Rich as a fish curry

In many ways all of Goa is like a village: laidback, sleepy, green with paddy fields and palm trees; particularly when the tourist season is over. But it's a village that's quite unlike the many poor dusty villages – of Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal – where India is said to truly live, where there are bloody caste feuds, there is oppression, unemployment, hunger, fear and hopelessness.

You see none of this in Goa.

People here are prosperous.

Almost every family in the cluster of villages where I stay has its own plot of land and little house with a red-tile roof. On this plot is the ubiquitous coconut tree, as necessary as the tulsi in the courtyard. Many have fruit trees – mango, jackfruit, chikoo, papaya. Some have skinny cows, a few keep buffaloes, a small number have chickens. The Christians keep pigs. I've seen ducks waddling down the road in a line and some strange spotted fowl that resemble turkey. Those who still work the paddy fields grow rice, but only for themselves (even though labour is expensive and it might be cheaper to buy it). But as Shaku, a young widow with a son, tells me: 'What to do? We can't eat shop rice – it gives us indigestion.' Lone fishermen in the evening catch their family dinner using either a net or a primitive fishing line. Apart from living off the fat of the land, people own shops in the small market on the highway, run shacks on the beach in season or have a government job. Almost every family has a son in the Middle East who earns pots of money, which he faithfully sends home.

There's electricity in every house, and it's really cheap. My monthly bill is no more than 200 or 300 rupees. All homes here have a telephone, which usually doesn’t work because they haven't paid the bill. Most astonishing of all, water is piped to every house even in the more remote villages. The PWD provides a little cupboard-like loo outside the main house, but otherwise plumbing is unheard of. Cows, of course, do it everywhere and you have women gathering dung every morning.

My neighbours include Hindus, Christians and Muslims. They all draw drinking water from the same well. Which is weird because they have piped water at home. But well water is all they will drink. Even though it means several trips to the well. Even though there are frogs swimming around in it. But in Goa a frog is called Lakshmi, goddess of wealth. It seems appropriate.