Catholics of India
The Konkans, Tony D’Souza, 2008
A brilliant exploration of multiculturalism. The narrator is Francisco, the son of a blond American woman who went to India in the Peace Corps in the mid 1960s and an Indian catholic from the Malabar coast on the Arabian sea whose father saw the white woman as a ticket for his sons to move to America the ersatz Britain. The region is a former Portuguese colony taken over later by the British. Under the Portuguese many residents were forced or converted to Catholicism and assumed Portuguese names.
Francisco’s mother grew up in a dysfunctional American Midwestern family and escaped to college at UW Milwaukee. When she graduated, she joined the Peace Corps where she was trained to teach low caste Indian women to build and use smokeless ovens and reduce the risk of early death due to lung disease and cancer. The Peace Corp sends the recruits to a training camp on a Native American reservation. Unlike most Peace Corp volunteers who hated India, would never live in the villages, or simply went mad, Francisco’s mother loved India. When she was assigned to a village as the lone American, she acquired a bicycle and jumped wholeheartedly into Indian life and her work. She never wanted to leave India. When the Konkan patriarch sees the volunteer, he invites her to his home and recalls his first son from his bank job with orders to court the American. They marry and the patriarch orders his wife to torture the American daughter in law so she will want to return home to American with first son in tow. The plan works and soon the family finds itself in Chicago.
Francisco’s father is obsessed with his ambitions and obligations of the first son of a first son going back generations. He gets a job with a good American company and works his way up although much slower than his white colleagues. He moves to ever larger houses in more prosperous neighborhoods which his wife hates. He takes up golf and tennis and applies for membership in local country clubs. He is always turned down and eventually forms a friendship with and American Jewish man who has married an Irish wife. They share ambition and disappointment.
Chicago Country Club House 
Francisco’s mother sponsors two brothers in law for immigration to America. A distant cousin must be smuggled through Canada. One uncle is in love with Francisco’s mother and spends a lot a time with Francisco telling him legends of the Konkan (Indian Portuguese Catholics) people and of his family. As Francisco grows up, he studies the actual history of the Portuguese colonial time and of the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries and of the long Catholic Goa Inquisition which last from the 1500s into the 1800s. He also learns the real history of his father’s family, their wealth accumulated by serving their British masters.
Konkan Wadi 
Francisco’s father is eventually promoted to VP but his job is mostly to fire minority workers in his corporation. The company thinks having a minority Indian do the firing will isolate them from charges of discrimination. Ambition wins over conscience and the father fires his own black protégé.