Editor’s Note

Where does the past end, and the now begin?
In Marcel Proust’s seven-volume opus of longing and remembrance—In Search of Lost Time—the past and the present drift and dance like interchangeable twins. Time becomes a malleable, often treacherous concept, as episodes from childhood and young manhood infiltrate the day-to-day at will, and the author voluntarily discards the present entirely in his excavations of a coveted yesteryear.
I’m reminded of that same excavation, a similar transposition between past and present, perhaps even an allied letting go of today, in Valerie Anithra Pereira’s hushed, opulent ode to Goa’s lost homes—‘The Unspoken Poetry of Abandonment’. Using two old Goan homes of Indo-Portuguese manner, left to the whims of decay and amnesia, Pereira manages to craft a latter-day fable of heritage, melancholy, and inevitability.
Walk through these words, poetic in their cadence but specific in their pinpointing of loss and relinquishment. Linger long within these photographs—richly-textured, beautifully-detailed portraits of broken facades, disfigured figurines, left-behind heirlooms, odd memorabilia, and rampant verdure. Meditate on how easy it is for something to slip away; how crucial it then becomes to hold on.

—Siddharth Dasgupta
The Bombay Literary Magazine