Goa II

Two years ago, when the first faint visuals of The Trip had begun to manifest in our minds, we had planned to spend the entire month simply soaking in Goa.
Slowly we came to agree that it might not be a bad idea to include some more actual traveling in our vacation. The list grew longer, and the point where our journey would culminate stretched further and further south... but the point of it's origin remained the same.

It was natural then, that while we delegated a maximum of four days to most places on our list... Goa should deserve an entire week.

Now we needed that time to shake off the Sonic Experience:

"In spite of the painfully obvious fact that we are it's only patrons in a month which will see scarce business, the staff continues it's bizarre behaviour. Everything seems to have acquired an increasingly insidious tinge since the Night of the Leering Wolves.

The Sonic is located right at the end of a strip of markets and hotels. An entire beach separates it from Curly's. This doesn't stop us from making a daily trip there anyway.

We spend as much time outside the guesthouse as possible.
The scooter and taxi guys yell out to us every time we cross the market. Every day, they have a new sales pitch :

"Hey, take a scooter...very romantic, sit very close, brake very good!"
"Take a taxi sir...your girlfriend get tired otherwise!"
"Too hot to walk man...why you not take cab today?"

But we like being on foot. Exploring, soaking, watching, smiling at strange strangers, gazing at the sea and trying to decipher it's undulating song.

Eventually, we get tired or too excited...I forget which, and return to our room."


On the fateful day we finally decided to abandon Sonic's sinking ship, I remember waking up feeling ...too far away.
Everything I knew was half a country away, intact only in intangible memories. An inexplicable sense of panic quivered just beneath the surface of my thoughts.
What we needed today was something familiar. Comfort food.
So Kshitij decided to go with mashed potatoes. How much could they possibly screw that up, we naively wondered...

Until a steaming bowl of potato mulch arrived.
Unsalted. Un-creamed. Mostly uncooked, too.

The waiter/cook responded to our aghast expressions by smashing a clenched brown fist into his hand, bizarre and ominous warning.
"I hate Indians."

Dr. Shankaran appeared,blazing in a theatrical aside in my head:

"Have you not read Fanon's account of negroes who would burn their skins with acid to bleach it white? Why would a man do something like this? Not because black was the colour of slavery...but because white was the colour of the masters. The colonized longs to become like the colonizer."


This was our first encounter with one of the myriad variety of mental roadblocks we would meet along the month. The futility of pointing out that he was, infact, Indian was obvious. So was the futility of staying put at the Sonic.
It took us forty minutes to pack our bags, pay our bills and trudge off to find better lodging. The universe with her twisted sense of humour led us straight this time, to the (now more significantly named) White Negro Guesthouse.


........................





You thought the leaden winter would bring you down forever,
But you rode upon a steamer to the violence of the sun.

And the colors of the sea blind your eyes with trembling mermaids,
And you touch the distant beaches with tales of brave ulysses:
How his naked ears were tortured by the sirens sweetly singing,
For the sparkling waves are calling you to kiss their white laced lips.

And you see a girls brown body dancing through the turquoise,
And her footprints make you follow where the sky loves the sea.
And when your fingers find her, she drowns you in her body,
Carving deep blue ripples in the tissues of your mind.

The tiny purple fishes run laughing through your fingers,
And you want to take her with you to the hard land of the winter.

Her name is aphrodite and she rides a crimson shell,
And you know you cannot leave her for you touched the distant sands
With tales of brave ulysses; how his naked ears were tortured
By the sirens sweetly singing.

The tiny purple fishes run lauging through your fingers,
And you want to take her with you to the hard land of the winter...

Tales of Brave Ulysses
Cream


















"Beautiful, breezy Palolem. Lazy drooping palms on a crescent beach. I've loved you since I first laid eyes on you, a sunny winter day, many years ago. My once-sister and I tasted freedom in your wine then, and vowed to return when we were wiser and older...our minds and bodies mature enough to taste the temptations that lingered in your sands."


While the sister and I no longer shared lives, my love and I were rediscovering the world together. We had nearly perfected our strategy of picking out the most eccentric and interesting people to talk to. Along with this we began to develop a shared understanding of who to stay away from. But more on those later.


"We trudged toward the beach dragging our backpacks and our sore behinds. As the stretch of huts, abandoned shack sites and assorted rubbish cleared, we stepped into a postcard.
An old man sat on the sand,in tattered shorts and a grey t-shirt, building a sand castle and brushing damp hair out of his eyes. A beautiful woman with golden hair, ocean blue eyes and a silver nose ring bent over near him, playing with a frisky little beach dog.

I liked her at once because of the dog and the nose ring and the fact that she was barefoot. I think the blue bikini won her a few points with Kshitij as well. She offered to take us to the nearest establishment that would provide us with what we needed - a cheap and clean room.
Said establishment turns out to be a hut, or rather, an independent part of the hut which belongs to a man named Fransisco."

(Every time I say his name I involuntarily begin to hum
"If you're going to San Fransisco...
be sure to wear...flowers in your hair...")


"...Fransisco is the perfect example of Goan hospitality. He loves his family and he loves tourists. He looks after all his guests with paternal concern. Every morning he cooks and feeds us a complimentary breakfast of bun omelette and chai, while enquiring about our parents, our jobs, our lives back home. This is the first of the many times we are told that our situation represents a bit of a cultural cliff. Neither Fransisco nor the foreigners we meet seem to have come across such a thing in India before.

Unmarried and backpacking together as a couple? In the South?
Did our parents have no objections? Were we of the same caste?
Was it okay for me to wear these shorts where I came from?"


Answering the wide spectrum of questions posed, I found myself wondering where exactly the typical urban upper middle class family fits in. Where do we belong, in the Indian scheme of things?
Our march towards increasingly "modern" lifestyles and values is based almost entirely on what the world markets our way. Indian soaps supposedly based on the middle class seem sickeningly kitschy. The world of saas - bahus and balika - vadhus is not one we relate to, it is nothing like the world we inhabit.
But switch on F.R.I.E.N.D.S., Grey's Anatomy, Sex and the City and you'll find us swooning with empathy.
Show us Amitabh Bachchan in a movie about the eternal patriarch - who lives in the U.K., prances about with half nekkid chicks but delivers monologues on the importance of "parampara" - and you'll have us nodding along.
We are stuck in a phase of transition...between two classes, between two worlds
and neither claims us as their own.

.....




"In the middle of not-so-sunny Goa, I wonder what's going on in your head. It feels so stupid being insecure when we have the luxury of this entire month together, but I am tearing your silences apart to see what lies behind them.

The paranoia begins to flood my mind so easily it's almost predictable. Would you rather have made this trip with someone else? Would you rather have made it alone and hooked up with someone along the way? An image of you with the blonde Marta sharpens into focus and I realise this is a one way street to insanity.
I need sleep."


.....


The Morning:
"Divesting myself of unhealthy thoughts, I woke up ready to party today.
We have found an entertaining ally in the old man from the beach. He claims to be a Spanish playwright on a working vacation. He is always in search of, in the act of consuming, or recovering from whiskey.
Through our varied altered states of consciousness, we have a considerably hard time understanding one another. We know we are all very high and only wish to get higher, and in this purpose, we are united. He claims Kshitij and I inspire him, and every now and then looks up from the whiskey to blurt out a famous name at us.

"Iggy Pop!"
"Genet!"
"Buddha!"
"Juliette Binoche!"

If he finds even a glimmer of recognitionon our faces, his eyes light up and he launches into an incoherent monologue on said individual, punctuated with "rat-a-tat-tat"s "parrrrum!"s and "PWOOF!"s and accompanied by frantic hand movements meant to indicate everything from sexual tension to nuclear disarmament.


The Afternoon:

Kshitij (shaking me awake) : Baby, there is this dashing naked young fellow sitting under our bed and I don't know what to do with him.

Me : What a clever ruse. I'm still not getting up.

Kshitij (laughing) : I'm serious!!

Five minutes pass and I become aware of a strange scratching thumping sound under the bed. I'm jolted out of semi-sleep.

Me : WHATTHEFUCKWASTHAT??


I leap off the bed and grab a knife. Kshitij is still laughing. I pull off the sheets to see this guy


















staring at me with an irate expression at being interrupted in the extremely private act of chewing his tail. In some time he comes out and sups on biscuits before leaving for the outdoors to perform his toilet. When he is done he scratches on the door and returns to his bed-under-our-bed, nodding at us in polite acknowledgment on the way.



The Night
A fire on the beach under stars frozen in space. The taste of smoky fish. Holding your hand while we stood in the ocean, wondering what held it in. Trying to be quiet in our room when we wanted to scream and then collapsing into laughter when Fransisco's voice tore through the darkness
"Marta, when you are going to get married and have babies?"
Going out in search of dinner and returning with cigarettes and biscuits which Hampu insisted on sharing again.
We leave tomorrow. Palolem has been different this time. I've been different too. The only thing that hasn't changed is that I still leave it hoping to return someday.

"The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure.It saves on hellos and goodbyes"