Bombay Balchao - Jane Borges

Bombay Balchao by Jane Borges was 78th of 2021. Bombay was the city everyone came to in the early decades of the nineteenth century: among them, the Goans and the Mangaloreans. Looking for safe harbour, livelihood, and a new place to call home. Communities congregated around churches and markets, sharing lord and land with the native East Indians. The young among them were nudged on to the path of marriage, procreation and godliness, though noble intentions were often ambushed by errant love and plain and simple lust. As in the story of Annette and Benji (and Joe) or Michael and Merlyn (and Ellena).

Lovers and haters, friends and family, married men and determined singles, churchgoers and abstainers, Bombay Balchão is a tangled tale of ordinary lives – of a woman who loses her husband to a dockyard explosion and turns to bootlegging, a teen romance that drowns like a paper boat, a social misfit rescued by his addiction to crosswords, a wife who tries to exorcise the spirit of her dead mother-in-law from her husband, a rebellious young woman who spurns true love for the abandonment of dance. Ordinary, except when seen through their own eyes. Then, it’s legend.

Set in Cavel, a tiny Catholic neighbourhood on Bombay’s D’Lima Street, this delightful debut novel is painted with many shades of history and memory, laughter and melancholy, sunshine and silver rain.

What strikes the code was the language used, and how the old buildings were being brought down, for high raise buildings. Loved the letters between Ellena and Michael, the preparation of Prawns Balchao, and thought provoking lines.

Few memorable quotes:

'Our minds are surprisingly gifted with this innate ability to omit events that we do not wish to revisit. But a slight trigger and the mind retrieves them for us, playing them out in technicolor.'

'Some lies are often only said, so that  a few truths are concealed. The bigger the lie,  the more painful the truth.'

'When you love someone dearly, you allow their truth to take precedence over yours.'

'Love makes you dreamy, deaf and dumb - a mute, floaty, gullible victim to the cruelties of that head-spinning feeling.'

'Time heals the broken. Sometimes, the healing is slow. Sometimes, it is slower. You cannot predict how long it will take before one forgets what it all felt like - heartbreak, the pain, the anguish, and that emptiness. Years could roll by, and you'd have done ten million different things to keep yourself from thinking, and yet, the mind would remember that moment when your life fell apart and crushed your whole'.

'What is friendship, if not two people loving each other fiercely and unconditionally.'

'Good thing is that the universe doesn't understand the rules of grammar. Punctuation isn't part of its lexicon.'

'The best part cannot be enjoyed whole, or it will become too much for you to digest.'

'Nothing lasts forever, baby, but it also depends on what your forever is, Is it a day? Is it a month? Is it a year? We make our own forever's.'