Monday, April 7, 2003
Loving Ayesha and Other Stories by Victor Rangel-Ribeiro
- Anjana BasuAnjana Basu taught English Literature, briefly, in Calcutta University. She writes poetry, stories, features in the local newspapers and in Cosmopolitan. She has had a book of short stories published by Orient Longman, India. The BBC had broadcast one of her short stories and her poems have featured in an anthology brought out by Penguin India. In America she has been published in The Wolfhead Quarterly, Gowanus, The Blue Moon Review, and Recursive Angel, to name a few.
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Book Name:Loving Ayesha and Other Stories
Author:Victor Rangel-Ribeiro
Publisher: Harper Collins India
Price: Rs. 250/
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TOLD FROM THE HEART
Goa that legendary place of golden sands, Portuguese heritage and hippies wandering around the beaches. A place where motorbikes double as taxis and churches dominate the landscape. There are the memories that that Victor Rangel Ribeiro carried to America, along with his luggage. There, after a while, they began to surface in the shape of stories.
What began the flow was a short story, The Miscreant, about a petty thief that made ripples in New York’s literary circles. The story snowballed even as Rangel Ribeiro covered music concerts for the New York Times, joined an advertising company, ran a music shop for a decade and later ran the largest literary centre in New York. Until finally, he became an author at the age of 72 with the publication of his novel Tivolem, like Loving Ayesha, a love song to Goa and the Mother Country. "The pull of the mother country is very strong"; he says even after living in the USA for forty-two years.
The Miscreant is one of the stories in Loving Ayesha, a folksy Goan tale of a village, a thief and a very down to earth saint. The twelve stories in Victor Rangel-Ribeiro’s collection Loving Ayesha and Other Stories transport us back and forth from the villages and small of India’s west coast to life in the canyons of New York. What unites the stories is the fact that they are very down to earth. The heroes and heroines, American and Indian alike face life on its own terms, with the dice very often loaded against them.
Some of the stories have an edge of black humour – that of Peter battling an ever increasing army of ants which has about it an edge of Hollywood horror, something out of Arachnophobia. A father in Paris tries to show his son how to write a letter when his typewriter is falling apart.
Others gently told pieces that touch the heart. Like the story of the lonely Indian widow in New York who finds companionship with her Chinese neighbour who seems even lonelier because she can hardly speak English. Chandu taking his first ride home on a tram late in the night. And the protagonist of the title story who finds himself losing his love twice over for the same reason.
Rangel Ribeiro is one of those writers who is able to sit back and let his stories tell themselves without intruding on the flow with unnecessary pretensions. Something that is very rare these days when most writers extract every ounce of drama out of each sentence.
Accompanying the stories are the illustrations of that other quintessential Goan, Mario Miranda – they add their own flavour to these tales of American and Indian encounters
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