Tony D'Souza draws on his past for 'Konkans'

By Colette Bancroft, Times Book Editor
In print: Sunday, March 23, 2008

“I have the details because of my background. But those aren’t my parents; that’s not me,” Sarasota author Tony D’Souza says of his works.
	[Times (2007)]

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When we are little children, stories surround us. Our world and our selves are shaped by the stories others tell us, especially the ones our families tell.

I don't mean the stories in books, important as those are, or the folktales our larger culture imparts, but the stories families tell about themselves: who we are, where we are from, how we got here.

The Konkans is all about those stories and their impact. It's the second novel by Tony D'Souza, whose home base is Sarasota. D'Souza won the first Florida Book Award for general fiction in 2007, as well as several other prizes, for his first novel, Whiteman.

Both Whiteman and The Konkans draw on D'Souza's personal experiences. The first novel is about an idealistic young American Peace Corps volunteer who goes to a West African village and discovers just how little he knows. D'Souza spent three years in Ivory Coast as a Peace Corps member.

The Konkans is about a young boy growing up in Chicago, the son of an American mother who went to India in the 1960s as a Peace Corps volunteer and discovered love. The boy's father is a member of an ethnic group in Southwest India called the Konkans, who in an overwhelmingly Hindu nation have been Christians for four centuries, since their conversion by Portuguese explorers and Catholic priests. The father comes to the United States with his bride and becomes a business executive.

D'Souza's mother, an American, met his father, a Konkan, while she was a Peace Corps volunteer in India, and they moved to Chicago after they married.

But in both books D'Souza has written not memoir but fiction. Every writer of fiction uses his or her own experience in some way, large or small, in shaping an artful story. The story is what counts.

The shaping of artful stories is a theme of The Konkans. Its narrator is the young boy, Francisco D'Sai, but he tells many stories he can't know firsthand, about his parents' families and childhoods, how they met and married, and much more.

They are the stories that he hears his family tell and then retells to himself as children do, burnishing them in his mind and finding in them a way of understanding his place in the world — no easy matter.

Francisco's parents, Denise and Lawrence, are a risky match from the beginning, not just because they come from different cultures. When Denise arrives in the village of Chikmagalur, Lawrence, the Anglophile first-born son of a fiercely proud and ambitious father, is away at college.

His father summons him home to court the American woman, and he obeys. A relationship sparks, even though they are at cross purposes:

"All of the things she loved about India — the flowers in the women's hair, the call of the fishmonger in the mornings as he pushed his cart through the streets, the fuss and hullabaloo that went along with every simple transaction in the market for the day's rice and salt — she recounted to my father when he'd escort her home from dinner at my grandfather's house. Though my father didn't tell her so, those were all of the very same things that made him hate that place."

They soon move to Chicago, where Lawrence throws himself into his career. Denise's loneliness is soothed by her baby son and by the arrival of two of Lawrence's brothers — an arrival memorialized in the family by the uproarious story of a live pig they buy for a feast. The pig has other ideas.

Where Lawrence is driven and status-conscious, his brothers Sam and Les are laid-back and fun-loving. To Denise, they are reminders of the India she loved and hoped to live in. Before long, Sam is something more to her.

D'Souza tells the family's intertwining stories in graceful loops, subtly reshaping them through Francisco's voice as he ages. Those stories expand into the larger world to deal with the struggles and resilience of immigrants and with racial and religious oppression, present and past.

But D'Souza always maintains focus on his vividly imagined characters and their stories, funny and romantic and heartbreaking as stories told softly to a beloved's ear: who we are, where we are from, how we got here.

Colette Bancroft can be reached at cbancroft@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8435.