Between Aurora and Maria:Being and Becoming in Goa
Editorial
January 2005, volume 29, No 1

There is this charming passage on page 61 of the book where Aurora, recounting the tense and fluid months after the Liberation of Goa, gives us a glimpse into that private world that she and Alban, an IAS officer of the Bihar cadre sent to Goa to help with the transition, had to negotiate. ‘He could sense my personal turmoil and my wistfulness, but to him I was Maria. He has come to know and acknowledge Aurora best perhaps only in the reading of this book. (“Oh no”, he had said when we were engaged to be married, “North India is full of Aroras/Auroras; it is a surname there, and I have a subdivisional officer called Arora. Please, please let me call you Maria. Besides, I cannot even pronounce Aurora the way it should be.”’

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