Book review: The Baptism of Tony Calangute by Sudeep Chakravarti

The Baptism of Tony Calangute by Sudeep Chakravarti. Aleph Book Company.

Chakravarti`s book was released in 2008 with the title Once Upon A Time In Aparanta  but he felt it didn’t reach enough people. A decade later,  it`s out again with a new title and a new publisher. 

I`ll confess I preferred the earlier title but that’s a trifling matter: the subject matter fairly blew me away. This is a description of Paradise defiled, written up in a deeply sardonic manner which does not for a minute, mask the horror of the context.

It’s a dirge to Aparanta/Goa but without the attendant, almost-mawkish Goa Dourada,  Golden Goa,  imagery. Velha Goa, says the author,  was built on trade, pillage, religion, ambition and treachery. Nova Goa is no different.

A long time ago, till concrete came and robbed the sunset, the smell of the sea and the breeze, nature  played at magic. But this is the land of ore, open, spewing, insistent, covering forests, farmland and streams and wells with refuse from iron-red earth that is bounty for few and curse for many. Here as elsewhere in Aparanta, the frenzy would move ever inland. In a few years, the space between the sea and the hill would likely be given over to homes and hotels for charter tourists, retirees from Europe, land sharks from Delhi, the automaton beat of nightclubs and more peddlers of trance.

We are shown how the good sons and daughters of the soil, elected to protect their villages, wilfully look away as their beaches of gold are stolen every night by bullock carts. The trucks that once aided in the rape and transport of sand are now cleverly banished in favour of the noiseless and easily camouflaged carts.

There is a chilling, a telling passage where the activist Dino and a female friend are threatened and kicked out of by a group of violent foreigners, kicked off  the beachfront in their backyard, in their home state, their country. This is India, friend, Dino tried to tell them. Not here, a German barks back.

The general thinking is verbalised thus: if we tracked down everyone who breaks the law, the economy would disappear. We would have rioting on our hands and less funds. Drugs are mostly being used by tourists, let them destroy themselves, how does it matter? If there is a fight for territory, the gangs will finish each other off. It`s fine as long as every now and then we put some small goonda in  jail to keep the public happy.

However salvation is possible, avers the author, and a sort of salvation starts to creep in by the end of the book. That is a spark of something positive which the increasingly anxious reader is desperate to hold on to.

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