An inward looking tale Rashmi Vasudeva Deccan Herald - Internet Edition Sunday, March 12, 2006
The Girl Sonia Faleiro Viking/Penguin Books India Ltd, 2006 pp 124, Rs 250. If atmosphere is everything, this book is a classic. The descriptions pull you inside The Girl's tortured mind and take you into her soul, torn asunder by betrayal, endless hope and an ethereal fear of living. Beautiful lyricism, poetic passages and evocative descriptions of Goa- yes you appreciate all that but the story makes you feel like a child who has been taken to Goa but was not allowed a glimpse of the sea. The Girl, which is the only way readers know her, is a ghostly presence throughout the tale, symbolic perhaps of somebody who lived a life that was as dead as it could be. This book is her story in the 'Village of the Dead', where sea and earth and winds and rain are more disturbingly lively than its inhabitants, put to sleep by years of isolation and ingrained numbness. As the tale begins with the funeral, you pretty much guess the rest. There is the exotic lover from an unknown land whom the girl loses her heart to and who leaves the 'blue village' plunging her into blues of a different kind. She is left to twist and turn in the dark corridors of her mind, exploring every sadness till grief fills up every pore of her body. Then of course, she decides to end it all. And yes, the lover comes back, late, to the Village of the Dead. This is Sonia Faleiro's first novel and credit goes to her for bringing the Goan monsoon alive- both in its beauty and its misery. Sample this: "When monsoon comes to Azul, the rain frosts panes of glass, slices electricity and telephone lines, seeps through cracks of doors and windows, creeps swelling patches of dark water into houses, fills the air with ripe clusters of bloodthirsty flies and the tender green smell of perpetual wetness." She also gets the Goan mannerisms and attitudes right. But ultimately, the reader has to plod along the Girl's path of misery. One only wishes to have been swept away as much by the story as her grief. ~(^^)~ Avelino
