Description

Jerry Dsouza grew up in the East Indian Catholic gaothan of Khotachi Wadi — five hundred yards from Charni Road station, a thousand miles from the South Bombay the world thinks it knows. His family had lived in the same wooden-balconied house since 1907. His grandmother spoke a Marathi-Portuguese dialect almost no one outside the *gaothan* understood. His father was a railway clerk who saved for twenty-six years to send his son to St. Xavier’s College.

In this exquisite, deeply observed memoir, Dsouza recovers a Bombay community that almost no English-language Indian book has ever properly described: the East Indians — the original Catholic *Marathi-speaking* inhabitants of the seven islands, who were Christianised in the sixteenth century and have, in the four hundred years since, been steadily written out of the city’s own story.

Across twenty-two chapters that move between the 1980s and the present, Dsouza writes about the Sunday Mass at St. Teresa’s, the Christmas *Kuswar* his grandmother prepared for thirty days every December, the *Mobai* fishermen at Versova who were his cousins, the bottle-glass-topped walls of the *wadi*, the developers who began circling in 1995 and were, two decades later, knocking on every front door.

This is, on one level, the moving personal story of a journalist’s working-class Catholic Bombay childhood. On a deeper level, it is the first major literary record of a five-hundred-year-old community whose very disappearance has been so slow and polite that the rest of Bombay has barely noticed it is happening.

A small, perfect, essential book about the city the rest of us have been busy losing.