sipping London Pilsner beer. His favourite pastime is watching pornography.

Gilbert D’Souza and his wife Angelina of Room 104 charm us with their version of religion. Since they couldn’t beget children, they had nothing to do with their time and hence took to evangelism. They preached Bible to whoever cared to listen until Gilbert discovered another kind of paradise in the bed of widow Joeann. Unable to endure the insult of such blatant infidelity, Angelina returned to her mother who was living in a one-bedroom apartment with her son and his family. Angelina is an unwanted burden in the overpopulated house where she had been born and brought up. The Bible tells her: “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord” [St Paul’s letter to Ephesians, 5:22]. So, like a devout Christian, Angelina returns to her husband who continues to savour his paradise in Joeann’s bed.

Michelle D’Costa is a 23-year-old student who falls in love with a Hindu classmate. Her parents of Room 107 are extremely concerned about her soul which will be doomed if she marries a non-Catholic. What about her children? They too will be damned. Even Father Lawrence Gonsalves, parish priest, is concerned. In addition, the young priest implicitly offers to defrock himself if Michelle is willing to leave the Hindu boy and marry him instead. But the miscegenation is destined and Father Gonsalves’s vocation is saved.

All these and other characters of the novel are taken from the real life we all live whether in Mumbai or Kerala or anywhere in this fabulous country called India. The author has succeeded in presenting these characters in unforgettable ways. All of them remain in our minds for a long time after we put the book down. And the book is quite unputdownable. Not because of any suspense or mystery though a bit of that is there too especially with Room 106 which is supposedly haunted.

I enjoyed reading this book so much so I finished reading it in a single day. I was amused, amazed and moved. Hats off to the author whose debut work is indeed verry promising.

 

 

Labels:

Comments

  1. Lux G.November 18, 2023 at 5:45 PM

    I love books that I can't put down and finish in one day. That's a really thorough review. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 19, 2023 at 5:41 AM

      I'm sure you'll find reading this novel a different kind of experience.

      Delete
  2. magiceyeNovember 18, 2023 at 5:45 PM

    Thanks for the review. Shall try to give it a read. As you pointed out all the characters and their stories seem oh so familiar!

    ReplyDelete
  3. CloudiaNovember 19, 2023 at 9:15 AM

    Sounds a very rich and full narrative of experiences. Thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Liz A.November 20, 2023 at 5:20 AM

    That's a great title. It's wonderful to enjoy a book so much you can't put it down.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 20, 2023 at 6:48 AM

      Nowadays writers tend to make the narrative very complex. This book is an eminent exception.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...
10 comments
Read more

You Don’t Know the Sky

I asked the bird to lend me wings. I longed to fly like her. Gracefully. She tilted her head and said, “Wings won’t be of any use to you because you don’t know the sky.” And she flew away. Into the sky. For a moment, I was offended. What arrogance! Does she think she owns the sky? As I watched the bird soar effortlessly into the blue vastness, I began to see what she meant. I wanted wings, not the flight. Like wanting freedom without the responsibility that comes with it. The bird had earned her wings. Through storms, through hunger, through braving the odds. She manoeuvred her way among the missiles that flew between invisible borders erected by us humans. She witnessed the macabre dance of death that brought down cities, laid waste a whole country. Wings are about more than flights. How often have you perched on the stump of a massive tree brought down by a falling warhead and wept looking at the debris of civilisations? The language of the sky is different from tha...
13 comments
Read more