The Decameron on a Goan Beach : Twelve Feel-Good Stories

Book excerpt: Four participants of an international conference on "The Art of Story-Telling"- three young persons and one not so young - prefer to remain in each other's company, decide to overstay and spend three days together in a beachside hotel in Goa before leaving for their respective home towns. While in Goa, they tell stories of their own invention, each of them telling a story every day, thereby recreating a backdrop immortalized by the 14th century writer Giovanni Boccaccio in The Decameron. Each of our group of four tells three stories in the course of three days.Some of the stories are realistic; some are magical; some are serious and comic at the same time; some modern fables have animals as characters and some of them even make sense in a curious sort of way. One thing, however, is common about these twelve stories: they celebrate life's diversities.