The best things in life are free

A bit of the big wide world has arrived on the edge of this quiet village. I go down to Palolem beach to see the live show one evening.

Shacks have sprung up all along the gentle curve of the beach, with names like Ibiza and Cuba and Café del Mar. Little blackboards outside each shack offer messages scrawled in chalk: Specialist in Mexican, Thai, Italian, Continental, Chinese, Tandoori. Buy one cocktail, get one free. Happy, happy hours.

I wander about in bare feet among tanned bodies.

A man is standing on the sand, leaning over to the sea, playing the saxophone to the mellowing evening sun with a concentrated intensity. A woman pirouettes gracefully on her toes like a ballerina. In the surf a father walks on his hands to amuse his kids. Another walks around juggling balls with astonishing skill.

A youngish bald man is doing the tai chi chuan (or shadow boxing), the graceful Chinese form of exercise that is like dance in slow motion. A woman is trying to swing baoding balls, another kind of Chinese exercise. A group of people are doing yoga together on the sand.

Frisbees fly elegantly through the sky. A football almost hits me. I dodge the mess of kicked-up sand where the rough game of football is in progress. Further inland a net has been strung up and a game of volleyball is being played.

I look to the sea. Heads bob about in the water. In the distance I see some kayaks, those colourful canoe-type boats that seat one or two. A man tries to balance on a little surf board and keeps getting tossed by the waves. Some south Indian tourists, fully dressed, are waist-deep in water, the ammas giggling like children. A traditional wooden fishing boat comes in and is hauled over long pieces of oiled wood. Women with baskets stand around waiting for the catch.

I sit on the sand. A cow wanders up to a group of tourists and puts his nose into the bag that's lying beside them. Soft cries and laughter. Someone takes a picture. One of them gently strokes the cow down the length of its face as if it's a horse.

From the rocky outpost at the far end of the beach, the sunset viewers drift back like theatre goers when the show is over. It hasn't been a spectacular sunset. The sky is a pale rosy colour, but still it's beautiful.

Soon it's twilight, that magical time of evening before darkness falls. The sky is a deeper rose now and the sea awash with pink. All along the beach tiny green or red fairy light bulbs come on, outlining the shacks, twined round some coconut palms. Couples walk along the edge of the sea, holding hands.

Love, peace and happiness.

My rat in shining armour

I noticed the other day that some mysterious nocturnal creature has been frantically digging up my garden. Every morning I wake up to find holes all over the place, and beside each hole a pile of mud heaped like an offering of flowers in a temple. I fill up the holes only to find them dug up once more in the night. Soon I notice they're not holes, but tunnels, and quite deep ones at that. One leads from my garden to the coconut grove behind. The other vanishes somewhere into the ground.

When one night I heard the sound of gnawing, I knew who the mysterious digger was. A rat, I thought.

And I understood why suddenly the frogs had given up wooing me and hopped back into the garden. The rat had been frightening them off.

I was absurdly grateful to the rat whom I finally spotted one night scrabbling up my kitchen wall and rushing out in haste. Better one rat who runs away from me than many slimy frogs trying to get into my bed, I thought. But at the same time I knew, rather regretfully, that I would have to rid myself of my knight in shining armour.

Off with it's head, I thought sadly, feeling rather like the bloodthirsty duchess in Alice in Wonderland. But even after the rat had been dispatched with some poisonous rat chocolate, the tunneling continued.

'It's an oonoor who did it,' Babuli the village idiot told me in Marathi, spotting the tunnels when I called him in to chase three squawking hens out of my garden. 'A kohinoor we call it.'

'A mon-goose,' Munni, a fat Muslim woman of the neighbourhood, pronounced as she came up panting to claim her hens who are in the habit of laying eggs all over the place.

'A bandicoot,' someone who spoke English later explained.

'A kind of rat,' someone else said. 'Use rat poison.'

I put some rat poison into the hole. But the mysterious tunneling still went on.

Acting on yet more advice, this morning I broke two wine bottles and buried the glass shards in the tunnel. I am hoping it will do the trick.

Sometimes the absurdity of what I'm doing strikes me.

It seems ironic that while the big bad world beyond my bit of paradise is fighting a modern evil with sophisticated weaponry, millions in the villages still continue to battle a stone-age enemy with sticks and stones and bits of glass. Rats, snakes, scorpions, bandicoots, pests who attack crops, leopards who wander in from the jungle - these are the real terrorists. The others are actors on tv, as unreal as villains in a Bollywood film.

To die for

What is more frightening: To be in a room with terrorists or stuck on a tiny shipwrecked boat in the middle of the ocean along with – as in that great book, Life of Pi by Yann Martel – a Royal Bengal tiger, a hyena, a zebra and an orangutan?

Living close to nature – which is as menacing as it is beautiful (just like man) – I ponder this.

Animals, so I'm told, are essentially simple beings. They will attack if they are hungry or if they believe themselves to be in some danger. Stuck with a tiger, I can still hope that it's not hungry enough to eat me. Possibly I might even be able to convince it that I am its enemy, someone to be wary of. What I do know is that the tiger is not going to eat me for the greater glory of god or because it wants to go to heaven or anything quite so crazy, and this itself makes it a little less frightening to me.

Stuck with a tiger, I'll be very thankful that it doesn't care about the meaning of life. I suspect that the terrorist - like many an ordinary person - has thought too much about such things and has suffered from a sense of emptiness inside. But unlike the ordinary person he is not able to fill up this emptiness by a belief in god or family or love or work, or any of the other things that most people hold on to in order to go through life with their sanity intact. I suspect this to be true though I'm no psychologist. Neither can he lose himself in a kind of semi death through oblivion: through drugs or alcohol or orgies or other mind-numbing experiences. Instead he goes through the motions of living, seeking that elusive meaning and wanting only to die, but to die gloriously.

And then one day he finds the big answer to life. At last he has faith. At last he can believe in something. Life is not so puny a thing after all. It's so tremendous this feeling – like a surge of cocaine in his sick soul - that he's drugged with the power of it. Nothing can touch him anymore, not reason, not love, not anything.

I think I'd rather the Royal Bengal tiger ate me up. At least I wouldn't die despising it.

Sleepless at the station

It began like one of those suspense stories: It was a dark stormy night -

The train halted at a little village station in the dead of night. I was the only passenger to alight onto the dark empty silent platform. I saw a woman holding a lamp for the train disappear into the darkness. The station clock informed me it was 2 in the morning.

Hefting my bag onto my shoulder I trudged along the dim single platform open to the blurry stars. It had been raining and the air was cool and sweet. I entered the station's small empty hall with its closed ticket counter and PCO, and I started down the staircase that led out. Because of the heavy rains the electricity had failed and the only light offered was by a fuzzy crescent moon in a cloudy sky. Yet it was enough for me to see that there was no auto rickshaw waiting outside, no motorcycle for hire. Only darkness and silence.

I returned to the station's small hall to ring Mashak, a local autorickshaw wallah I know, but the ping in the receiver told me his phone was out. In rising panic I wondered how I would get home. Home is only a twenty-minute walk away, but the station is some distance from anywhere on earth. I thought of myself walking alone along a lonely dark road in the dead of night. I began to realise I would have to spend the night at the station.

I looked about me. The station master, who is actually a young woman, gave me a sleepy look and retreated to her cabin, where she put her head down on her desk and went to sleep. The man who runs the kiosk-sized canteen and another big man who's always at the station both looked at me in a friendly way. The big man offered to drop me home on his bicycle for fifty rupees. The canteen wallah stretched out to sleep on one of the two benches, urging me to make myself comfortable on the other one. Feeling like one of those sad mad homeless women I settled into a plastic chair that I got from the station master's room, and rested my feet on the bench. I looked about for rats, but there were only three small puppies which the station had adopted. The big man fed them the remains of the lassi he was drinking. Two of them cuddled up and went to sleep. I watched the third chase a cockroach for some time.

Then there was a sudden silence and total darkness. The generator, which was feeding the dim lamps, had been switched off. The canteen wallah snored. I fell into an uneasy sleep. Sometime in the night a train thundered through without stopping. We all slept.

A little before 5 I heard a rickshaw and then some foreigners climbing up to the station, chattering in cockney English. They were there to catch one of the few trains that stops here.

As I walked home, aching in every bone, I wondered what they thought of this sleepy little village station that's so picturesque in the daytime, but which has no coolie and no noisy PA system and very few trains they can catch. And I remembered that I had just returned from a frightened city where the terrorists had thrown grenades in the railway station and had almost blown up the Taj hotel, killing many foreigners.

I guess it's a good time to holiday in a place so off the map that trains simply hurtle through without stopping.

Kissing the frog

It's frog season again, that silly time of year when love is in the air and frogs are everywhere.

Down the road on Palolem beach some of the frogs seem already to have metamorphosed into tanned handsome young princes. They strut about on the sand or they stroll along the edge of the water, holding hands with girls who kiss them again.

In my garden the ugly ones still linger, warts and all. Come dusk and they cheerfully hop into the house to try their luck, croaking what sounds suspiciously like 'kiss me quick, stupid'.

A little one hopped up to my bed and gazed up at me with its little bright eyes. Another leaped down from the rafters as I stood cooking, balancing itself for a second on the edge of my hot kadai like a champion diver, before leaping off again. Yet another hid in a pair of shorts that were hanging on the line, and then jumped out onto me when I tried to wear them. There's a frog invariably in the loo, swimming around lazily in the pot (luckily I have a second, sealed loo). And another hidden among the coffee mugs on the kitchen shelf.

To all these hopeful suitors my response is the same. I scream. I take a broom and try to shove them out. I run out to catch hold of some kind soul who will help a woman in distress.

But the frogs don't give up. Every night they're back in the house, croaking their serenade.

I think I will have to kiss one of them soon.

Help!

Bullfight, Indian ishtyle

It's a full moon night. And two bulls are fighting in the middle of the arterial village street. They have locked horns and are staggering up and down the street like two burly drunks. A man shouts at me to get out of the way. Others wave to passing motorcyclists and scooterists. A group of foreign tourists gathers.

When they're angry, one of the local women tells me, they can be dangerous. We wait to see if the crazed bulls will bang into a passing scooter or motorcycle, tossing the driver into the open gutters at the side.

But they nimbly sidestep all traffic and continue their raging dance down the street, conjoined still at the head like Siamese twins. It isn't exactly like the bullfights described in Hemingway's novels. No rockets explode to signal the beginning of the fight. There's no horse to calm or tire the bulls. No dashing matador to direct the bull to his senseless death with his red cape. No cheering fiesta crowd, drunk on wine and bloodlust.

It's just a desi bullfight. In the end there is no blood or gore. The bulls go staggering down the street, still keeping their horns obstinately locked, and disappear into a fallow field behind some trees.

Show over.

And to think that they were probably fighting over a cow!

Two little birds

On my zai bush, filled these days with white fragrant flowers, I came upon the following:

Nest with two tiny birds, a polka-dotted butterfly, a chameleon, a lizard at night, two frogs, tiny insects, a moth, one fat firefly, a small wasp hive.

It's not a bush anymore, more like a teeming chawl with everyone existing higgledy-piggledy one on top of the other.

The tiny brown-and-cream birds with thin curved beaks, who are the original inhabitants of the bush, look very unhappy as they flit to and fro.

One day the little papa bird cries: 'Oh how crowded it's getting in here. And so noisy. How I miss the early days when there was nothing but the two of us and the fragrance of zai. Life was so sweet then.'

'Alas!' the little mama bird sighs. 'Life is not a bed of zai flowers. I can't sleep a wink anymore. If it's not the firefly flashing its vulgar green light in my face, it's the frogs keeping me up with their ghastly croaking. Momo dearest, why not give singing lessons to the frogs?'

'Teach a frog how to sing?' the papa bird cries enraged. 'What kind of a birdbrain do you take me for? I might as well teach a pig how to fly.'

'All this low life around us,' the mama bird muses. 'What will happen to our babies when they're born I can't help thinking. They might get bitten by a wasp, poor sweet things. Or witness a snake eating a frog.'

'A bird's eye view they'll get of all the violence,' the papa bird cries.

'Oh what shall we do?' the mama bird sobs. 'This bush is no place to bring up baby birds.'

'Let's migrate to the city!'

'But will there be worms for us to eat there?'

'Worms! No one eats worms in the city. We'll eat caviar!'

'And watch movies at the drive-in!'

'And sit on taxicabs and buses!'

'Oh what fun. Let's flee,' cries the mama bird.

'Let's fly,' cries the papa bird.

And so the brave little birds leave the zai bush and fly far away to the big bad city where one night they are hit by a drunken driver on a motorcycle which crashes into the wall in whose crack they have made a nest and they die instantly.

But maybe that's not how the story ends.

The bride wore bulbs

Tulsi got married the other night and the whole village celebrated the wedding. I was invited and went out of curiosity to see this marriage of a sacred plant to a god.

There is something so simple and serene about a Tulsi plant lit by the quiet flame of a diya in the evening. But for the wedding, my neighbour Nirmala had decorated her Tulsi with strings of tiny lights and the bride looked quite garish. On the ground beside her a little fire was burning and there were coconuts and flowers. Men and women went round the Tulsi crying: 'Govinda! Govinda!' Afterwards crackers were burst and everyone was given pedas and a handful of puffed rice and jaggery.

But who did Tulsi get married to? – I asked. Amazingly, no one knew. In fact, they were quite thrown by the question. 'See those sticks tied to the Tulsi?' a young man finally told me. 'She got married to those sticks. They are her husband.'

Nobody knew the story of Tulsi or understood the significance of the ceremony. Nobody had thought about it and nobody cared. I always thought traditions in villages remained deep and pure, that villagers themselves were rooted in these traditions, that the old myths were central to their lives. But it's not so. The whole thing is just a farce, an empty ritual. Time-pass.

People will embrace anything and everything if it's sanctioned by religious tradition, and they won't find it absurd at all. It's all right for a god to marry a plant. Or for a man to marry the sun or a tree or a fish. The wedding of a (rather ugly) plant with sticks is celebrated. But the prosaic reality of a man loving and wanting to marry another man, or a woman wanting another woman, is regarded as strange and weird and sick, even criminal. What a strange world it is.

The village idiot

I can hear Babuli talking to himself long before he shows up at my door with the morning milk. After he's delivered the milk he looks at me hopefully, wrinkles his nose and says with a wheedling smile: Got two rupees on you?

Babuli is what you'd call the village idiot.

The first time I saw him I was secretly delighted. I had never thought to meet an authentic village idiot and I was full of curiosity about the state of his mind. Was he retarded? Was he mad? He shuffled up to the door in dirty baggy shorts and shirt, his thin body so hunched that his eyes remained fixed on his bare, mud-encrusted feet. Silently he poured the milk into the vessel I held out, but every now and then he snatched a quick look at me so that his hand shook and the milk spilt. His smiling glance was at once lustful and shy and confused and creepy, and I realised later this is because he has no front teeth, while the yellow canines on either side of this dark wide gap protrude like Dracula's. He gave me the creeps for a long time till I understood that his weirdness is only a form of extreme shyness with strangers. And that Babuli is actually quite vulnerable and sweet.

Because his brothers ill-treat him, Babuli lives with another family in the village where the woman of the house is kind to him.He dotes on her: helping out in the fields, taking her buffaloes to graze, delivering the milk. He doesn't receive a salary but they feed him, take care of him and occasionally give him some money for cha-beedi.

Money, therefore, is something he doesn't have, and so I offered him some work: to dig a pit and plant a mango sapling. By the end of the exercise he had trampled down two other plants, thrown mud all over the place and practically buried himself alive in the pit while the mango sapling remained forgotten. My neighbours gathered one by one to shake their heads pityingly and tell me how crazy he was and how incapable of doing any real work. I've since learnt to give him work he can do, and he seems to walk a little more upright for the money he earns.

What I've found over the last two years is that Babuli is neither stupid nor incapable nor mad. He's a little slow in the head, he has problems with his speech, he has some problems coordinating his limbs, he has problems working hard.

But his biggest problem is that he's the village idiot. And being condemned to be the traditional village idiot is a lonely job. I had expected Babuli to be a source of amusement to villagers, but no one laughs at him, not even the children when he talks to himself. In fact no one pays much attention to him. And that's his tragedy. Because what Babuli wants is to have people talk to him, to be included in some warm closed circle. Perhaps he even dreams of being loved. But 'who'll marry him'? - as the villagers say.

Instead the village idiot smiles his funny smile at anyone who will smile back. And he talks a lot, mostly to himself. Sometime he sings softly. He's invariably cheerful. He reminds me of the clown with the smiling face who's crying inside.

Flying so high

It's kite flying season and the sky is peppered with colourful kites. But strangely enough you cannot buy a kite anywhere in the market.

I discovered this when my little nephew and niece were visiting and I thought it would be fun to learn how to fly a kite.

Finally I asked one of the boys, 'Where do you get your kites?' He replied that his friend made them and directed me to a fat boy of thirteen or thereabouts.

'Five rupees per kite,' the boy told me, adding generously, 'Three rupees for children.'

The kites were rather fine with many long tails.

As we three amateurs struggled to get them off the ground – first the blue one, then the red one – we were trailed by two small boys who gazed with rapturous longing at our kites. They probably were too young to have learnt how to make the kites. When one of our kites got entangled in a tree and the other got caught in a bush we finally gave up.

With the greatest glee the two small boys ran to retrieve the kites. And soon they were soaring high in the sky. One boy finally went away but the other boy, an intense little fellow with dark eyes, was there all morning and all afternoon. In the evening he was still there, his eyes fixed on his kite in the sky. You knew he was not standing on the ground but flying high with that kite.

Probably he'll grow up and forget what it was like. He'll learn to get drunk on fenny or to get high on something else. And one day he'll make kites for his son and then maybe it will all come back to him.

Once in a blue moon

In the city I rarely saw the moon or thought to look for it. Electric lights dazzled the nightscape there: flashy neon strobes, gaudy multicoloured bulbs, sodium vapour lamps: synthetic light shining through smog and smoke.

But here, where the sky is an uninterrupted expanse of endless space, you can't help noticing the moon in its many moods and manifestations.

Two nights ago it was a quite extraordinary golden-yellow crescent suspended like the enigmatic smile of some ghostly Cheshire cat. Close by was Venus, the brightest and biggest star in the sky. Together they made everything else in that inky sky pale in comparison.

And yet, despite its magic, there is, I always feel, something a little theatrical about the moon, something that makes the night itself feel uncomfortably like a film set. Perhaps it's because the moon itself in its different phases offers up a different persona every time.

Sometimes the crescent is a sliver of the palest silver, shy and virginal, appearing late in the evening and fading away early.

Sometimes it's a big round passionate yellow moon.

Other times it's only a bland white object in the sky, trying to bask in another's light and failing miserably.

On cloudy nights it will appear in a halo of burnished light. Or, as the clouds are carried along in the wind, seem as if it is riding on the impending storm like a ship on choppy waves.

There are times when it's not the moon but the moonlight that is absolutely mesmerizing. On nights when the power fails, that is when you notice best the silver light filtering through the trees like something almost live. On a particularly dark night everything will be bathed in this dazzling silver light. And you can understand then why in fairy tales fantastic creatures emerge to dance in this light. Or why it is said that the moon brings out the madness in those who have the tendency, for even perfectly sane people are affected strangely by it.

But once in a blue moon one sees a sight that is truly unforgettable. I was on the beach one evening when it happened. The sun was about to set into the sea in the west. And then I saw, bouncing up from the casuarinas trees lining the beach in the east, a full glorious huge yellow moon. For a moment the moon and the sun, on opposite sides of the earth, stared at each other, eyeball to eyeball. And then the sun sank, as if defeated. And the moon, which after all only reflects the light of the sun, had its solo triumphant moment of glory.

The god of small thefts

Listening to villagers talk, one would think thieving simply doesn't happen here.

'Nah, nah,' my neighbour Nirmala says, shaking her head virtuously. There's never been a robbery in our neighbourhood ever, she tells me.

Not robbery according to the village moral code, maybe. But I can think of three things that villagers steal all the time, and which they don't even regard as stealing.

One is mud. People here are mad about mud. Truly. When I wanted to get rid of some mud that was piled up uselessly, my neighbours were scandalised. 'No, no,' they exclaimed. 'You never give away mud.'

Mud is precious. No sooner has someone dug out the mud in his plot to lay a foundation for a new house than it's half gone. Come evening and everyone in the vicinity will be hurrying to the mound, carrying shovels and plastic basins. Like ants they'll scurry back and forth, taking as much as they're able to carry on their heads. An old woman I know is the biggest mud thief of all. Not only is she old, she limps. Yet not even her traditional nine-yard sari will get in the way of her pilfering.

What do people do with all the mud they steal? I've seen the old woman heap it lovingly round the base of her coconut palms. But she owns a large coconut grove. What the others do is one of the eternal mysteries. Maybe they hoard it for an early grave. Maybe they sift through it looking for gold. Who knows?

Less baffling is the way they guiltlessly steal flowers. Here they are compelled by both vanity and piety. No self-respecting village woman will be seen without flowers in her hair. And if her bushes have run out, she simply plucks flowers that don't belong to her. Everyone does it. Except me, of course. I hate to see flowers disappear from my little garden. 'But it's for god,' the pilferer will say. 'To do puja.' Villagers are puzzled by why I allow the fragrant zai flowers to bloom and die uselessly on the bush when they could pluck them and stick them into their hair.

Worst of all is the fruit thieving. Come the cashew season and the whole village goes crazy. Cashew trees have a habit of sprawling all over the place. So your tree is usually everywhere but on your plot. Genuine owners will be frantically gathering the fruit, while everybody else will be frantic to get at it before the owners do. Joining the mad melee are the monkeys who leap from tree to tree and roof to roof. Not I know why the monkey god is not worshipped here. He's competition when it comes to stealing flowers and fruits. Or maybe he just resembles them too much to be treated as a god.

The mango tree

Opposite my little cottage looms an old mango tree. It must be older than all the inhabitants in the village, yet it stands majestically, imposing in its dimensions, solid as a mountain swathed in monsoon green.

The mango tree is one of the reasons I settled on this particular plot. I see it all the time, framed by the wall-sized window of my tiny living room. At night, sitting on the hard window seat, looking up every now and then from my book, I gaze at the dark splendour of it against the starry night. I see it from my dining table while I eat and from my bedroom window when I lie down to sleep. The picture it provides is never constant.

These days the mango tree is afresh with tiny new leaves that are not quite green yet, and there is something very tender and young about the old tree. Something even a little sad, as though it can't help grieving a little for the loss of its leaves. But soon, I know, the young leaves will have grown full and vibrantly green, and the tree itself will recover from the loss. Is it so different, after all, with us humans? We shed old leaves as we grow older – old memories, old loves, old friendships. We give up houses and cities and continents, and their passing away is made bearable only by the close gathering of new leaves. Yet every loss through the years will be marked by a wrinkle, a grey hair, a pain that doesn't quite go away. But the mango tree remains serene through every storm, its age a secret: written in its hidden grains of wood.

Yet if only those grains of wood were scarred, like human souls, by every experience of the tree. And if only we could learn to read the grains, to decipher the secret tree script, what mysteries might be revealed to us. But, ironically, it is left to us humans to cut down the tree and convert the wood into paper on which poets and historians will leave their ponderous scribblings. Words and yet more words, while the tree itself remains wisely silent.

This summer the mango tree was thick with mangoes.And all day the boys in the neighbourhood were trying to climb the tree and plunder its luscious fruit. As a child I used to climb my grandfather's mango tree to pluck fruit or simply to sit in the crook of a branch. But this is the great-grandfather of all mango trees, and it doesn't yield itself up so easily. I watched the boys struggle to climb it and then struggle to reach for the fruit. They looked small and lost in the gigantic tree. Mothers and fathers came out to help, to shout encouragement. They came with sticks and stones, as if to force the tree to yield its bounty. Much fruit was eventually harvested, and every family made mango pickle. The mango tree can be generous with its fruit because, fittingly, it belongs to no one. It remains free on its protected green patch, standing proudly over the village.

Once spring is here, I know the little singing bird that wakes me up will sit high up on its tallest branch and burst into song. In the monsoons the fattest and brightest fireflies will flutter about in its leafy branches, looking like stars fallen down from the heavens. Kites will get stuck in it, purple and blue and red kites with trailing tails. And then again the leaves will fall. The tree will look mournful for a while and then recover its serenity as many of us never do. One day i I will be gone,but the mango tree will still be here, rooted to this spot, spreading its branches up to the sky.

And thereby hangs a paranoid tail

Villagers seem to love dogs. Though they don't fuss over them or feed them bread and jam, every household has a dog or two. Some have half a dozen lounging around in the dust of the yard. They are given scraps to eat and left to run free and wild.

Watching a dog chase a frightened, squawking rooster, it occurs to me how easy it would be for a wily politician to make the dog look like the enemy.

I can imagine a cur like Raj Thackeray – after he's done chasing poor Biharis out of Bombay - starting a Hound the Dogs campaign.

It's so absurd, it's entirely possible.

Dogs are not your best friend, he will shout from his pulpit. Can't you see how they eat roosters and deprive the local population of food? Can't you see how they monopolise the garbage, and to such an extent that poor local rag pickers actually have to fight them off? Even the poor cow has to go hungry. Is this fair? Not even hungry Biharis will stoop to such low tricks.

Beware of dogs.If out of the kindness of your heart, you've given a dog a nice home, remember this: give a dog an inch and he will want the whole yard. And soon even that will not be enough. The dirty dogs will completely take over your neighbourhood. See how already they mark their territory simply by raising one leg. Look how they growl at every one who passes by. They are dangerous and they're armed to the teeth - with very sharp teeth that bite.

Beware of dogs. Dogs give you rabies. And they will take away your jobs. Is that what you want? Already they have taken over the job of the watchman. What will they do next, ask yourselves that. What if they become farmers and wine shop owners? Will you beg them for scraps, for a glass of fenny? What will happen to your Goan pride then?

Don't forget, men wiser than me have already predicted that every dog will have his day. Has that day already come? Is the country already going to the dogs?

And listening to his rant, maybe the poor villagers will get rid of the dogs and hire migrant Biharis to guard their homes and then the local Goans will say that the Biharis have taken away their jobs and Raj Thackeray will chase away the Biharis and so the merry-go-round will continue.

Unless, of course, they pelt Raj Thackeray with stones and shout: You dirty cur, take that.

What fun it would be to see Raj Thackeray run away like a frightened dog, with his tail tucked between his legs.Run, you cur, run!

Is there anybody out there?

Too many things happening. Too little time.
So I'm going to stop blogging - for some time at least.
Hello, is anybody out there reading this?

Bats at twilight

At twilight - when Venus glows in the sky and trees, losing their green depth, become sombre outlines - one often sees what seems to be a small lone bird fluttering about long after the other birds are gone.

Something about the frantic way in which it flaps its small wings, and in the way it darts about as if in fright, for years made me think it was a little lost bird looking for its mama or at least the rest of the flock.

Till I discovered it was not a bird, but a bat.

Why does it flutter its wings in that lost frightened way?

I thought it might be because it was blind. How scary to be blind and lost.

I have seen bats suddenly rise like a thick dark cloud out of the bushes on a hillside. It was getting dark and I was hurrying down the hill after watching the sun set when all of a sudden there were hundreds of bats gliding past me, swift, silent and intent. Not one behaved as if it was blind.

A solitary bat often flies in through an open window of my cottage at night. It will fly from room to room 'looking' for a way out, but it flies gracefully, not like my frightened twilight bat (or me flying out in fright).

Is my twilight bat still too young to have learnt how to feel its way about without sight?

Is its frantic fluttering just a bat thing and nothing whatsoever to do with fright?

I don't know.

But I'm getting used to not knowing a lot of things out here.

Like why a moth will settle down inches away from a lizard and not realise it's in danger. Or why stray dogs stay awake all night barking. Or why a frog will hide in my bookshelf till it dies and I find its dead body squashed flat between two books like a dried leaf.

It's all a mystery.

Maybe one day I'll see a pig fly and won't be surprised at all. Who can figure out, after all, the strange ways of these creatures?

When cultures meet

One of the nice things about living in a place where people come to holiday is the general air of gaiety. The sun is shining, the sea is blue, and all the horrors of the world – war and terror and strife - seem very far away.

People on holiday are happy people.

So when an act of senseless violence occurs, it is all the more horrifying.

A 65-year-old Australian tourist was beaten to death yesterday by some waiters after he objected to the way they served him beer.

A Dutch woman down the road from where I live was beaten by some locals last year. Again over something trivial. The woman along with her husband had been running a restaurant for some years. The woman was not seriously hurt, but she was so shaken by the incident that the couple packed their bags and left, vowing never to return.

There is, of course, the case of Scarlet Keeling.

It makes you wonder if the smiling face of tourism is not somewhat romanticized in a world of simmering discontents and covert xenophobia. It is, after all, no more than commerce, no more than an artificial 'hospitality' offered in return for cold cash. To paraphrase Adam Smith, it is not from the hospitable nature of Goans that tourists get their holiday, it is from their self-love.

Tourism is an industry in which one culture is forced to welcome a different culture for reasons of commerce. And when West meets traditional East, it seems they don't so much meet as collide. Yet the façade must be maintained at all costs. And so each side smiles brightly at the other, says 'hello, hello', and coexists till the season is done.

There is an old song by the Temptations: 'Smiling faces, smiling faces sometimes – they don't tell the truth.'

You think war and terror and strife are far away from here. But maybe it's only an illusion.

The new labour

There's a house being built next door for the last many years. Every now and then there's a sudden flurry of activity, and then silence again.

One morning as I'm drinking a cup coffee on the veranda I see a small group of young boys and girls enter the half-built house, chattering loudly in Konkani. They look like college-going youth in any small town. The boys slouch in with satchels on their back. They have slicked-back hair and a rather jaunty air. The girls are smart in salwar-kurtas. One girl has white flowers in her hair.

A while later I realise they are manual labourers. They go to and fro in the hot sun, carrying heavy blocks of laterite on their heads. Some are emptying bags of cement and scraping together a mixture with water and sand. Others are transporting the mixture to the mason. The boys have changed into old t-shirts while the girls wear long white coats rather like a doctor's over their clothes. It's hard work, sweaty and dirty. They don't look sweaty or dirty. All day I can hear them laughing and talking as they work. They tease each other, they sing. During the lunch break, after eating rice from the tiffin that each carries, they lie down in the shade cast by a large cashew tree. The girl with the flowers pulls out a compact mirror and examines her face. Another combs her hair.

When they leave in the evening it's hard to believe they've been doing hard labour all day in the hot sun. Each has had a wash. They look like college students going home after a day spent sitting in a lecture hall and making fun of the teacher.

I know for sure that these migrants from Karnataka won't be going home to some hovel, as they would if they were labourers in a big city. I asked a mason once what they did on a Sunday. 'Eat chicken and watch TV,' he told me.

They are such a contrast to the wretched labour you see in cities that I wonder: Is this a sign of the New Shining India? Or is it just Goa not conforming, as usual, to the Indian stereotype?

Singing while you slave?

Oh to be a rich rustic

Lately I've been thinking I wish I'd been born a villager in a prosperous region.

Then I wouldn't need to educate myself. Or get myself a job. Or work hard to earn money.

I could be an illiterate old rustic who drives a bullock cart and yet be rich. Seriously rich. Like old Pandari baba. The old man doesn't own a scooter or car. He rides around on his cart or on a rickety cycle, but he owns all the coconut and cashew groves around where I live, as well as several fields. In addition, he's the owner of a large house with a concrete roof and another smaller house. Both he rents out, while he and his family continue to live in their small, ancient cottage with its tiled roof and loo outside.

I could be like Ulhas, who used to be a tenant farmer, but who as a result of some tenancy laws now owns the lovely large property where he lives with its chikoo and banana and mango trees - just 500 metres from the sea.

Or like Rodney Gonsalves whose forefathers were traditional fishermen, and who runs a popular hotel right on the beach on land he inherited.

Or like a lot of other villagers who show no ostentatious signs of wealth, but who own more than one piece of what is, or soon will be, prime land.

I'd sit around drinking fenny under a coconut tree or playing the guitar while waiting for the property developers to descend from the city, waving their wads of cash. And I'd sell my land to some stressed-out guy from the city who works like a dog in an office. And I'd laugh all the way to the bank.

I'd be part of a new landed gentry. We would elect Mayawati as prime minister of India. And we would acquire flashy cars and designer suits and sneer at the poor dogs with their fancy degrees and office jobs, who think working hard is the way to get rich.

More cow musings

A herd of cows is idling on the beach, not a tuft of grass in sight, not even a plastic bag. What made them wander this way?

They sit or they stand, and they stare in that passive stupid way of cows.

Are they enjoying the cool sea breeze? The beauty of the sunset? Digesting their meal?

It's hard to say. Their expressions give nothing away.

As if guessing my thoughts, one turns its head and looks steadily at me. And the reproach in its eyes seems to say: "What is this life, if full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare?"

I stand reproached.

Maybe cows are wiser than I thought.

The cow who cries

It must be nice to be a cow in the western world. To live comfortably on more than two dollars a day, to know that you are better off than a lot of Indians (forget Indian cows) living below the poverty line.

It must be nice to be fed instead of having to scavenge in garbage along with low-life like cats and dogs – always in danger of being knocked down by a careless motorcyclist or being bitten by a village dog; nice not to look like someone out of a concentration camp.

It must be nice not to be treated like shit while your shit itself is treated with tender loving care, plastered on walls and floors, used as manure and as fuel for cooking. Nice not to have your urine praised as a panacea for all ills including cancer while you yourself slowly waste away.

It must be nice not to be a symbol: of mother earth, of fertility, of crooked political bosses, of India, of Hinduism. Never to have communal riots in your name. Never to be dressed up and paraded through the village and have people worship you as a goddess.

It must be so nice just to be a regular unholy cow.

And to be happy and to have pictures of you laughing on cartons of cheese.

I look at the sad scrawny cow who’s been standing still and staring passively at nothing at all for the last half an hour, and I wonder if she’d be thinking all that if she could think. Or would it be: At least I'm not a hamburger.

Baby, can you drive my car?

Every year during the Ganapathi festival my neighbour Ramakant binges on lottery tickets, the ones that each Ganapathi pandal sells. He'll buy not one, but an entire booklet of 100 tickets totalling 5,000 rupees in the hope of narrowing his chances of winning the big prize: a maroon Maruti Alto. So far he has spent 15,000, a lot of money for a man who trims trees and brings down the coconuts. But probably his two grown sons paid.

This year, to his utter astonishment, Ramakant won. Ganapathi be praised!

The car was brought home, everyone came to oohh and ahh over it, aarti was done. The next day the family of eight and a horde of relatives – dressed in their most elegant clothes - went for a spin in the car and a hired van.

Then the bamboo compound fencing was removed . The car was placed inside and covered with old saris and a plastic sheet. All evening Ramakant spent putting the bamboo back in place.

The car is now safely inside.

Every day the wrapping is removed and the car cleaned thoroughly.

But the car never goes anywhere. None of them knows how to drive.

Inviting shopaholics for a rest cure

There are more coconut trees than shops out here. A thousand times more.

So it’s funny one doesn’t see ads like the following promoting this southern tip of Goa:

Are you a compulsive shopper who wants to kick the habit? Then come to this paradise of No Shops. (Not what you city types would call a shop, anyway.) We at Niche Tourism offer the Nirvana Rest Cure for sick souls like yours.

It's all not here in the south of south Goa. No designer stores, no fashion shops, no music shops, no jewellery stores. No shops where you can buy furniture or fancy foodstuffs or anything useless. (A few years ago you couldn't even buy ice cream. As for vegetables, people just ate fish.)

Our small market area called Chaudi is so ugly you’ll never be tempted to visit. (No one can be that desperate.) The biggest store here is a government-run departmental store where you get everything you don't want (but ordinary people need). Most tourists don't even know Chaudi exists, that too only 2 kms away on the NH17 , because they go straight from airport to beach and back. It's only the long-term foreigners (practically residents) who are in on this secret, and for them a few stores keep Marmite and other goodies. On Saturday is the grand weekly bazaar for vegetables, but it won't interest you. A festive air reigns as simple folk from the neighbouring villages flock here to stock up on provisions, have their future told by a card-picking parrot and get their footwear fixed from the only mochi in miles. Boring for someone used to malls.

With no shops to distract you, shed your material soul and discover ananda in god’s own creations (better than Gucci). Meditate on tranquil blue waters. Release all your negative energy on some of Goa's most beautiful beaches: Palolem, Patnem, Galgibaga, Agonda. Seek beauty in the hills all around. Return to your city with a light heart and a full wallet.

(PS. If you are beyond redemption and can’t cope with the cold turkey, go for Plan B. Drown your sorrows in liquor. Lots of booze shops here.)

Bird of nostalgia

I almost saw a koel today. I've been told it's a black, rather ugly bird, but it's so shy I've never been able to spot one - though for many years I've wanted to.

Most people wouldn't get terribly excited at the idea of seeing a koel.

But every time I hear that familiar 'ku-wooh, ku-wooh' something happens to me.

Sounds – like smells – tend to prod forgotten memories, to reawaken old, lost emotions. Who has not heard a song after years and years and not felt something which has nothing to do with the song and everything to do with the memory associated with that song?

Whenever I hear a koel's ku-wooh I am so deeply moved it's almost absurd. The sound instantly sends me back to my childhood in Poona. I see again the quiet shaded avenues, the huge ancient banyan trees lining Ganeshkhind road, the hills I used to climb. The sky is blue. I can feel the soft sunshine and smell the grass. Most of all I remember the vast peaceful silence which was every now and then broken by the koel calling: ku-wooh, ku-wooh.

D H Lawrence expresses most aptly this deep sense of nostalgia in his poem Piano, based on a memory evoked by the sound of a woman singing softly in the dusk:

. . . The glamour/Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast/Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

Perhaps what makes the memory especially poignant for me is that the Poona of that memory is dead. The banyan trees are gone, so is the silence on Ganeshkhind road, so is the fragrant air, so are the hills. Gone also is that vast silence in which a child could not miss hearing the call of a simple bird.

C'est la vie, as they say.

The spitting game

In Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, a favourite pastime of a group of old men is a game called hit-the-spittoon. Idling outside the paan shop, chewing tobacco, these old fogies amuse themselves by seeing who among them can direct the jet of red juice into the brass spittoon.

A variation of the game seems to be played here every morning by old and young, men and women. But without tobacco, paan or spittoon.

It's a mystifying game, and I'm yet to figure out the rules.

I think it's called 'This Is The Way We Brush Our Teeth', but I can't be sure.

From what I gather, it's played like this: toothpaste is applied onto a toothbrush, and then the players hit the road brushing their teeth.

My first experience of the game was when the milk boy arrived one morning with foam all over his mouth and the brush inside.

But I've seen people wander up and down the lane for no reason at all, the brush clenched between their teeth like a cigar. I've seen a man taking his buffaloes to graze and doing it. People stroll about on the beach or visit the little provision store, all the while vigorously brushing. Women do it while getting water from the well and while cleaning the courtyard.

And every now and then, they turn to one side and go pthoo! pthoo! all over the place.

The remarkable thing is how they manage to hold a conversation without allowing all that foamy toothpaste to fall out.

Maybe that's the point of the game.

Or to see who can spit in more places every morning.

Maybe they just get bored brushing their teeth in one place.

Or they do it because toothpaste is good for the trees.

But I suspect it's a status thing. To tell the neighbours, and whoever else might care, that they don't use black tooth powder or a stick of neem. Oh no. Look at me: I brush my teeth with Colgate toothpaste! Pthoo!

Sounds that wake you at 3 in the morning

Thwack! Thomp! Thunk! Cat jumping on tile roof in hot pursuit of rat.

Pa-tchhack! Frog landing flat on floor after taking flying leap from favourite hiding place behind painting on wall.

Tchack! Lizard falling off wall after unsuccessful mating attempt.

Bhup. Bhup. Bhup. Moth banging head against walls.

Khrr. Khrr. Khrr. Khrr. Pregnant rat dragging dry teak leaf through rafters in the roof in order to make nest and babies.

Brrrrrz. Brrrrz. Lost insomniac bumble bee.

Pingg! Flying beetle with hard shell colliding into fan.

Kr-rack. Kr-runch. Kr-rack. Kr-unch. Kr-rack. Stray cow breaking and eating, breaking and eating enormous leaves and stalks of bread-fruit tree.

Gruck-gruck. Gruck-gruck. Frog singing love song.

Keeeeeeeeeeeenh! Cricket screeching non-stop.

Wneee. Only a mosquito.

Sex and violence in the garden

It's a languorous sunny day, the kind when one feels much too languid to do much. I'm slouched in a deckchair on the veranda, an open book on my lap, gazing at the lush little garden and the coconut and cashew grove beyond.

Slowly I become aware of the almost frenetic activity that's going on around me. Some bees are buzzing madly, one with its nose nuzzling an open flower. Dragonflies hover above the hibiscus, the sun glinting on their filigree wings. Butterflies, lots of them, flutter nervously. A tiny bird has plunged its thin long curved beak into a pink flower and is sucking deeply. Two equally tiny black and white birds, who have made a secret nest inside a bush of fragrant white zai flowers, flit back and forth. There's a lone fat squirrel that keeps dashing up and down the cashew tree trunk, thumping its tail and shrieking. High up on a coconut tree a solitary bird is singing.

Courtship, pollination, procreation . . . my garden has become a hotbed of sexual activity.

And then I see a snake, not a common sight in the daytime. And slowly I make the connection between the snake and the zai flowers. The snake has come to eat the frog, who the night before was hiding in the zai flowers to eat the insects who – like besotted lovers - were irresistibly drawn to the seductive fragrance. I'm always being told by my villager neighbours not to plant fragrant flowers anywhere near the house because they attract snakes; and always I dismiss what they say, thinking: But snakes have no sense of smell.

The frightened little frog goes hop-hop-hop close against the wall. The long black snake slithers after it, swift, silent and intent. They both disappear behind some plants. Suddenly the sunny garden seems full of menace. Somewhere a sea eagle screams. After a while the snake reappears and glides out of sight. No frog. R.I.P.

It strikes me later that the snake was no villain. He was just doing what snakes are meant to do. Good and evil do not exist in the natural world. It's human beings alone who can be truly evil. Why then, I wonder, do I fear the snake more?

Not waving but drowning

The sea was rough today, a dirty muddy colour with a pale frothy surf.

But still people were in the water, jumping high every time a huge breaker approached and seemingly being carried effortlessly beyond it so that it crashed below rather than on top of them.

Yet every time I see the bobbing heads and waving arms, I can't help thinking of a poem by Stevie Smith:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning:

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.

There are no life guards, of course, on this beach as on many others. Even if there were, would they be able to tell the difference between a man who's waving and one who's drowning? Literally and metaphorically speaking.

Would anyone?- I wonder.

Would you?

Poor chap, he always loved larking

And now he's dead

It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,

They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

(Still the dead one lay moaning)

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving but drowning.

The importance of being wild

Reading Oscar Wilde the other day, I realised how horrified he would have been by the idea of city people choosing to live in a village. Wilde was an aesthete who devoted his life to the beautiful and the sublime. Naturally he simply loathed the countryside. It is only in the city, he asserted, that a man can indulge in civilised pursuits (those being the Only Worthwhile pursuits, of course).

But Wilde would most certainly have been horrified by what passes for a city in modern India. I imagine him in dirty, crowded Bombay looking "With such a wistful eye/Upon that little tent of blue/Which prisoners call the sky". Reading Gaol all over again. The very word civilised - which suggests elegance, refinement, culture – is rooted in a word that means city. But what, I wonder, is civilised about our cities?

Granted, you will find theatres, art galleries, bookshops, libraries, seminars, intelligent conversation, cultivated people. But what about life and living? "My art I put into my work, but my genius I put into my life." Wilde again. Are not all the civilised pursuits a sham of sorts when the quality of living itself is so thoroughly uncivilized?

Call my rant sour grapes (I yearn sometimes for civilised diversions).

But I really do believe that the rot seems to have set in cities, and there must come a time when a better alternative is available to those who want it. Getting out is an option. But why should that mean going backwards in time? Why can't one take along all the nice bits of civilisation?

Whenever I drive along the Konkan coast or in the hills of the Western Ghats, I see all around me miles and miles of beautiful empty land. Beautiful and quite uninhabited. I see spectacular views of rolling hills and of the glittering silver sea. And I imagine people fleeing the city and settling down in this idyllic landscape; living in cottages (no skyscrapers) amid trees and gardens. I imagine children running free, learning how to climb trees and recognise flowers and fish, shells and birds. Naturally, as in all idylls, the state is only to happy to provide electricity and water.

What next? The way I see it, people don't have to have homes in the same place they have offices and markets and leisure activities. This is how it is in cities today, and the result is mass chaos. Instead, everything should be neatly compartmentalised. There would be clusters of just cottages, each cluster like a little village. And each cluster would be connected by a world-class motorable road to a "facility", also set in this idyllic landscape. One such facility could be a centre of art and culture. Another could house offices and places of work. Yet another could have shopping malls and restaurants and skating rinks and bowling alleys. There would be no overcrowding, filth, pollution. There would be no need for rural development, since the rural would naturally get developed with only a little help from the powers that be.

It's not as wild as it sounds.

And surely such an arrangement would be good for the soul, and for the body and mind: offering everyone a chance to lead a rich and beautiful life?