Book Review: 'Afterlife: Ghost Stories From Goa'

Book: Afterlife: Ghost Stories From Goa
Author: Jessica Faleiro
Publisher: Rupa
Pages: 168
Price: Rs150

The Fonsecas are your friendly neighbourhood Goan family. There’s Savio with his salt and pepper hair, and a propensity for eating chicken cafreal with a fork. His wife, Lillian, worries about feeding guests and finding a boy for her unmarried daughter. Their daughters Carol and Joanna are both settled abroad.

In Afterlife: Ghost stories From Goa, Faleiro offers you an intimate look into the Fonseca’s lives. It’s the night before Savio’s 75th birthday party. His paternal cousin and family drop in for a visit. Greetings are barely exchanged when there is a power cut. Everyone congregates in the living room where they start swapping ghost stories.

Each ghost story makes up a new chapter and they’re all recollections of one Fonseca or another. A young priest participates in his first exorcism of a boy possessed by an old man’s spirit. A college girl who dared to spend a night at a haunted library ends up doing something... unnatural. Also in the mix are a ghost who loves children, an uncle who sends a message from the grave and a relative who gets reincarnated as a bird. The ending of Afterlife... is unexpected but ties up well with the premise of the book.

Reincarnation, exorcism and immoral priests — Faleiro touches upon some forbidden subjects in Christianity, but what’s a story on Goa without a sprinkling of religion, devotion or fanaticism thrown in? The strong religious (read: Catholic) undercurrent in Faleiro’s stories make for delicious irony given that Catholicism doesn’t technically believe in ghosts or the afterlife. A chapter on the Inquisition is particularly interesting given it’s a period not many Goans like talking about. Add to this a priest with a shameful secret and you have a story worth remembering.

When writing, one often tends to go back to childhood memories and they leave imprints on the final story. Faleiro could very well be Joanna, the eldest Fonseca daughter, whose third book is a collection of ghost stories. In an interview with a Goan publication, Faleiro mentioned her own brush with the paranormal at the age of 10. In an abandoned house near her home, through an open window she saw a rocking chair moving back and forth. This memory finds its way into one of the stories in the book.

Faleiro’s stories provide varied glimpses of Goan life. There are descriptions of furniture common to most houses in Goa: “the sofa and the broad armchairs in muted flower prints, the floor length ivory curtains”; the long toast (with champagne) and ballroom dances that are part of every celebration and the appearance of one of Goa’s favourite birds, the kogul (koel).

Afterlife... will appeal to those who are attracted to simple stories — the kinds that do the rounds in villages, with each person embellishing it with their own memories. The ghost stories are not shiver-inducingly scary but are at times almost like parables. They work because of the personal touch in them. The Fonsecas could very well be your own family, sharing your family secrets.