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.