Review: You Envy the Coutinhos

In Michelle D’Costa’s debut novel, one of the characters, Joachim Coutinho, is obsessed with becoming a Bollywood actor despite not having the “face” for it. Carrying this obsession into middle age, at one point, he is even bent on achieving his acting dreams not only at the cost of abandoning his painfully built career in the Gulf but also putting at stake the lifelong dream of his spouse.

One will have to read this propulsive, multigenerational family drama, masterfully captured in just a little over 200 pages and tackling multitudinous themes like migration, to find out how Joachim’s Bollywood dreams land.

However, what is striking about Joachim’s Bollywood aspirations is that they are akin to the ambition of an individual wanting to become a published novelist. Both are high-risk careers to bet on, where the chances of success are slim.

The writer herself, whose debut novel was published by Tranquebar, Westland, was privy to this risk and underscored the perilous nature of these careers.

“Be it acting or writing, any creative ambition needs support as it’s not a traditional 9-5. There’s struggle before you make it. And there’s often no guarantee that you will make it,” she told in an interview with Usawa Literary Review.

For Michelle, however, the gamble has paid off. She attributed her journey to becoming a published novelist to her parents, who had migrated to Bahrain from India, where she was born and raised amid a large community of South Asian expatriates.

“I think pursuing a creative career as writing has opened my eyes to how privileged I have been to be able to write and fail and bring myself up because of the support of my parents. It’s not easy to pursue your creative dreams without emotional, moral and financial support,” she added.

Early grind

While Michelle acknowledged the “privileged” background that came with her parents’ support for her creative pursuits, publishing her novel did not happen overnight. She went through her own share of false starts along the way.  

“I always wanted to write one (a novel) and I had written and abandoned many drafts over the years but nothing seemed to work out,” said Michelle, whose literary journey in a way began with interviewing authors for her blog before her own short stories began to be published in national and international publications like Litro, Out of Print Magazine and The Bombay Literary Magazine. Her poetry e-chapbook, Gulf, followed in 2021.

She also shared her impatience and how she initially approached fiction writing — creating a story spontaneously rather than working from a detailed outline. Over time, however, she became more intentional about structure and began using it to guide her writing.

“I moved from being a pantser to a plotter. For You Envy the Coutinhos I had a rough idea of where I wanted the story to go and what each chapter would look like. Having a structure to follow really helped,” she said.

But it wasn’t merely the structure that gave her confidence. There was something about the idea itself that felt different. 

“I felt this idea had weight. The others had felt feather-light. That’s how I knew this was worth pursuing,” she added.

Multigenerational family saga in a capsule

But having the conviction in an idea to build a novel upon is only half the battle won.

With the novel spread across decades, from 1979 to 2018, covering three generations, spanning countries and regions, and bringing together multiple characters and relationships, one would be tempted to write the big fat Indian family novel.

But in a world where our attention spans have shrunk, Michelle was very conscious of the word count and pace of the book.

“I wanted to keep only the essential and most important scenes that showed the family dynamics but also propelled the story forward,” said Michelle, who, apart from writing, has also been actively engaged in editing and providing creative writing mentorship through her association with a Mumbai-based company Bound India.

She, however, added that it was not easy to cover so much in such a limited word count. Michelle’s sparse yet succinct prose perhaps also aided in keeping the novel compact.

Why family saga?

While the novel is relatively short for a family saga covering multiple generations, it manages to cover an array of relationships — from father-son, mother-daughter, husband-wife, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, sisters-in-law and cousins to lovers.

The dynamics of each of these relationships are well defined, and there is a certain tension between them, at times bordering on adversarial hatred. Take, for instance, the relationship between Joachim and his father Joseph, where, right at the outset, Joachim throws his alcoholic father in a gutter and is on the verge of smashing his head with a stone; or the typical Indian hostile relationship between Joachim’s mother Priscilla and her orphan daughter-in-law Emilda, where Priscilla leaves no opportunity to censure her.

Michelle said that she has always been drawn to family dramas like most of us, especially when we are not personally involved in them. She wanted the world of the Coutinhos to have conflict and friction, like most Indian families.

“Indian families are complicated. Like they say, you don’t just marry a man, you marry his family. And I wanted this to be a strong presence in the book,” she noted, adding that readers have reached out to her saying that they are finding this aspect relatable.

Perhaps this is because it feels like we have witnessed, read about and heard about these characters in our day-to-day lives. But what makes these characters fresh and distinct is the way the writer manages to make them her own.

What is also noteworthy about the characters is that each one of them, including Joachim’s daughter Caryn’s crush, manages to draw sympathy as much as criticism. We do not get any heroes or villains. Michelle said that she did not think of any of the characters as inherently good or bad, and just presented them as flawed and complex humans with difficult emotions and circumstances.

“And if that’s how it has come across to readers too, then it’s great, but good or bad can be very subjective so it’s up to the readers to decide for themselves,” she added.

Bollywood dhamaka

One of the highlights of the novel is a slew of references to Bollywood and Indian television series, which is bound to make people who have lived through the era nostalgic.

There is everything from the iconic 1980s movie Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Ata Hai and the rage of the 1990s romantic movie Dil Toh Pagal Hai to the vamp character Komolika from the popular TV series Kasautii Zindagii Kay and a play on the sensational gossip chat shows around Bollywood – Coffee with Caryn.

Michelle said that it was only natural for her to explore Bollywood in the novel, as it was a big part of her childhood growing up in Bahrain.

“Every Wednesday, on Channel 55, they aired Bollywood movies. I would curl up on the couch and watch these with my parents. I studied Hindi in school (CBSE) and fell in love with the language. We used to watch movies in the theatre in Awal Cinema,” she explained.

She also said that because of her exposure to Bollywood in the Gulf, she never felt like she was away from India. “Even the Arabs love Bollywood,” she added.

That sense of familiarity with Bollywood also feeds into one of the novel’s larger ideas: the way Bombay, and Bollywood with it, can become a symbol of hope for those dreaming of a different life. 

At one point in the novel, Michelle writes, “Bombay is Bollywood. Bollywood is Bombay,” capturing the enduring association between the city and the film industry, and its pull for those who flock there to chase their acting dreams despite the uncertainty.

One of the scenes in the novel illustrates this beautifully: “How many of these people standing in the queue had had Bollywood dreams when they first came to Bombay? None of them look like they could be actors, but people could transform.”

The Gulf dream

However, not everyone makes it in Bollywood, and not all dreams are fulfilled in the country they are living in. Many leave their homeland in search of better prospects abroad.

The novel captures this migration trend powerfully, and with the writer having lived in a foreign country herself, the themes of identity, belonging and displacement come alive.

“I have been a migrant for most of my life. I was a second generation migrant in the Gulf and these are issues I personally grappled with,” said Michelle.

Interestingly, living as a migrant was also a significant driving force behind her desire to write about these experiences.

“As I grew up I became curious about this, was it just me? How were other South Asian families dealing with this? How are the blue collar workers dealing with this without seeing their family for years?,” she said.

However, what surprised her was that the books she read largely dealt with migrants in the US and the UK, rather than the experiences of migrants in the Gulf.

While these stories about migrants outside the Gulf did leave a mark, Michelle underlined that she felt stories about the Gulf diaspora were missing.

Interestingly, The Namesake by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, about a Bengali family navigating life in the US, was a catalyst for Michelle’s novel. She also pointed to another “brilliant book of short stories” – Nishanth Injam’s The Best Possible Experience, published as recently as 2024 – as a recommendation for those interested in books about the Indian diaspora.

Shattering the Gulf myth

One of the common threads in fiction on the Indian diaspora is an attempt to shatter the myth of foreign lands that might seem desirable and almost heavenly from the outside.The idea for the novel also, in a way, stemmed from an attempt to shatter the myth of the rich Gulf world.

“The ‘envy’ is because a lot of people think that families in the Gulf are happy and have money. I wanted to show how complicated lives can be, that it’s not as simple as it seems, not as glorified as it seems,” said Michelle.

She also shared how, for most of her life, the image of the ‘Gulf NRI’ girl made her feel uncomfortable.

“I wanted to explore the human side to the ‘Gulf NRI’. Yes, it has its privileges no doubt. But it also has its struggles,” she added.

And the novel does not hold back in highlighting the struggles of migrants in a foreign country, where they can find themselves at the mercy of local people.

It not only shows migrants struggling without communication with their families back home, but also depicts how some can be pushed into conditions that amount to slavery.

However, the writer has handled these scenes with restraint, without trying to make them overly sentimental, showing that sometimes there is no time or space to cope with difficult or mixed feelings as a migrant.

“You got to put on a brave face and live, there is no other option. You can’t take sick days, go for therapy or mope about it. I wanted to show the almost machine like living that’s expected from most South Asian migrants,” she added.

The “you” in the title

While most of the novel is written in the third person, the writer switches to the second person when it comes to Darrel, the nephew of Joachim. This literary device works particularly well as it not only helps realise the substance of the title, but also elevates the overall storytelling.

Michelle shared that the novel started out with the idea that ‘someone’ was looking at the Coutinhos from afar and envying them.

“Could it be a neighbour? Or a friend? Or a relative? I settled on a nephew because I wanted to show that despite being so closely related, we can have distorted versions of people. I wanted the second person narration to be immersive and let the reader get lost in Darrel’s point of view. And see the Coutinhos, like he sees them, as ‘others’, as something he might never be.” she explained.

She also revealed that the initial draft was written entirely in the second person because she had enjoyed writing short stories using that point of view, but had to look at the novel objectively and make hard decisions. That bet to tweak the narrative voices has worked.

And if all goes according to her initial plans, we will probably soon get to read Michelle’s second novel, which was developed as part of her Master of Creative Writing programme at the University of Auckland and is written entirely in the second person. For readers who have grown fond of her debut, there is already another reason to look forward to what comes next.