Jessica Faleiro: ‘Afterlife: Ghost Stories from Goa’—family secrets are revealed
Startling family secrets are revealed, as is an ancient curse that forever binds the family…
Afterlife: Ghost Stories From Goa starts with a happy event. The Fonseca family are all gathered together in the Carvalho mansion. They have come together to celebrate Savio Fonseca’s 75th birthday. The family have enjoyed a good feast, when the power suddenly fails and all the lights go out.
Left in the dark, the family members start swapping spooky stories…
A young boy is haunted by an older man’s spirit
A man buys a Venetian goblet which then seems to cast a spell over his life
A dying relative is visited by a bird (koel) that seems to be the reincarnation of someone she knew
A college girl is forced to spend the night in a haunted library with a tragic result
A man takes a shortcut across a cemetery and is then haunted by a face that he can’t seem to shake from his memory
Amidst all this, the stories also reveal the hopes and dreams of the various members of the Fonseca family. Slowly, though, all the tales gradually build up in Afterlife: Ghost Stories From Goa to reveal the history of the family, a secret that Savio and Lillian had jealously guarded from their daughters.
“Afterlife is a novel of interlinked stories set in contemporary Goa, a coastal state in the western part of India,” Faleiro told New Asian Writing. “The Fonseca family gathers at their patriarch Savio’s house on the eve of his seventy-fifth birthday. It starts raining heavily, the electricity fails, and in the darkness, family members start narrating their encounters with the supernatural. Each story connects the family members in some way. As the night advances, the family begin to learn more about their history and eventually, discover the secret lurking behind their family name.”
The author says that one of the stories in her book actually contains the seed of the inspiration for this novel. “When I was ten years old, visiting my grandmother’s house, I believed that I encountered a ghost. The experience left a lasting impression and I spent a couple of decades asking people for stories of their own encounters with ghosts. This led me to research more about what a ‘ghost’ or a ‘haunting’ was really about and my novel was born.”
Afterlife: Ghost Stories From Goa
Jessica Faleirohor
Rupa Publications India
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Reviews
“Each short story in this collection is bound to send a chill up your spine.”—The Curious Reader
“Reincarnation, exorcism and immoral priests...what’s a story on Goa without a sprinkling of religion, devotion or fanaticism thrown in?”—DNA
“If you like ghost stories, extended family tales, twists in the tale and Goa this is the book for you.”—The Whimsy Bookworm