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.
