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

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...
22 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...
18 comments
Read more

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...
12 comments
Read more

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
122 comments
Read more