Why do you tell stories, and when did you first know that you wanted to tell them?
I started writing quite late in life. Writing happened out of circumstance and desperation rather than choice in the sense that I had to resign from my teaching job to accompany my husband to London. My first book was purely English Literature on Graham Greene. I also wrote a series of columns, Letter from London, for the Indian Express for about a year.

Maria Aurora Couto’s, author of Goa: A Daughter’s Journey, received the Padma Shri in 2010

What made you begin writing the family memoir, Filomena’s Journey: Portrait of a Marriage, a Family and a Culture? What is the book about?
The book is about my mother who married for love and raised seven children under very trying conditions.
The suggestion that I should write about my parents or about Goa pursued me from the time I began the book on Graham Greene around 1983. Friends from Dharwar who are writers themselves suggested that I write about my mother or my father, and that I should give up Greene. I always did feel my mother’s life needed to be celebrated. A thought that was daunting yet reinforced by repeated suggestions in various ways with insistent regularity over the years. Writers in Goa also urged that I abandon Graham Greene and Eng Lit to write about Goa, Amchi Kani.