Here are some choice bits from Tony D’Souza’s The Konkans. In this passage, a black Chicagoan tries to plug a Catholic Mangalorean into the American hierarchy of racial insults, presented as an act of welcoming, benevolence and friendship. This confusion with Hindus is repeated throughout the book:

‘I’ve finally decided what it is I’ve got to call you…’

‘What is it?’

‘Dot head. Even though I know you aren’t one…’

After moving to an upscale white suburb, trying to get promoted at work and land an invite to the country club, the father faces racial prejudice. Every night, the front window is splattered with tomatoes:

At two A.M., the tomatoes in the window. My father sprung up from his chair… He picked one out of the group, closed in on him… for the space of those two heartbeats, they were connected by that touch like friends… He… grasped his hair and beat his face into the lawn… My father was saying, You fucking fuck bastard, which is what people say when they’ve caught someone who’s been throwing tomatoes at their home…

His father came to my father. He asked in our living that the charges against his son be dropped. It hadn’t been about race. It was a prank… If my father prosecuted this, it would keep his son out of Notre Dame, the family’s alma mater… My father nodded and let it go.

My father and mother dressed up in their best clothes in the early spring. They let the women from the country club look all around their new house…

The rejection letter came in the mail.

The father commiserates with a Jewish friend who is also discriminated against at work. But in the end he does his job, a token minority promoted to fire other uppity minorities who complain of discrimination:

Our fathers held the legs of those chairs in their hands like clubs… trying to kill something out there in the dark, trying to make something die…

My father tightened his tie that Monday morning… Then he pressed the buttons to take the elevator downstairs for his appointment with Charles Curtain…

‘It’s because I wrote a letter to Marsh…’

My father shook his head… ‘It’s because you let them do it by being late.’

The book talks about the brutality of the Goan Inquisition:

The priests of the Goan Inquisition… immediately outlawed Hinduism. Sacred Hindu texts were burned, Hindu music, clothing, and foods were banned… Violaters were burned at the stake… Hindus who confessed to their crimes were granted strangulation before they were burned. So many adults were killed that orphans abounded… The Catholic Church raised these children Catholic…

African slaves… descended on villages, capturing Hindus, rubbing raw pork in their mouths, thereby rendering the people outcasts from their own religion. The priests conducted a mass baptism of these untouchables… the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul…

The Inquisition had a 41-point manual… Fingernails were pulled out. Eyelids sliced off. Fingers and toes were removed on eby one… Legs and arms were amputated joint by joint until nothing was left but the torso, and the living head… Hindu names were made illegal… the Konkan language was banned, Portuguese was made compulsory…

Most Konkans have never heard of the Goan Inquisition, do not know that their language is a pidgin, that their family names were adopted out of fear, that their Catholic faith was born of torture and fire. They also don’t know why they like to eat pork.

Hindus are not let off lightly:

All the way to the cemetery, the Hindus hissed and shouted at my grandfather’s casket… some ran ahead and spit on the road so that the priest and the officers and my father and uncles and all of us had to walk over their spit…

Hard as it is to believe, these are not the most charged passages in the novel. The narrator’s uncle brings his black girlfriend to meet the family. It’s an excuse to list reactionary racial prejudices and implicitly criticize these vile beliefs, and there’s something here to offend everyone:

… the English conquered the whole world… The Irish don’t matter of course. Gypsies are of course garbage. The Konkans have mixed opinions about Jews. While they admire and identify with them, take pride in their own status as the ‘Jews of India,’ when the going gets tough, the Konkans are not above some friendly Jew baiting…

While most dismiss the ‘Pork & Cheese’ [Portuguese] to the rank of the greasy Greeks, Konkans still think abnormally well of that long-diminished sailing superpower, which brought the rootstock of their culture to them in its little caravaels.

But the people the Konkans hate, and not with Mickey Mouse Basque-to-Castilian bile, but with full-on Armenian-to-Turk acid, is Muslims… So you converted to Islam to escape being harijans. Guess what? A harijan is still a harijan. Go fuck yourselves for fucking up our India, you fucking Muslim fucks.

… Hindus are generally a kind and gentle people, rather harmless. They believe in a god who is a monkey. Of course they got mad about all that [collaboration with the British] stuff during the Raj… look at how well they held their temper afterward. Thank you for making them do that, Mahatma Gandhi.

But this admiration is extended to the higher castes only… Sikhs are good, different. Their turbans are quite stylish. Do they really have to wear that special underwear? Wouldn’t it be nice if they started killing Muslims again? And what about those crazy Parsi Tatas? Feeding their dead to vultures, taking their sisters to bed? Is that what it takes to make all that wealth?

… Asians are irrelevant, blacks are not human. Blacks do look like monkeys, though, and that’s a funny thing.

Related posts: The Mangalorean’s last sigh, ‘The Konkans’