: ‘I had no Konkani books to read. It was the language in which one laughed’: Damodar Mauzo #IndiaNEWS I first met Damodar Mauzo through his novel Karmelin, translated into English by Vidya Pai.

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‘I had no Konkani books to read. It was the language in which one laughed’: Damodar Mauzo #IndiaNEWS
I first met Damodar Mauzo through his novel Karmelin, translated into English by Vidya Pai. It was a strange meeting, reading a Konkani novel in English with all the attendant feelings of inadequacy I felt as a monolingual reader – for that was how I was for most of my young life – with the additional guilt that this was the language of my state of origin, one of my many mother tongues.Once I got stuck into the book, I felt almost immediately the reality of this world, and I felt equally strongly the artistry that it took to make the world real. I did not know the man at all but he seemed to have crawled easily into the skin of this middle-aged woman, this doughty fighter who would do whatever it took to keep her daughter from knowing the kind of want she had endured. I remembered later talking about Karmelin to Abhay Sardesai, poet and editor of The Art India Magazine when we were travelling home in a Mumbai local. He emailed me some memories of his experience of reading the book. “I read Karmelin in 1987,� he says, “when I was in my teens. It was one of the first novels in Konkani...Read more

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