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Published on Thr, Feb 26, 2009 at 12.32

I simply had to write Once Upon a Time in Aparanta.

This novel attempts to question the idea of “paradise” and what happens when a self-proclaimed “paradise” faces itself in a mirror.

Goa is a charmed place, and I’ve been drawn to it since the late 1980s, when I first visited. After countless visits over the years, it is now home. Four years ago, I finally moved from Delhi to Goa. It fulfilled the need of a time in my life, when I was searching for more mental space to research and write books, and also to begin to write Once Upon a Time in Aparanta. I began to live the book: soak up the land, the language, the people.

To come back home to Goa from travels is to ascend into calm. In the rains, I shed skin with the land; renew myself with cleansing Monsoon water the same as the land does. Here, I learnt again a bout colour. After two decades in the Big City, here I learnt again to breathe.

But even as I look upon Goa with the eyes of an impassioned lover, I experience violent disenchantment with it.

The present day has brought with it the lure form tourism, mining, and real estate (and with all these, corrupt politics). Land is gold in Goa. As the promise of riches once brought the Portuguese and others to Goa Dourada—Golden Goa—land often pays back the investor five times the value paid three years ago. Many Goans are today wealthy by trading in this asset to “outsiders”—from Mumbai and Moscow, Bhatinda and Blackpool, and, of course, planeloads from the National Capital Region. Land is being converted from active farmland and active forest to be sold to mining and construction interests. Those who participate in the conversion to this new religion are both Goans and not. The compelling mix of power, money, and what the Chinese call “fragrant grease”. Here, peace and prosperity can cost ten per cent—even fifty.

The stakes are high, and getting higher. Piece-of-the-action is driving Goa to the edge. And in all this, Goa and its people are in a state of high churn, where medieval mores and the incestuousness of the village clash with the lure of easy money, crash-lesson modernity and bright lights. The bogey of the “outsider”, and xenophobic paranoia, have reached ludicrous proportions. There is no “visitor” any longer. Neither is there acceptance of the irony that “outsider” and “insider” are often blurred into the same side of a coin.

Goa is today a teeming, turbulent, touchy place. In the ancient days of forty years ago, Goa was a trip. Now it’s also a business, a disease. It is difficult to deny a place that resembles a fading courtesan, desperate for coin; even, a Banana Republic with caricature dictators. This is a creaky paradise, a pilgrimage for Marquez. A place at a crossroads, where fierce debate rages between a colonial past and postcolonial future.

I decided several years ago to tell this story through Once Upon a Time in Aparanta.

Through Once Upon a Time in Aparanta I have attempted to capture this churn of present-day Goa, its charm and follies, its greed and grouses, its colourful characters and peerless natural beauty, and its seamy side. Goa and Once Upon a Time in Aparanta present a leitmotif for similar places in Asia and around the world, which set out to seduce the world on its terms, but are often trapped and ravaged by it. This book could be seen as a story for our times.

From the beginning I was clear it would not be an “easy” book, in that; it would not allow the reader to escape. I wanted the reader to be drawn in, meshed with Goa, meshed in the minds of the characters. I wanted readers to share in the joy, love, venality and horror of the characters. A socio-political novel, I finally decided to tell Aparanta through the device of parallel narratives of distinct tone. The first is a combination of lyrical narrative and magic realism that tells the story of the protester Dino Dantas and his hotelier cousin Antonio de Calangute. The other is an unforgiving satire, which tells the story of the rise and rise of Winston Almeida, a Churchill-worshipping villain. A sort of good and evil narrative in parallel streams that merge towards the end of the book. There are elements of commedia dell’arte as well, and a high degree of theatrical element. Goa is larger than life. For me, Once Upon a Time in Aparanta could be no less.

The fact that the reception of the book, even in such early days, is good is always pleasing for a writer. But for me the vindication as to its topicality and approach has come with a sense of recognition, despair, shock and outrage that I sense from some Goan readers of Aparanta. This is good. Reaction is terribly necessary.

And I am so very pleased that Indian publishing in general and Penguin in particular, has space for a book such as this; a work that deliberately takes enormous risks to tell a story, lyrical and brutal in turn, that must be told. My editor at Penguin, Ravi Singh, who is also Editor in Chief of Penguin in South Asia, was very supportive. He is a very good reader of manuscripts, and along with Poulomi Chatterjee, his associate editor, had precise suggestions to make the narrative smoother without in any way compromising the story that I wanted to tell. I always want to push the boundaries of storytelling, engage readers completely. That has been my experience also with my previous works, the novel Tin Fish (Penguin, 2005), and the non-fiction work Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (Viking/Penguin 2008). For these, while I am happy to say the books continue to do well, and most literary critics have been very positive and kind, some have been quite enraged with the books. (It is interesting, then, at 45, to be able to be a bit of an enfant terrible of Indian publishing in English!)

In many ways Aparanta has been for me a cathartic process. As the characters deal with their visions and hopes and fears and disappointments, I have dealt with mine. When I write, I very nearly live the characters. For several weeks and months, it is as if I’m in a separate universe with the characters, with only a fleeting connection with the so-called ‘real’ world. The characters have helped me to confront my own ideas and sense of self; and I so dearly wish my readers are engaged in the same way.

A Once Upon a Time in Aparanta taught me too, that there is no paradise. Paradise is only what we make of it.


	Sudeep Chakravarti has been a journalist with the Asian Wall Street Journal, Sunday, India Today and Hindustan Times. He is the author of a novel, Tin Fish, and Red Sun, a non-fiction work on the Maoist revolutionaries in India.