Dream country: ‘The Konkans’ by Tony D’Souza

Tony D'Souza's second novel takes its deceptively simple title from the author's name for Indian Catholics who speak Konkani, and who live on the west coast between Mangalore and Goa. But rather than ethnography, the book offers the complex history of a single family, the D'Sais, following a string of firstborn sons in a family in which birth order is no minor detail. As the narrator, Francisco, wrestles with conflicting versions of his family history, he has to decide what being firstborn – indeed, what being Konkani – will mean to an American with a person of colour for a father whom he never knew well, and a white mother who wanted, more than almost anything, to see the world.

This story should sound familiar. In broad brushstrokes (and even in a few of the details), it is the biography of Barack Obama. Unlike the US president-elect, however, Francisco D'Sai is less clear about where his search began and what he makes of it. But in The Konkans, it is enough to watch Francisco select one of his father's dreams. The dream is this, in two parts: in the US, you must fit in, and to fit in you must forget India. From the remove of Chicago and, later, from its suburbs, for Francisco, his father Lawrence and his uncle Sam, India is the dream. In fact, this is has long been the case even for Francisco's Michigan-born mother, Denise:

She had first fallen in love with the country and its people, and later, just before she was scheduled to leave, with my father. My father could read and write and had a saleable education. My mother would probably have been happier married to an oxcart driver or laundry washer, but her poor roots had made her practical about the realities of the world, and in marrying my father she'd brought home with her the one living-and-breathing souvenir of that place that could also get a job in America. Sponsoring over my uncles was done to spite him, a return to what she really loved. Many were the nights that my mother drank and sang and talked Konkani with them while my father glowered in his study, pretending to pour over paperwork for his position as a corporate insurance manager with the multinational Hinto & Thompson, but really grinding his teeth at all that noise, which reminded him in an uncomfortable way of where he was from and who in fact was.

The prose here is some of D'Souza's strongest: understated and resonant. Francisco has a droll perspective on two people who nobody knows better than he does. His equanimity is striking, and hints early on that the narrator might have the biggest stakes in all of this, but that his approach is nonetheless going to be calm, measured and almost unnoticeable. Some critics have faulted the voice of the narrator, calling his attempts to piece together disparate stories an example of failed omniscience. For this reviewer, he simply seemed to be trying to get to the bottom of things; if that is considered a flaw, it should not be.

The old sandalwood
Lawrence's expectations in America are high, as they were for him back home. Sam, on the other hand, seems freer; having emigrated as a single man, he dates many women of various ethnicities. Still, he maintains a Konkani identity, and is more connected to his home country and to its diaspora than is his elder brother. This sharpens one of the book's fascinating subplots – an affair between Sam and Denise, made possible when the two travel to the Canadian border to smuggle in a relative while Lawrence is away on business in England. Nine months pass; a daughter is born. Francisco never asks the question that peppers The Konkans in the sly form of a song title, "E puri konachi", which D'Souza calls an anthem of young Konkani men – a celebratory song played at weddings and sung in the streets that translates as "Whose daughter is she?" In a single stroke, traditional marriage is both supported and undercut.

Despite his philandering and fraternal betrayal, for much of the book Sam is a hard character not to like. He cares about both homelands; he resists alcohol, unlike his brother; and he cares for Denise in a way that she needs and of which Lawrence seems incapable. Then one evening he brings an African-American woman to dinner; Lawrence explodes, and immediately writes home to arrange a marriage for his brother. When Asha, the bride, arrives, Sam mistreats her, tempering his goodness with cruelty.

In D'Souza's world, everyone is this complicated. Over the course of the book, as the family moves out to the suburbs and up in the world, Lawrence struggles with his failure to earn the respect of his white peers. He is rejected on a yearly basis for membership at the local country club; and when he is finally promoted, it is not what he had hoped for. "My father," Francisco says, "met men who were not white in the hotel's restaurant, bought them martinis on the company's dime, and fired them." At one point, he axes a young black man whom he had hired himself. "It's because I wrote a letter to Marsh after they gave Paul Saunders the new ADM account when everyone knew it should have gone to me," the young man tells Lawrence, who shakes his head and says, "It's because you let them do it by being late." D'Souza lets a single word – them – speak volumes of subtext. His subtle sociology underscores the drama.

This understatement helps to compensate for the over-omniscience of Francisco. When the D'Sais move to an upper-class suburb, vandals continually throw tomatoes at their house. They suffer through this alone until Lawrence befriends a Jewish neighbour, Mr Bing, and his family. During one get-together, the men get drunk and start smashing chairs in the Bing garage, chairs they earned at jobs they hate. Startled and worried by the noise, the house empties, and Francisco observes the disturbing scene with a friend his own age: "Our fathers held the legs of those chairs in their hands like clubs as they beat them on the table, trying to kill something out there in the dark, trying to make something die."

Being dominated by a boss is hard for Lawrence, an extreme and discomfiting reversal of fortune for a man who, half a world away from where it occurred, still proudly recounts a story about sandalwood. Once upon a time, Lawrence's father, Francisco's grandfather, cheated the British out of a store of sandalwood. Lawrence tells the story with pride; Sam tells it with shame. Francisco, meanwhile, struggles to see the whole picture, which is where the other double meaning of the title comes up. The Konkans may sound like the story of a whole people, but in fact it is the story of just a few men: Lawrence, Sam, their father and Francisco. Just another partial picture, with one more snapshot to go: two people who fell in love with the country first and the person second. They made a baby who had two countries, or two dreams, called India and America. To believe D'Souza and his narrator Francisco, ties to the dream country – to the utopia, a place that is, literally translated, no place – are not easily revised.

~ T K Dalton teaches writing at the City University of New York. He is currently completing his first novel.