A slice of Goa in the ’60s

The Sting of Peppercorns by Antonio Gomes. Amaryllis, 2017

Antonio Gomes’ The Sting of Peppercorns is set in an era of transition and tumult. It opens in the lavish, stately village of Loutolim in South Goa, once the abode of elite Catholic landlords, who had converted from the Gaud Saraswat Brahmin caste. Incidentally, Loutolim is now a well sought-after piece of real estate for the wealthy elite from Indian metros who are obsessed with the quest of owning perfectly preserved Indo-Portuguese homes.

On a balmy summer morning in 1961, one of the village’s grandest mansions and its masters - Afonso de Albuquerque, his wife Dona Maria Isabella dos Santos Albuquerque, other son Roberto and daughter Amanda - await the return of their ward Paulo from Coimbra in Portugal, where he had ostensibly gone to pursue law, but had wallowed in debauchery in the seedier parts of the river-fronted city, unknown to most others in the family.

The author immediately establishes the inevitable air of change, when Paulo, soon after his return, faces a brutal attack by a band of anticolonial guerrillas keen on looting the valuables in the homes of the rich landlords of the time in the name of raising money for their subversive war against the colonists.

The Sting of Peppercorns captures the steady decline in the fate and fortunes of rich, aristocratic Catholic families in Goa in the wake of the socio-political changes following the Liberation by the Indian armed forces and the subsequent takeover by the Indian administration.

Thanks to Paulo, the privileged, stoic Albuquerque lineage now finds itself getting charmed by the hippies in Anjuna and Calangute beach villages who had just begun to descend on Goa from Europe and Northern America in the mid to late 1960s.

The major socio-political changes in Goa in the 1960s, like the transition