Damodar Mauzo

Few countries celebrate religious and cultural festivals with greater passion, imagination, and joy than India. And among the many festivals of this gloriously diverse, multicultural nation is Christmas. The Christian communities of India celebrate the birth of Christ with food, music, lights, prayer, family gatherings, charity, and other age-old traditions. This anthology captures the distinctive magic of Christmas in India and in the Indian diaspora with a splendid collection of essays, stories, poems, and hymns―both in English and translated from India's other languages. It includes works by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, Booker Prize winners Salman Rushdie and Aravind Adiga, Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri, Khushwant Singh, Jerry Pinto, Damodar Mauzo, Vivek Menezes, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, and others writing about Christmas in Goa, Kerala, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, as well as in London and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In the title story, an ineffectual husband finally reaches his boiling point, 'Coinsanv's Cattle' is a heart-breaking depiction of how a farmer couple must make the impossible choice - send their beloved animals to slaughter or face starvation and, in the quietly humorous 'A Writer's Tale', a senior author becomes the unwitting subject of a woman's fiction. Compiled with care and smoothly, felicitously translated by Xavier Cota, Teresa's Man and Other Stories from Goa brings to readers tales which are as compellingly local in their flavour as they are universal in the ideas and emotions they evoke. This volume is a must-read.