‘Appetite’: Life in Goa comes alive in this wryly humorous yet eerily chilling anthology

It is difficult to not romanticise Goa. Not the hyper-curated, exaggeratedly aestheticised party destination that lives in perpetual revelry on Instagram, or the casino capital that flashy billboards at the Dabolim airport promise, but the real deal. Small villages that awaken at daybreak. Old Portuguese houses with their red benches, often under the strict surveillance of a resident dog or two. The sound of the poder and the satisfaction of biting into the still-warm crust of a fresh poi. The energy of Mapusa market. The seven hundred and sixty-five distinct shades of green that form the landscape of monsoon months. The roiling July sea that humbles the most intrepid of tourists and adventurers. The inviting plates of ambotik and xacuti, and the sticky sweetness of dodol.

All this, if you are an outsider looking in. More, if you claim kinship with the land, the history, the culture. It is this liminality between longing and belonging that Shivranjana Rathore and Tino De Sa’s anthology of new writing from Goa captures.

Appetite: New Writing from Goa, appropriately titled, brings together short stories, poems, essays, memoir pieces, and one graphic narrative that collectively explore the complex terrain of desire, nostalgia, embodiment, historicity, anguish, horror, and uncensored, ungovernable...

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