Karmelin by Damodar Mauzo - Book Review

It has been exactly 20 years since Bhai Damodar Mauzo created a storm with his book Karmelin (translated from the Konkanni by Vidya Pai) and yet there is nothing “old” or jaded about the story. In fact, on this revisit, I am seeing so many things that I had not seen in the story so many years ago. Men and women from Goa are still going to the Gulf as maids, ayahs, cooks, nannies and drivers. Perhaps they are still getting exploited there as they were then and still introducing their own sons and daughters into the same trap. Until Goa’s domestic employment situation improves, one feels, this will never stop.

Bhai’s language is temperate. (Hot words, passion and emotion would follow him later.) For example, he uses phrases like, “surrendered to him” to convey rape, repeated sexual abuse. It is a subtle, compassionate description of the protagonist Karmelin’s helplessness.

There’s a saying about a drumstick tree. It survives on the water that is poured over its roots to nourish the betel leaf creeper turning around its tree trunk. I admire Vidya Pai’s translation for not trying to outmaneuver the original. In the translation, you can almost hear the Konkanni. There are many such examples in the book. (I will come to them later.)

They also say that if we find someone to blame for our misery, we absolve ourselves of all blame. Karmeln does that. She blames an alcoholic husband for being forced into slavery so far away from her family and a beloved daughter who has just turned 19. And when she receives news of her husband Jose’s passing, this paragraph just about sums up her feelings. “What were the other memories she had of him? Dong ding! Ding dong!”

As she is “only an adopted daughter” the match with Jose has been arranged rather thoughtlessly. Drunkenness at the wedding, obscene comments, are the stuff of village gossip that, over time, become the stuff of village lore. “The father and his sister do not get along” sounds all too familiar as does “By such simple deeds she managed to lower a big load from Mai’s shoulders. Her affectionate nature wiped out the creases of worry on Mai’s forehead and set at rest the suspicion lurking in her breast.” The beauty of the translation! These words are in English but the emotion underlying them is Goan. They have the scent of the soil of Goa in them.

These sentences could be Konkanni, for example. “Meanwhile she grew taller and even more beautiful, but even in the first flush of youth she did not overstep the limits of propriety and decorum” Or, “make the sign of the Cross on your tongue” Or, “pinch her when no one was around”.  

In another very Goan moment in the book, when her young cousin/lover leaves for Mumbai and asks her the “question that mattered more than anything else on earth”... “Karmelin, what shall I get you from Mumbai?”

The story of Karmelin being pressured into a marriage with the boorish Jose is universal. Karmelin’s justification is that of any abused girlfriend or wife anywhere in the world. “He drank a lot.” (Who didn’t drink these days?) “He’s selfish, Bad-tempered, wicked too, perhaps”. (He’s always lived amongst rough sportsmen, that’s why he behaves like that.)

 In the first year that I arrived here, in 1995, I saw how syncretic Goan society was. A description of Karmelin’s wedding is simply spell-binding. If you needed any more proof of a syncretic society, here it is. What’s more, it hasn’t changed over the years since Karmelin was first published. “Conceição sang the traditional verses as Paai dipped his fingers in the coconut milk first of all” has a poetic ring to it. 

Once a woman marries, she is expected to “bear everything in her husband’s house” is a given but what interested me personally was the fact that when Karmelin comes back to her (adopted) maternal home, it is considered improper to send her back unaccompanied. What is also interesting is that Bhai paints a rather blameless, Virgin-like profile of his protagonist. “If she had known that he had won the money at cards, she might not have accepted it. But she did, nevertheless, not only because she needed the money but because this was the first time that Jose was giving her something of his own accord, like other husbands gave their wives normally.”

Bhai’s protagonist is orphaned as a child, loses a brother, is adopted by an aunt who resents her, abused by a first cousin, betrayed in love, married off to an alcoholic, abused by the husband’s roommate, is subjected to poverty and destitution almost all her life. The only glimmer of light is her daughter and the support she receives from her sister-in-law and neighbour Isabel. When a tragedy strikes either of them, it is the two of them who hug each other and sob irrespective of their own personal associations with the tragedy. It is then that you realise that Bhai’s characters weep for themselves at their own tragedies. When Karmelin gets the opportunity to go to Kuwait to work and is reluctant, at first, it is this sister-in-law who says, “poor people like us can’t afford to think about shame and respect… that’s for the wealthy people to talk about.” 

We also learn from Karmelin that the outmigrations to the Gulf began with the famous (and unique) Goa, Daman & Diu Agricultural Tenancy Act of 1964. We do know that over 40,000 farming tenant families got their homes but one of the fallouts was that a lot of farm owners went back to tilling their own lands (out of fear of losing their lands to the tillers) and this caused an outmigration of the former tenant farmers to the Gulf. 

Even today, like Karmelin, my neighbour brings chocolates for us all each time she returns from the Gulf. “Have I begun to think that happiness can be bought for a price, just like the Arabs do?” asks Karmelin. But Bhai, is that the prerogative of the Arabs only?

I also have another question. Why is the parish, the church and the parish priest completely absent from Karmelin’s life? It is only at the end of the book, when the parish priest mocks Belinda (Karmelin’s teenage daughter) “Why don’t you go to Kuwait?” he asks that we see or hear of his presence in their lives. Twenty odd years down the line from Karmelin, I have seen and met many Karmelins and the village church community playing an important (and regulatory) role in their lives. Was it different then?