Book Review

“The Sixth Night”

 A novel by Silviano C. Barbosa

Review by Lino Leitao,

Author of the novel “The Gift of the Holy Cross”

THE SIXTH NIGHT

            by

Silviano C. Barbosa

Goa Raj Books

Toronto, Canada.

pp 314, Hard Cover,   December 2004

US$ 20

            What’s the Sixth Night, or Sottvi Raat?

It’s an old Goan belief, which the author expresses in a couplet down below:

No matter how hard you try                       

No matter what you do

What is written on your Sixth Night

Will always come true

            Silviano Barbosa, the author, weaves a very fascinating narrative around this old Goan belief, exposing the social mores based on caste iniquities and servile mental attitudes implanted to the very core of the Goan psyche by the feudal and colonial hierarchies during that period of Goa’s history.

            The story revolves around Linda Antonieta Cardoso, born to Joanita Dias of Navelim and Mário Cardoso of Cuncolim on the twenty-seven October 1944. She is born in the Shudra caste, the lowest caste in the Goan caste structure, and her ancestors were toddy tappers.

As one goes reading the novel, it appears, that Sottvi, the Goddess of the Sixth Night, inscribed an exceptional future in Linda’s destiny. Sottvi endowed her with a gift of intellectual curiosity, giving her a strong will to fight against the prejudices that kept humans in subservient oppression in the society that she was born in.    

Linda’s consciousness awakens to the injustices of the caste system, for the first time, when she was about nine years old. It happened in her village Church. She had gone with her mother Joanita to the Passion Service, and they were lucky to have seats in the pew at the back. But when an upper caste woman who had arrived late to the services, orders them to vacate the seats because they are of lower caste, and that the seats be given to her, Linda rebels and fights for her rights, creating a commotion in the Church.

Much later on, when Linda was a student at Liceu Nacional Afonso de Albuquerque – Portuguese High School, in Panjim, the fellow students, who came from the Goan elite class and some from Portuguese Europeans, looked down upon her because she didn’t belong to their social status. She was just a plain village girl. The snobbish attitudes of her fellow students hurt her. She fought them by coming at the top of her class, thereby demonstrating that she was not only intellectually superior to them but a better human being.

A critical reader will come across some impetuous assertions in the narrative, which oftentimes, aren’t historically appropriate, and the characters that abound in the novel don’t voice them. They come as viewpoints or observations from the author, impeding not only the flow of the narrative but damaging the literary quality of the novel. An example:

“The majority of the ordinary Catholic people of Goa never had any trouble with the Portuguese, except the lack of influence and power. They did not care who ruled Goa as long as they were happy. Currently, they were happy. (p 207)”.

The above statement is a biased statement and the author should have known better. The Goan populace irrespective of their religious affiliations lived in secular harmony. By stereotyping ‘the ordinary Catholic people of Goa’, the author is adding fuel to the fire. The Goan populace from all sectors worked very hard to earn a meagre living and if they looked contented, it was because they were kept ignorant of their fundamental rights. Catholic intellectuals like: Loyolas of Orlim, Menezes Bragança, Roque Correia Afonso, Tristão da Cunha, Francisco Candido de Loyola and Dr Julião Menezes were the pioneers of Civil Rights Movement in Goa, and I am sure that the author is aware of this fact.

Ignoring such flaws, we pursue the romance of Linda and Carlos Soares, a Portuguese bureaucrat, who was an attaché to the Governor’s Colonial Office in Panjim. Fate throws a lot of insurmountable hurdles on their way, making their union almost impossible. But in the end, purity of feelings and true love overcomes them all, and the couple gets married not in Goa, nor in Portugal, but in St Michael’s Cathedral in Toronto.

You and I may not believe it, but Joanita, the mother of Linda, who came all the way from Goa to attend the wedding of her daughter, is certainly convinced that the Sottvi, the Goddess of the Sixth Night, inscribed the incomparable future of her daughter on that auspicious sixth night of her birth.

I enjoyed reading The Sixth Night.

Lino Leitão – author of The Gift of the Holy Cross.

The novel can be ordered from: goache@hotmail.com