Stray Mango Branches

Are you careful when you light candles in prayer? Who is most at risk when branches of a mango tree trespass into the neighbour’s balcony? Were people less selfish when Padre Tio was young? Is it permissible to reveal the eighteenth ingredient in Tia Cassy’s Christmas cake? Is donkey an endearment? Fatima M Noronha asks these and other questions in the stories here. Stray Mango Branches is a plateful of slices and slivers of Goan life. The stories in the first part of this collection are meant to be fiction and those in the second part are meant to be memoir, but the author confesses she was not raised in a distinct genre. Family yarns take on a new twist in every telling, while who can stop real life teacher Flavia, grave-digger Namdev and milkman Uday from wandering into fictional stories? Meet Goans in and away from Goa, meet people who are Irish or Nepali and Goan too. And if you meet a certain gorgeous acacia, his name is Shirish, he likes to be talked to.