https://www.thehindu.com/society/review-of-the-wait-and-other-stories-by-damodar-mauzo-people-like-us/article65532750.ece
Extraordinary jubilation erupted across an entire range of literary communities when it was announced last December that Damodar Mauzo had won the 57th Jnanpith Award, the very highest honour in Indian literature. There was intense celebration in his home state of Goa, of course, where “Bhaiyee” is genuinely beloved, but it was unexpectedly mirrored wholescale across the border in Maharashtra, where the 77-year-old litterateur is being celebrated as an icon of potential reconciliation after a full century of tensions, resentment and hostility between Konkani and Marathi intellectual cultures. But even that was not the end of it, because Mauzo is an unusual bridge figure in many other aspects, and also the pre-eminent cultural ambassador for the unstinting native humanism (*vegllench munisponn* in Konkani) of Goa. It is those aspects of his remarkable life work which Amitav Ghosh – who was the first writer of English to win the Jnanpith in 2018 – celebrated in his congratulatory message on Twitter: “Bhai is a great writer whose work celebrates Goa's richly pluralistic heritage. Bhai is also a great soul, who has stood firm against majoritarian threats. Kudos to the Jnanpith Foundation for once again affirming its commitment to the preservation and celebration of India's wonderfully diverse, multilingual and multireligious literary traditions.” Both dimensions of Mauzo’s understated brilliance are evident throughout the acutely timely *The Wait And Other Stories*, his first book of translations (by his long-time collaborator, Xavier Cota) to be released after the Jnanpith award. There’s his characteristic preternatural deftness in illuminating the interior lives of an extensive constellation of characters: insiders, newcomers, children and the elderly, labourers, middle-class strivers, the newly rich, and migrants to the USA. And in stories like *Burger* (where a Catholic schoolgirl suffers agonies because of sharing her tiffin) and *Yasin, Austin, Yatin* (in which an anxious, unscrupulous taxi-driver scuppers himself by pandering to what he perceives his customers desire) there is highly effective social criticism whisked into the narrative with the gentlest of touches. I have been an unqualified fan of Mauzo’s writing ever since his path-breaking novel *Karmelin* emerged in English translation in 2004 (it was originally written in 1979, won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1983, and is now available in another dozen languages). Since then, Bhaiyee has been my mentor and colleague as the co-founder and co-curator of the Goa Arts + Literature Festival, and I’ve had the opportunity to witness his meticulously observant ways up close over many years. They’re genuinely amazing: everyone from every social and cultural strata somehow gets to feel intimately akin to this great man, and they are always their true selves with him. Then, with adroit facility, he returns the love by writing characters so true to the bone that they live and ache in your consciousness forever. *The Wait And Other Stories* brims full with these kinds of unforgettable protagonists. I was especially struck by the surreal, knowingly Kafkaesque *Gentleman Thief*, which begins with a reclusive writer surprising an intruder in his home at 1.30am. “’Who are you?’ ‘A thief.’ ‘You don’t look like a thief.’ ‘Do thieves have horns?’ ‘But, you don’t exactly look like a thief.’ ‘Have you seen thieves?’” Shading more like Murakami is *The Aesthete*, featuring the pompous Karan who collects objects and experiences for their perceived beauty, while cultivating an obnoxious phobia for what he sees as flaws. “Unkempt people thronging the beach” ruined his appreciation of his own Juhu apartment. A tiny, chipped fleck of paint on a painting in his hotel room compelled another meltdown. Meanwhile, his gorgeous and devoted wife Anjali – “the empress of beauty” – has found a tiny spot near her belly button “like the white smear of lime paste daubed on a fresh green betel leaf”. Mauzo’s backstory is relatively little known (and even less understood), but neatly encapsulates the unique cultural and social ethos of India’s smallest state. Born in Portuguese India before its Liberation in 1961, he studied commerce at Podar College in Mumbai before returning home to the archetypical seaside idyll of Majorda, where he inherited the family general store. He has spent the prime of his career working deep in his village community serving mostly Catholic customers through the day, and then writing about that exact same milieu after his family had gone to sleep at night. In every possible way, he is an exemplar of Goa’s fluid cultural identity, where an unabashed pluralistic universalism still holds sway despite multiple threats and depredations. It is obviously too early to herald the historical nature and impact of *The Wait And Other Stories*. Nonetheless, in these agonizingly fraught sectarian times, even while our minor differences are being weaponized for mass destruction, Mauzo’s serene new writings are an essential respite, and his wisdom is sheer balm. Take the time to savour these stories. You need them. We all need them very much.
