The case of the biting dog

Getting bitten by a village dog is a common phenomenon. In fact you can’t say you’ve truly lived in a village until a bit of your flesh has been gouged out in this way.

The experience is one shared by pigs and buffaloes, though monkeys tend to be too nimble for the dogs. As for the poor hen, it doesn’t even live to tell the tale; scattered feathers in the wind the only evidence that a murder most foul has occurred.

The village is quiet when tourists leave, and on the evening it happens even the boys playing volleyball in the empty field are not to be seen. There are only the village dogs darting up to sniff you, and then running off as you cry out in shock at the pain and sight of blood.

Whodunit? you start thinking after you’ve been to the hospital and been told that the course of anti-rabies injections is going to cost a few thousand rupees. Whose dog was it?

One mean looking brown dog looks very like another. And given that all village dogs are either mongrels or pariahs (there is a difference, as any indignant dog lover will tell you), it’s hard to tell the strays from those that have been adopted.

Whodunit? Will you ever know?

The next morning the fellow who reads the electricity meter turns up. Inquisitive as only villagers can be, he wants to know about the wound on your calf. ‘Tcha,these dogs,’ he says, shaking his head in disgust and commiseration. And he tells how hard, how dangerous it is for men like him who have to go house to house reading meters.

Soon the whole village knows you’ve been bitten by a dog. Wherever you go, people ghoulishly want to see the wound.’ Tcha, these dogs,’ each exclaims, discounting his own dog of course.

Soon it’s common knowledge whose dog has bitten you.

It was Ganesh Electrician’s dog whodunit.

But Ganesh Electrician knows that every dog has his day,besides it's a dog's life and therefore he's quite safe from anyone demanding money for anti-rabies injections. It happens all the time with villagers. The money is never paid and once the angry villager calms down he quietly swallows an ayurvedic tablet if the wound is serious. Otherwise a poultice of some leaves is applied. Nobody has yet died of a dog bite.

At Ganesh Electrician’s, the entire family of seven is ranged on the veranda, hackles raised, teeth bared, snapping and growling. It wasn’t their dog whodunit. The village is lying. Their dogs never bite. Bark, snap, growl.

‘Tell me,’ one snarls, pointing at the dogs lying in the dust. ‘Tell me if any of these dogs bit you.’ From the back of the house the angry barking of a dog straining on a leash can be heard.

How to tell? One mean looking brown dog looks very like another.

‘Not our dog whodunit!’ the family barks. And snarling and snapping they drive you away.

How does one prove ownership, in any case? The dogs don’t have a license or collar. There are no papers.

You wish the owner had bitten you rather than the dog. At least then you could get the guy locked up in a mental asylum. But dogs? Dogs run free. Everyone loves dogs.

Muslims and Christian pray together

Elsewhere in India, much is being made of a Muslim girl wearing a scarf to college. Should she be free to do it? Should she not?

Astonishing the kind of things people have time for.

Here, the Muslim children of the village go to the local convent in the daytime in the prescribed uniform, which includes short pinafores for the girls. Like the rest of the children they too sing Christian hymns to Our Lord Jesus Christ. In the evenings, wearing more traditional garments, the boys and girls cover their heads and go together to the local masjid for their Islamic lessons. No one finds this strange.

How is it that Muslims allow their children to sing prayers to a Christian god in a convent school?

I put this question to Farzana when I give her lift to the local market. Farzana is a fiery and rather beautiful young Muslim woman with two little children. Her husband is a part-time butcher, while she herself makes samosas at home to earn a little money since her rather touchy and conservative shouhar will not allow her to go out to work.’

Farzana doesn’t seem to think it matters. ‘Let them sing,’ she shrugs. ‘The children know who they are, isn’t it. So what does it matter?’

This seems to be the general attitude here. Yet these are staunch Muslims who observe all the customs and rituals, including namaz five times a day, though rarely do the women wear a burka.

It’s probably the same in a hundred villages and towns where people don’t give much importance to who is wearing what and why.

Which seems to suggest that those who make a hullabaloo over such things are only troublemakers,encouraged to be chauvinists and worse by those who fear them and a law which does nothing to deter them. Happily, they don’t exist here.

Village dogs

Village dogs are a curious feature of village life.

Every house has one dog, and often it will have several. The dogs hang around aimlessly on the street outside the house, often with the cats with whom they live in peace. Or you see them loitering at street corners. Or running lightly together down the road, like packs of hungry wolves with a secret agenda.

To a city person, used to trained and tame pedigreed dogs, these mongrels –lean and mean, tough and well-fed - can be quite alarming.

But there’re so many of them that you cannot go anywhere without having several dogs run up to sniff you or run circles round you, barking loudly. On the beach, when the tourist season is over, the dogs lying in the sand will get to their feet one after the other and go on barking till you turn away in disgust or fear. On a bad day you can be accosted by a dozen such dogs in turn. And if you are foolish enough to have a dog with you who is not a village dog, be prepared for violence. There is nothing these snarling creatures hate more than a pedigreed dog.

Unlike the pigs and hens and cats, who simply ignore you, village dogs are unable to pass a human being without reacting to his presence in some way. Mostly they do this by barking very loudly.

Dogs curled up and asleep in the middle of the road will get up slowly and bark loudly as soon as they see you. Dogs in someone’s compound will suddenly dart out on to the road and stand about barking. If you’re driving or cycling past they’ll chase you at top speed, barking all the while. And all you need is one barking dog to have dozens appear from nowhere to join in the fun. Sometimes they lose interest, sometimes the whole pack of them will trail after you, barking. If you’re lucky they’ll be distracted by a squawking hen and go tearing after the poor thing.

At night it’s unsafe to go out, not because you know you can get mugged, but because you know you can get bitten by a dog. Late at night gangs of dogs roam around, getting into fights with each other. You can hear the snarling and barking, followed by the shrieking and squealing of the poor victim. And then yet more frenzied barking. On full-moon nights the howling and shrieking and barking is insane.

This barking is what villagers love about dogs and the reason they keep dogs and feed them fish and rice and scraps of leftover chapattis. Without the dogs how will they know if someone is passing by? Or if the cow is eating up the papaya tree? Or if the monkeys have landed on the coconut palms? How will they know if thieves are trying to break in (never mind if burglars are nonexistent)?

Funnily enough the villagers are eternally complaining about the dogs: how they bite, how they eat the chickens, how they bark all night and disturb their sleep. But it’s always the other person’s dog who’s a menace. Never their own.

Fisherbirds

A sea eagle is normally only seen perched high up in a tree on the beach, or gliding and circling far above the sea. They appear to be solitary birds, rather daunting when you see them up close, with their hooked beaks and disdainful air. Unlike the little birds in my garden they are not given to warbling and singing.

Rarely will you see the sea eagles catching fish.

But one evening when the gorged monsoon tide was surging onto Palolem beach, fast and furious and frothy, I saw about a dozen of them dipping down and skimming the waves and surf that washed onto the sand. This was the first time I had seen them so close to ground level.

The local fisherman had just come in, each boat laden with the prawns that are found aplenty in this season. There were also hundreds of dead silver fish scattered about on the sand, ignored by crows and dogs, but eagerly gathered by a little girl who seemed to think they were little different from seashells.

The sea that day was clearly overflowing with fish.

The great brown and white eagles circled close to the surface of the water. Every now and then one swooped down and appeared to snatch something out of the frothy sea. For this it used not its beak, as I had imagined, but its talons. Rising from the water was more difficult for the big, heavy bird. Each desperately flapped its wings and then struggled to rise again into the air. I watched one of them to see if it would fly away with its prey. It flew some distance and then turned and circled and swooped down to the water again. Had it quickly popped the fish into its mouth while flying? Had it not even succeeded in snatching the wriggling fish from the water? I thought the latter likely. Surely, otherwise, the eagles would take home some fish to feed the young ones? But maybe this is not the season for baby eagles and the big ones can selfishly gorge themselves silly.

I stood watching them for some time, unable to spot fish in the grip of an eagle’s talons, if at all it had caught any. How different these fisherbirds seemed from the fishermen who throw their lines into the water and then just sit on a rock, hoping and dreaming, or the fishermen who cast their net on the water. Yet, maybe they’re not quite so different. In the end, neither the fisherman nor the sea eagle can be sure of catching the wily wriggling fish.

You and I, on the hand, have simply to go to the fish market to have fisherwomen fighting to give us fish. Money is all they demand in return. Reminds me of a little verse:

A weaver bird might dine
Off caviar and wine,
If he could trade his nifty nest
For gourmet food –
The very best.
Alas! The little worm is his fate
For lack of just
This little trait.

Roots

The flood of the monsoon tide has dug deep into one beach, creating a tall bank of sand where the tide mark ends. Here the row of casuarinas now cling precariously to the edge. You can see the roots of some of these trees in this wall of banked sand. In some cases, the sea has washed away all traces of sand and a section of roots stands forlornly in midair. There seems to be no one single tap root, but only many long thin roots crouching rather spider-like on the ground. It’s astonishing that these weak looking roots are able to hold the trees upright. Some of the casuarinas have toppled over with no soil to hold onto.

Elsewhere large old trees have been felled by the recent furious winds, the broken roots standing in the air much like leafless twigs.

Trees are uprooted more easily than the villagers here. No storm can persuade them to loosen their hold on their “native” land. Apart from those who have gone to sea, and the few who have gone to the Gulf to make their fortunes, most villagers have never been outside the state – other than on the odd pilgrimage to Shirdi in Maharashtra - and have no desire to do so.

This makes them somewhat odd in the modern world where constant movement is more common than not: from house to house, from one city to another, one country to another: across oceans and continents and time zones, forsaking what has grown familiar, and sometimes loved, for what is unknown and strange and often disorienting.

The sense of loss, even grief, that this inevitably brings about is unknown to the villager for whom the past is preserved in the present: the same house, the same trees, the same people: only a little more tatty, a little more dilapidated by the passing years.

In the essay Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie writes:

“An old photograph in a cheap frame hangs on a wall of the room where I work. It’s a picture dating from 1946 of a house into which, at the time of its taking, I had not yet been born. The house is rather peculiar – a three-storeyed gabled affair with tiled roofs and round towers in two corners, each wearing a pointy tiled hat. ‘The past is a foreign country,’ goes the famous opening sentence of L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, ‘they do things differently there.’ But the photograph tells me to invert this idea; it reminds me that it’s my present that is foreign, and the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time.”

Tree which are uprooted can sometimes – if the damage is not severe or the trees are still young – be replanted in the same soil. Mostly they just die. Human beings might die a little inside every time they are replanted. But they are sturdier and made sturdier still by optimism. What choice is there, in any case. To look back is only to know and remember that loss.

As the poet Elizabeth Bishop urges:

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

. . .I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

The hallucinating cat and other animals

Funny thing, this aching need some people have to get high.

It's such an irrepressible urge; it has so much force and persistence that psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel has called it a "fourth drive", which functions much like our drives for food, sleep and sex.

Animals, apparently, have such a need too. And like humans – who will risk death and imprisonment to get intoxicated – animals too will go to great lengths to gain that pleasurable sense of well-being that only certain hallucinogenic plants offer.

In the Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan writes:

“According to Ronald K. Siegel, a pharmacologist who has studied intoxication in animals, it is common for animals deliberately to experiment with plant toxins; when an intoxicant is found, the animal will return to the source repeatedly, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Cattle will develop a taste for locoweed that can prove fatal; bighorn sheep will grind their teeth to useless nubs scraping a hallucinogenic lichen off ledge rock. . . Goats, who will try a little bit of anything, probably deserve credit for the discovery of coffee: Abyssinian herders in the tenth century observed their animals would become particularly frisky after nibbling the shrub’s bright red berries. Pigeons spacing out on cannabis seeds (a favorite food of many birds) may have tipped off the ancient Chinese (or Aryans of Scythians) to that plant’s special properties. Peruvian legend has it that the puma discovered quinine: Indians observed that sick cats were often restored to health after eating the bark of the cinchona tree. Tukano Indians in the Amazon noticed that jaguars, not ordinarily herbivorous, would eat the bark of the yaje vine and hallucinate.”

Birds do it. Bees do it and make honey that’s sweetly intoxicating. Certain elephants in Malay do it: travelling great distances to eat a vine that offers them a powerful kick. They will also trample on a palm that protects itself with long, tough thorns only to get at the intoxicating pith. Water buffaloes in opium country love to get drowsy on the cultivated opium poppies - though they are bitter and pungent to taste. Baboons love to eat datura. Cats love to hallucinate on catnip and go chasing phantom butterflies.

In places where khat, a powerful stimulant, is grown commercially, fields are protected by electric fencing to keep out goats who are mad about its leaves.

The fencing is a bit like prohibition in Gujarat. With a sign saying: Beware. Trespassers might die. In Goa, of course, there is no fencing. People get drunk all the time, even early in the morning. Maybe a little self-imposed fencing wouldn't be such a bad thing.

Rainmen

In the pouring rain, men and women draped in plastic are planting paddy. You see the bent figures in field after field as you drive past, snug in your car.

It looks like backbreaking work. Each figure, holding a bunch of seedlings (or should that be saplings?), puts one into the ground - and then another and another and another, never once straightening up during the process. In fields where the paddy has been planted you can see how neat the rows are, how perfectly aligned.

In the past, I have many a time gazed with pleasure at the tall straight blades waving in the fields around here. The green of the paddy is so bright and yet so extraordinarily soothing a colour that you can hardly bear to take your eyes off it.

I never once thought of it as food. Rice is something you buy in a shop, and it bears no resemblance to the paddy in the field.

Yet, to those who toil in the rain, standing in ankle-deep water, the relationship between their labour and the food they will eat is all too real. If they do not work now, if the rains are not sufficient, if the crop fails, then there will be no brown rice to eat for the entire year. Instead they will have to buy polished white rice in the market. And for a Goan who likes his fish curry and ukri (brown rice) that is a horror not to be contemplated. As a woman in the village once told me: Shop rice doesn’t agree with our digestion.

So paddy planters toiling in the rain - with their minds fixed firmly on the fish curry and rice they will eat - makes eminent sense. No work, no food.

But there is one other kind of person who must toil in pouring rain. You see him too, covered from head to foot in a raincoat, valiantly climbing ladders placed on electricity poles. It’s the poor linesman, an employee of the state-run electricity board. During the rains his workload trebles. He spends all his time fixing one broken line after another, day after day. And yet, we never see the fruits of his labour. No matter how much he works, the electricity supply still fails, again and again.

Darkness

Grey days continue, bleak and sunless. The sound of rain continues, almost without break: the battering on your red tiled roof and on window panes; the thundering cascades from the many furrows in the roof all around the house; the endless drip, drip, drip from trees.

All day and all night the wind moans and sighs and howls like some crazed Greek chorus, causing trees to dance wildly, scattering leaves as in some sacrifice.

The air is misty, as in a hill station.

One damp gloomy night, when the voltage is so low even the fridge stops running, all the lights flicker and die out. Through hazy sheets of rain you see a yellow light glowing dimly in the distance. It’s as you had feared. As a result of the downpour, carbon has formed on the wire connecting your home to the electricity pole. Yours is now the only house without electricity. Strangely enough, the fuse light on one power switchboard gives a ghostly red glow. You put the switch into the ON position and the light goes off. You would find this creepy if it hadn’t happened before. In the darkness you clamber onto a stool and switch off the mains in the fuse box to avoid the possibility of a fire.

You stumble through the dark house to call the electricity department. You unwrap the phone from its warm cocoon, but despite the blanket to keep it warm the phone will not work. You unplug it and take it into the kitchen. There, holding it a foot above the flame, you warm it gently over the gas fire. You try dialing again. This time the phone comes to life. But there is no hope for you tonight. The man at the other end of the line tells you to wait till the morning and to switch off the mains until then.

Your emergency lamp has run out of power. You have no candles, no torch.

Hopelessly you occupy the dark absolute void. After a while you think this is how it must feel for prisoners under torture in dark solitary confinement.

But why? - when darkness is a perfectly natural phenomenon. What is it that so unnerves us about being alone in endless darkness? Is it because we feel ourselves completely disconnected from that other outer world of reality? Is this the feeling of Absurdity described by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus?

In this brilliant essay (in which he examines the idea of Absurdity and attempts to answer what he calls the fundamental philosophical question: whether life is or is not worth living) Camus writes: "The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it. . . The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage-scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us."

Yet, even primitive man lived in awe and fear of darkness. And then he discovered fire! What a great triumph that must have been. At last he had some control over the many strange forces that dominated his existence. Let there be darkness - god declared. And man replied: I don’t think so. Not right now.

In The Bible According to Spike Milligan: "God said: Let there be light; and there was light, but Eastern Electricity Board said He would have to wait until Thursday to be connected."

In this, Milligan speaks for all the state-controlled electricity boards in India. No matter how loudly the great god wanted light, the State did not will it. Let there be darkness in all the villages, the State said.

And the poor people had no choice but to tremble in this darkness like primitive man.

Marooned

Four days of steady rain and winds blowing at 65 km an hour. You look out the shuttered windows and all you see is sheets of rain and mist. In the garden the neem tree has fallen and the sankeshwar with its bright orange flowers is partially uprooted. Elsewhere coconut trees have fallen and casuarinas. Tiled roofs have broken. The electricity comes and goes, and then stays away a long time. The phone has a dial tone, but cannot connect with the outside world. On the advice of the phone guy, it lies like a baby wrapped warmly in a blanket to coax it back into life. The roof drips.

Everywhere is a great salty dampness. It seeps into all your possessions. A few books have mildew already. The wooden furniture is damp and mildewy. Wet clothes flap eternally in the veranda. The sugar in its plastic container is slowly becoming syrup. The glass shelf which holds it has a patina of moisture. You wait for the computer to conk.

You dare not step out of the house with something as ineffective as an umbrella. You try it a couple of times and find the umbrella turns itself inside out. You fear that like Mary Poppins you will simply fly away, holding onto the handle.

When the thunder of the rain beating down on your roof lessens, you can hear the thunder of the angry sea less than half a mile away.

Food supplies are low. You eat rice and dal and potatoes and homemade bread. And more potatoes and rice and bread. You dream of fresh fruit.

You dream of sunshine and golden beaches and blue seas.

You are stranded on a desert island in the monsoons.

The white church

The ubiquitous white church - glimpsed through treetops as you drive through the hilly landscape of Goa, standing by the seashore or within the precincts of a ruined fort - gives the impression that Christianity dominates Goa. This is not so. Christians probably account for no more than a quarter of the population.

Yet these churches are seen everywhere: austere, silent and shuttered. Some are small, no more than chapels, some imposing in their dimension. Some are earthbound, others appear to be suspended over the village or town, with a flight of steep steps leading up to them. They are almost invariably white, a whiteness that dazzles - and beautiful in their uniform serenity and simplicity. They are also almost invariably detached and separate from their surroundings.

Local Hindu temples, on the other hand, are colourful and gaudy, often noisy. Apart from a few ancient temples which are quite grand, the temples are small, built by local villagers. Though several are present in every village, you don’t notice them as you do the white silent churches.

What do these different houses of worship say about the worshippers, not to mention the gods they pay homage to?

If the church is silent and almost forbidding, is the Christian god, too, distant and remote? Or do these churches merely present such a façade because they were built by the Portuguese, conquerors who desired to impress the land with the authority of their gods?

On Talpona beach is that rare sight: a Hindu temple. The small temple stands at one end of the long, curving beach. Adjoining it is the cluster of red-tiled cottages that forms the tiny village. Walking along this almost virgin beach lined with casuarinas trees towards this far end, you are not tempted to go right up to the temple. There is about it an air, not of worshipful reverence as befitting the house of god, but of the mundane, of the ordinariness of life. You imagine hens scratching in the dirt outside the temple, dogs sleeping, wet clothes flapping, small children with bare bottoms crawling about near the temple door. If god lives in this temple, he is very much a part of village life.

The difference with the white churches seen on most other beaches is stark.

Happiness is a little grass

The cow is a happy animal these days.

All day herds of them wander about munching on the fresh carpet of grass and shrubs that has sprouted magically in the rain. Delicately they nibble at the sweetest and most tender leaves before moving on to the next clump of green.

They’ve become fastidious eaters overnight, gourmets even. Where once they gobbled anything hungrily, now they fussily search for blades of grass and shoots that have freshly sprouted that morning. Yesterday’s new leaves won’t do for them anymore. Oh no. They’re much too grand for that now. Their long enforced fasting through the summer months is over. Now they have a feast provided by the rain gods. And the garbage bins wear a desolate air.

While the cows eat, I get the unmistakable whiff of another kind of grass. Someone, somewhere, is enjoying a smoke.

Funny thing how grass can make both cows and men happy.

And they put up signs saying: Keep off the grass! Tch.

The bus driver’s family

In the neighbourhood is a simple, hardworking Muslim family that makes nonsense of the poor, deprived Muslim stereotype.

The family lives in a little tiled cottage with two pleasant little rooms, a small kitchen, a loo outside in the village tradition. The man is a bus driver. Every morning at 7.30 – Sundays included - he cycles to Palolem to begin his duties. Every evening round about 7 pm he returns looking tired. His wife is a big, strident woman with strong arms and a girlish smile. In the tourist season, unknown to her husband, she is a masseuse, using her strong arms to pummel the flesh of stressed-out tourists and thereby earn some extra money. For her children she has ambitions.

Afsana, the elder daughter, is a thin shy pretty girl with thick long hair. Two years ago she completed her tenth standard exams. Now she is doing a tailoring course, where most young Goan girls prefer to work as shop girls. Afsana does exquisite embroidery, so her plump younger sister Asma informs me. Asma is moonfaced and bright-eyed. She is in class eleven, likes studying, plans to go to college, and wants to be a teacher. Seeing her eager face you know it’s not just talk. The son Aziz, nineteenish, twelfth-standard pass, moonlights as a bus mechanic late into the night with the aid of an emergency lamp. By day he is doing a course in computers.

They are simple people, but the girls are always beautifully dressed and have wonderful manners, as does the son. Unlike most villagers, the bus driver did not inherit the tiny plot on which he lives. He bought it some twenty-odd years ago when land was cheap.

Down the road is another Muslim family. Two brothers, one a tailor, the other a ration shop salesman. Every evening the two little giggling daughters, heads covered with a dupatta, skip to the mosque for their Islamic studies. In the morning, dressed in neat brown pinafores, they go to the local convent school where, presumably, they sing hymns in assembly.

It only happens in Goa, I think.

Love of beauty

Somewhere in every human heart – even the meanest, surely – is a desire for beauty.

When the city-dweller articulates this love of beauty and seeks to satisfy it as best as he can, he is disclosing that he lives not in beauty but in squalor and ugliness. For, as Socrates says, you can desire only that which you lack. The greater the lack, the greater the desire.

The more I live in the natural world, the more I realise – despite everything – how truly and utterly I live in beauty, walk in beauty as the poet says. Sometimes, gazing at the immense arch of the evening sky over the sea or the green silent river that flows into it, absorbing the pervasive lushness of trees and plants, inhaling the fragrance of a flower, I am overwhelmed by this glorious, mysterious thing we call Beauty.

It is not as if there is no ugliness in the natural world. There are ugly creatures enough, yet even their ugliness seems to exist almost solely to make you note and appreciate, by contrast, the beautiful and sublime.

This is not to say that the man-made is not beautiful. As a result of man’s creative urge we have sublime works of art and objects of great beauty. Yet this is always an individual endeavor. The great mass of humanity seems to have no aesthetic sense. The love of beauty is deadened in the hurly-burly of living. Ugly buildings sprout as a result. Squalor and chaos reign.

There are those – some environmentalists, for example - who are accused of romanticising nature and opposing progress. The arguments and counterarguments fly fast and furious. Yet, somewhere in all this jungle of strident angry words there is – or so it seems sometimes - an inarticulate, truly heartfelt cry for something that appears to be in danger of getting lost in a world that everyday grows more unnatural and more ugly.

When, I wonder, did the natural human desire for beauty become this inchoate yearning? Did it begin with industrialisation, when, sickened by the belching chimneys and a grey landscape, by the overall degradation, men turned their faces away? Does it continue as the stress of living in crowded cities intensifies? In beauty there is harmony, a harmony that simply doesn’t exist in the mad world.

D H Lawrence – always a lover of nature – writes this, almost a hundred years ago:

"The car ploughed uphill through the long squalid straggle of Tevershall, the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with coal dust, the pavements wet and black. It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything. The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling."

It is undoubtedly true that man is losing touch with something deep and true within himself when he disconnects from the natural world and embraces all that is plastic.

To see a complete negation of beauty and harmony in our world is a horror that is hard even to imagine.

This little piggy stayed hungry

You have pigs, plenty of them, very black and truly ugly, running about outside rather ramshackle cottages near the beach. They are always nosing about in the mud and filth for something to eat, wagging their little skinny pig tails in enjoyment. They make you laugh, they look so ugly and greedy and foolish.

In this brilliant, comic description in The White Peacock, D H Lawrence brings these pigs to life:

"I met George tramping across the yard with a couple of buckets of swill, and eleven young pigs rushing squealing about his legs, shrieking in an agony of suspense. He poured the stuff into a trough with luscious gurgle, and instantly ten noses were dipped in and ten little mouths began to slobber. Though there was plenty of room for ten, yet they shouldered and shoved and struggled to capture a larger space, and many little trotters dabbled and spilled the stuff, and the ten sucking, clapping snouts twitched fiercely, and twenty little eyes glared askance, like so many points of wrath. They gave uneasy, gasping grunts in their haste. The unhappy eleventh rushed from point to point trying to push in his snout, but for his pains he got rough squeezing, and sharp grabs on the ears. Then he lifted up his face and screamed screams of grief and wrath unto the evening sky.

"But the ten little gluttons only twitched their ears to make sure there was no danger in the noise, and they sucked harder, with much spilling and slobbing. George laughed like a sardonic Jove, but at last he gave ear, and kicked the ten gluttons from the trough, and allowed the residue to the eleventh. This one, poor wretch, almost wept with relief as he sucked and swallowed in sobs, casting his little eyes apprehensively upwards, though he did not lift his nose from the trough, as he heard the vindictive shrieks of the ten little fiends kept at bay by George. The solitary feeder, shivering with apprehension, rubbed the wood bare with his snout, then, turning up to heaven his eyes of gratitude, he reluctantly left the trough.

"I expected to see the ten fall on him and devour him, but they did not; they rushed upon the empty trough and rubbed the wood still drier, shrieking with misery."

Passion

Some months ago I planted a passion fruit creeper. The purple flowers of this creeper are strange and exotic, different from any flower I’ve ever seen - and I eagerly looked forward to the blossoming of the passion flower and later of the fruit.

When the creeper died soon after for no reason I could fathom, I took it as a bad sign.

What is life, after all, without passion?

Those free-marketeers who claim their mantra as “greed is good” have got it wrong. It’s not greed, but passion that built Microsoft or Porsche or any of the great companies.

It’s an individual’s passion for his or her art and craft that’s given us great painting, literature, music, theatre, film. Passion is behind all remarkable scientific discoveries and inventions, behind the sportsman’s achievements, behind every dream and aspiration.

Anything that truly matters in this world, anything of any value is touched by passion. It’s what makes us live life more fully, enables us to fulfill our deepest and noblest desires.

To push files in an office, to sell an insurance policy or vegetables needs no passion. The mundane is carried out almost mechanically. Its driving force is the need to earn money.

They say that human history is but the struggle between passion and prudence. And only when passion triumphs do great things result.

The day we stop feeling “the intoxication of passion” as one philosopher put it, is surely the day we die a little. Like my poor creeper.

Fear of freedom?

In Toad Philip Larkin writes:

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison –
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion. . .

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:

Economics may be the basis of life, but all too often it seems to become the stuff of life itself, the stuffing even, particularly for the average middle-class Indian. Lives today are dominated by home loans and car loans and pension schemes and children’s school fees and saving for the future.

Who, nowadays, renounces everything to follow his heart?

Why is it that so few individuals today can be like Paul Gauguin, for example? Gauguin was a successful stockbroker and then one fine day he simply dumped his old life, children and wife included, and took off for Tahiti in order to paint.A young French girl I know has gone off to live in a tent in Australia. I observe the foreigners who live here and often think how free they seem compared to us Indians, with what ease and joy they embrace their freedom.

It would be all right if individuals preferred security to the perils of freedom. It would be all right even if one were happier living the consumerist existence. That is a choice. The sadness is when they postpone the dictates of their heart to an indefinite future. One day, they say.

And the days pass, and the years.

And then one day they are confronted with this (Larkin again):

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Oh solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the field.

Save me from the environment

It was World Environment Day some days ago. And as usual I was somewhat bemused by all the exhortations to save the earth and save the environment.

Living in a village I’ve got accustomed to thinking just the opposite: that it is I who need to be saved from the environment.

This might sound absurd, but I’ve learnt that the natural environment is not only about pretty trees and flowers, birds and butterflies. It’s also harsh, tyrannical and frightening. So much so that existence here is still a primitive battle against nature and the elements.

I have to deal with snakes and bandicoots and monitor lizards and rats. There are black-faced monkeys who are no better than vandals and thieves. There are frogs who don’t allow me to use my own loo, who want to sleep in my bed and jump into my food. There are leeches and scorpions; not to mention the million strange insects which appear as soon as you switch on the lights in the rainy season, or the hungry lizards crawling the walls after them, or the hundreds of big red ants marching across my dhurries with the dead. Walking along the beach you have to be careful of jelly fish and blue bottles, sea creatures that stick to your skin and don’t let go. If you’re unlucky, you’ll even have a bull in a frenzy charging you.

The natural environment considers man a trespasser. What, after all, do all these creatures understand about manmade boundaries, about property titles and the like?

And though we may no longer be living in primitive times, it is with primitive terror that I endure the monsoons. The torrential rains in Goa are almost always accompanied by gales, by crashing thunder and lightning. The lightning sometimes goes on and on for hours, tearing the sky apart with its unearthly white light. Flashes sometimes float into my little cottage, followed by the most tremendous crashes of thunder. The winds blow at such terrific speeds that trees are uprooted every season, destroying roofs, disrupting electricity and creating chaos. If I believed in god, it would be easy to suppose – as the ancients did - that all of this is god’s fury directed at sinful mortals. Last year my modem and UPS blew as a result of all the lightning. The moisture in the air, coupled with the fluctuations in electricity, destroyed my monitor and mother board. My tile roof began to leak, as it always does when the wind is particularly fierce. And then the monkeys came, jumping on the roof, breaking some tiles and causing rain to fall inside.

This is Mother Nature, who does not need me to save her.

As for the greenery, you can go on trimming trees and bushes in an attempt to control the almost frenzied growth that takes place in the monsoons, but it’s no use. Everything springs back into life, thicker and more lush than ever. Even branches of broken trees continue to sprout leaves. The villagers sometimes use these thick branches to prop up trees that have bent in the gale, and over the years these branches acquire a life of their own, growing with the tree they’re supporting. Life after death, you could call it.

I once attended a lecture in Delhi by Leon Louw, a South African economic, political and environmental scholar. Every year in the monsoons, I recall the ‘crack in the pavement theory’ he spoke of when I watch the weeds mysteriously sprout. Where do they come from? What is the secret of their insatiable, maddening growth?

And how can we say the environment is being destroyed when it seems infinitely more powerful than puny man?

Nature's call on Palolem beach

When the tourist season is over and the shacks come down, Palolem beach, often described as one of the most beautiful beaches in Goa, looks an ugly mess.

Sheets of blue plastic are seen everywhere, covering whatever cannot be removed and must be protected from the rains. Ugly stumps of brick and cement stand among the coconut palms, a reminder that the manmade will always scar what is natural and beautiful.

Most ugly of all is what remains of the loos.

I climbed the low hill beside Palolem beach, which offers a panoramic view of the sea. The few shacks that dotted the area were gone. But there, scattered among the coconut trees, were little square slabs of cement, each surmounted by a commode, each looking like some bizarre headstone on a grave.

This cemetery of shit pots will remain till the tourists return next season, offering an ironic twist to the term “answering the call of nature”.

Natural colours

Yesterday it rained, and the garden was flooded with the strange bright clear light you sometimes see late in the evening, just when you feel it’s time for twilight.

My garden is very tiny, but wild and unruly. And after the heat and unexpected rain – all the greens washed clean and glittering in the strange light with droplets of water - it all seemed unbearably lush.

Almost dazzling to the eye were the colours of the flowers. The bright yellow of the sankeshwar and hibiscus. The deep red of the bougainvillea. The shocking pink. In all that lush green they glowed vivid and alive in a way they never had before, as if I had popped some LSD.

Colour, if you think about it, belongs entirely to the natural world, particularly to flowering plants. All the colour we see otherwise is merely a reproduction. The city is filled with this synthetic colour. You see it in cars, buses, hoardings, clothes, shop signs, buildings – everywhere. It’s paint. Artificial, unnatural, plastic, sad.

It’s something you get so used to that you never stop to think it’s merely an imitation of the colours of nature, the colours that city people almost never see.

Yesterday I stood for a long time absorbing the bright yellows and reds and pinks and greens. And it seemed as if I was back in time at the very beginning of creation, in my own tiny garden of Eden.

When the light of the moon goes off

Pitch darkness is something you can never experience on city roads. Even if there is a total power failure, even if it’s the dead of night, you always have the headlights of a passing car or motorcyclist.

But imagine what it is like to be on a deserted village lane at night when the power fails. The lights in all the house windows go off, the street lights go dark. It’s the rainy season and thick clouds obscure the sky. There is not a star to light the way, not a sliver of moon.

I was on my bicycle one time when this happened. It wasn’t even late, but because of the rains no one was around.

Suddenly I found myself pitched into utter darkness. This is the kind of total blackness in which you don’t see even the vague shape of objects around you. Everywhere is a thick, impenetrable blackness.

To make it worse, there was no sound on that deserted lane, except for an occasional rumble of thunder overhead. Rain threatened.

I got off my cycle and thought I would walk up the slope with it. The lane curved upwards and to the right. This much I knew. But what if I misjudged the road and fell down into the field on the left of me? Best to wait, I thought. But what if it started raining heavily? A few drops had already started falling. What if some tree had fallen (they do this all the time in the monsoons) and the electricity didn’t return for hours? I began to ring my cycle bell to register my presence on that dark road just in case some scooterist came tearing down the slope and knocked me down.

Living in a village you get used to natural light, to the light of the moon and stars. If the electricity fails on a night when you are wandering about in the open, it’s not dark at all. Everything is illuminated by a silvery light, and the effect is magical.

But not in the rainy season when there is no natural light. In the monsoons, sensible villagers always carry a torch.

Car pooling with villagers

When you drive your car in the city, the faces you pass tend to be just an anonymous blur.

Not so in a village. Whenever I drive past people here I feel I must – out of courtesy – stop to offer a familiar face a lift, particularly if that someone is waiting for a bus. This wouldn’t be a problem if villagers weren’t so kindhearted and unselfish. The familiar face will never get into my car until she has generously invited every other familiar face waiting by the road to get in with her. Before I know what’s happening, half a dozen smiling people are crowding into my little Santro – along with shopping bags, muddy footwear, wet umbrellas, and occasionally a screaming baby or heavy sack of rice. Reduced to being little more than the village bus driver, I drive along, stopping every now and then to drop off one of my passengers, waiting patiently till the unfamiliar face gets out lugging her baby or bag. Car pooling by force, I call it.

Worst of all is when Babuli (aka the village idiot) spots my car approaching. Instantly he will position himself by the side of the road and with a sheepish grin wave for me to stop. I think of his mud-encrusted bare feet and wish my car was a bullock cart. To stop or not to stop becomes a huge moral dilemma. Should I hurt his feelings by not stopping or should I care only about keeping my car seats free of the mud that is bound to be stuck to the seats of his ragged shorts? Sometimes I just wave back innocently, as if all he is doing is waving to me in a friendly way. Sometimes my kind nature (I must definitely be growing into a villager) triumphs. And then Babuli, mud and all, gets in and peremptorily directs me to drive him to wherever it is he wants to go. Meekly I comply.

Sometimes I think I should get myself a scooter. Or better still, a nice big bus.

Sunshine and water

It’s so hot you’d think everything under the baking sun would be wilting and dying.

Yet, summer is the season in which many trees and plants begin to sprout fresh green leaves. In astonishment, and some envy, I watch them flourishing in my little garden. The leaves are so tender and sweet. What is their secret?

All they need is water and the hot sun, and they're happy.

Life should be so simple.

Yet sometimes I do believe it is.

When I moved out of the city, one of the things I missed most was eating whole-wheat bread. So I learnt to bake my own, as I learnt to do many other things living in a village. And I realised that like the plants bread needs very little: heat and water, and of course some flour and a little fresh yeast. Why then does a loaf of whole-wheat bread cost so much in the city? Why do plants?

It’s hot in the village. But at least there is all this fresh green in the garden to soothe the eyes.

I never had plants when I lived in the city. There was only the heat.

Taking a break

I don't have much time to blog these days.
So you won't be seeing posts very often - at least not till the end of the month.
If you've been reading this blog, please don't give up on me.
I'll be back with more on life in the village.

Hot sands

How we Indians loathe the sun and the heat.

And how strange it is that foreigners just never seem to get enough of it.

Out there on the beach right now the sun worshippers are probably lying on towels and slowly roasting their bodies, or sitting under beach umbrellas, or frolicking in the water with only dark glasses to keep them cool.

Crazy though they seem, it’s probably cooler on the beach with the sea breeze blowing. And definitely – definitely, I think – cooler in the water. The sun is never so hot when you’re in the sea.

But imagine making the effort to go out into the sun, to brave the terrible white glare till you reach the beach, to cross the burning hot sands until at last you reach the sea.

Only the flowers seem to flourish, and the hotter it is the more brilliantly they blaze.

Sun worshipping is not for Indians. Surya namaskar is as far as we’ll go.

Who killed the whale?

The sea throws up strange things sometimes.

This time it was a dead whale that the fishermen towed in to Palolem beach.

The creature was a good twenty to thirty feet long, a mottled pale grey like the conjoined shells you see sometimes on the beach.

It must have been dead for sometime because the body was already decomposing. You couldn’t really make head or tail of it. What seemed to be the head had almost completely collapsed, and only one side of the cavernous mouth was visible. There were no eyes left.

Considering it had been lying in the hot sun all day, it wasn’t really smelling so bad. But it was an unpleasant odour nevertheless, though strangely not fishy. Nor did it smell like the corpse of, say, a dead rat. Must be all the salt in the sea.

Half the village turned up to see the poor whale. And everyone, including the holidaymakers, went on a photographing spree. Macabre the way people will photograph anything, even a decomposing whale.

In other parts of the world, from what I’ve read, dead whales make big news. Environmentalists and Save the Whale activists usually turn up to a point finger and demand whodunit. An autopsy of sorts is also carried out to find out how the whale died.

Here, there didn’t seem to be any of that. The fishermen believe a ship accidentally killed the whale.

The municipality was involved, and I spotted some garbage disposal guys with yards of nylon rope. They were planning to drag the dead whale up the beach beyond the high tide point and there they were going to bury it. R. I . P.

The profane buffalo

It’s funny how cows are sacred and buffaloes are not, though both provide milk.

What’s even funnier is how, despite this, buffaloes are treated with more care and respect than sacred cows.

Many villagers keep a cow, particularly when there are small children in the house. Cow’s milk, after all, is supposed to be the nearest thing to mother’s milk.

Yet, most cows are left free to roam and scavenge for food. No one seems to care what they eat. And like pigs, cows will eat almost anything, from grass and thorny bougainvillea to plastic bags and garbage.

Buffaloes, on the other hand, are taken out to graze and to bathe in pools of water. And they are usually given a nutritious feed when they return home.

Why this difference?

Maybe economics has something to do with it all. You can buy a cow for as little as two thousand rupees. The cost of a buffalo runs into several thousands. A villager also gets more money for selling creamy buffalo milk as compared with the thin milk cows give.

Yet, when a gaily caparisoned cow is led from house to house by a couple of ragged con men beating a drum, people will rush out of their homes to do arati to it, and to bow down before the holy beast.

The poor buffalo must be satisfied with being fatter and better fed.

Maybe mythology also has something to do with the difference. Buffaloes may give more milk, but the male buffalo at least is traditionally associated with Yama, the god of death. While cows, of course, symbolise fertility and motherhood and all those things we’re taught to reverence.

So cows are skinny and sad, but venerated and loved.

Buffaloes are fat and ugly and profane. But we like their milk, even if we don't love them too much.

Freedom is not a bird

Oh to be free as a bird, people often say.

I watch the gulls flying in formation high over the sea as the sun disappears. First they appear as an arrow in the sky, with one bird leading. Like dancers they morph gracefully into a straight line, not missing a beat. And then yet again the form changes before they vanish together into the mists rising from the water.

I watch the little magpie robin in my garden singing so lustily.

And the solitary kite circling slowly in the blue sky.

And the woodpecker banging its beak on the trunk of a coconut palm.

A flock of angry crows is squabbling in the giant mango tree beyond, cawing loudly.

A hidden koel calls plaintively from the coconut grove.

For days I watch a bulbul sitting patiently in its tiny nest, built in the crook of a tall, delicate plant. Every time the breeze blows, the plant sways and the little nest shakes like a tiny raft in stormy waters, the bulbul hanging on for dear life. Finally, the egg hatches. A neighboring cat kills the fledging bird.

I watch a tiny green bird dip its long beak into pink fragrant flower, a cat stealthily pad behind a great coucal in the undergrowth.

Why do we imagine all these birds to be free?

They’re not free from hunger or the fear of predators.

They’re not free from the vagaries of the wind or the rain.

They’re not free from the instincts that nature has given them.

They’re not free even to make a simple choice, as we are.

We are free to choose not to be slaves and bigots and liars and oppressors and thieves and murderers and traitors and scoundrels and terrorists and whiners and cowards and cheats and drunkards and fools –

If it was free to choose, maybe the bird would wish it could be free as a human being. But then again, maybe not.

The long and winding road

Narrow lanes meandering through utter wilderness are a peculiar feature of the Goan landscape. You see them everywhere, suddenly branching off from a main road, veering off into the great unknown.

I drive down one of them, wondering.

The lane curves lazily through some paddy fields and empty land, in absolutely no hurry to get anywhere. Suddenly it turns sharply to the left and then soon after sharply to the right. Thereafter you swing wildly from left to right and right to left.

What could have possessed anyone to build such a crazy road when the distance to be covered as the crow flies is no more than a hundred metres?

The engineer and the entire road crew must have been drunk.

Or maybe it was deliberate, a thoughtful gesture to the many men known to stagger home drunkenly. The zigzag road, after all, naturally follows the path a drunkard would weave. If the road was straight, wouldn’t the poor fellow end up in a ditch? Wouldn’t he do himself some serious damage? Might not his poor wife end up widowed?

Might not the crooked road also reflect some very crooked thinking? A long winding road is likely to have a bigger budget and therefore a bigger cut for all those involved in building it.

Then again, maybe it’s just a way to bolster the statistics. How else can a small state end up with so many more miles of roads?

Whatever, it forces you to drive like a doddering old man in an ancient Fiat, so that you have all the time in the world to gaze about. Sometimes these lanes meander through a wild jungle of cashew trees, passing only the occasional dwelling. Sometimes through flat lands dotted with grazing cows, low hills in the distance. Sometimes through the hills themselves. It’s all very pretty. And a city type used to rushing about might never otherwise get a chance to simply relax and look at the scenery: at waterfalls in the monsoons, the sudden glimpses of sea, the green paddy fields. Sometimes you’re so busy looking at it all that you almost go off the road.

Where do these lanes go? Those that meander towards the coast inevitably hit some stretch of beach. The ones going into the interior climb into the hills or end in some little village unused to cars.

Rarely do you pass anyone on these winding lanes, other than an occasional bus.Yet the roads less travelled are there. And that makes all the difference.

The joy of the swimsuit

Are Indians the shyest people on earth?

Or is it simple prudery, the traditional taboo against showing skin, that makes a lot of Indians (particularly women) enter the sea fully-dressed?

Probably a bit of both.

Which is sad. Because surely there is a joyful sense of freedom in being unencumbered by too many clothes, in feeling the air and sun and sea on one’s bare skin: a freedom that only a swimsuit offers? In a swimsuit you are naked, and yet not naked.

But Indians tend to lack the natural unselfconsciousness that most foreigners have towards their bodies. A fat, aging, wrinkled woman in a bikini – completely unashamed of her body – is a common sight on the beach. But, generally, when Indians do wear swimsuits, they tend to do so only when they’re young and fit and can strut about with some confidence. I’ve seen fat ammas, in traditional nose rings, frolic in the sea, giggling and squealing like children. Wouldn't they enjoy themselves more without yards of sari hindering their every movement?

The sun worshippers glory in the human body, decorating it with tattoos, tanning it bronze in the hot sun, exhibiting it on the beach. And they do all of this with a natural grace and pride that is not usually evident in the rare Indian who wears a swimsuit.

To the villagers here, a blatant display of too much skin is a scandal, a cause for shame. Though the tourist in his or her skimpy clothes is welcomed with an oily smile, privately there is much censure of their “shameless” ways.

It’s a pity. There are places in the rest of the world where people hang out completely naked.

Indians don't have to go that far. All they need to do is shed their inhibitions along with their clothes - and enjoy the freedom of a swimsuit.

When storm clouds rage

Reading The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh makes you realise how truly blessed the Goans are.

In the Sundarbans, described by Ghosh so beautifully in this book, life is lived on the edge always. People are not only poor, but struggling eternally against the elements, particularly the tides that regularly inundate the many mangrove islands. As for cyclonic storms, never in Goa have they experienced anything quite like this:

The minutes crept by and the objects flying through the air grew steadily larger. Where first there had been only twigs, leaves and branches there were now whirling coconut palms and spinning tree trunks. Priya knew the gale had reached full force when she saw something that looked like a whole island hanging suspended above their heads: it was a large clump of mangroves, held together by the trees’ intertwined roots...

Then the noise of the storm deepened and another roar made itself heard, over the rumbling din of the gale: a noise like that of a cascading waterfall... Priya glimpsed something that looked like a wall, hurtling towards them, from downriver. It was as if a city block had suddenly begun to move: the river was like pavement, lying at its feet, while its crest reared high above, dwarfing the tallest trees. It was a tidal wave, sweeping in from the sea; everything in its path disappeared as it came thundering towards them... And then it was as if a dam had broken over their heads.

In The Hungry Tide it is the landscape of the Sundarbans, more than the human characters, which dominates: beautiful, threatening, destructive.

In Goa,during the monsoons the winds sometimes travel at such tremendous speeds that coconut palms and electricity poles come crashing to the ground. Any moment, you feel, your tiled roof will be hurled away in the storm. The rain is always accompanied by deafening thunder and lightning. This lightning doesn’t simple crackle across the sky, it tears open the skies with its fierce, terrifying light. At such times the sea comes alive like some ferocious, enraged beast frothing at the mouth. And the gaping sky, sundered by lightning, looks as if it will swallow the beast alive.

Yet, it’s absolutely nothing compared to the storms in the Sundarbans.

I must keep reminding myself of this when the south-west monsoon storms hit the coastline this year. Not that I think it will help.

Nice girls don’t

Prostitution, I’ve noticed, doesn’t seem to exist in any of the small villages in this area.

Which is curious, given that the oldest profession is said to exist everywhere. It also raises some interesting questions.

Does prostitution exist mostly in the anonymity of cities? Does it cater to villagers only when they migrate to cities, being lonely away from wives and families?

Is the community here so small and tightly-knit, with everyone loosely related or at least on nodding terms, that prostitution – unless it’s openly done - becomes impossible?

Is there a lot of premarital sex among young people?

Goan are so prosperous that I don’t believe even the poorest woman among them has need to sell her body. It’s true also that in the small and fairly middle-class community that exists here everyone knows everyone else; if a man desires anonymity, he’s unlikely to get it. But from what I’ve seen of Goans, I don’t think a woman who prostitutes herself would be ostracised. People here seem far too easygoing for that.

Yet, it’s odd because marriages here take place very late. A woman who’s still unmarried at thirty is fairly common. And I have rarely seen local courting couples. In the evenings, the young men all hang out together at some corner or are zooming around on motorcycles, the girls are at home. Or they are returning home from work.

And that’s another thing. Working girls. Many, many unmarried village girls go to work in the small shops of the market at Chaudi, in government offices and the odd factory. During the tourist season, the poorer among them get cleaning jobs. Others work in travel agencies and internet cafes.

Prostitution seems like a nasty business in comparison.

I think it doesn’t exist because the girls are simply not interested. Or would that be just too simplistic a reason?

Dedicated to god and vanity

It’s rather nice how many a village woman greets the new day with flowers.

First thing every morning, you’ll see her freshly-bathed, fresh fragrant flowers in her hair, plucking yet more flowers to offer the gods during her puja.

Ever so often a little girl walking to school will spy a rare rose growing over the wall of someone’s garden, and quickly she will steal it to tuck into her plait.

My neighbour, Nirmala, is absolutely mad about flowers. She has bushes of the tiny, fragrant white zai and mogra, as well as the little scented orange flowers locally known as aboli. Her husband, a woodcutter, can often be seen patiently plucking each tiny flower so that his plump beautiful wife, a mother of five grown children, can decorate her hair.

Nirmala would be astonished to learn that in seventeenth century Amsterdam, tulips were such a craze that people abandoned jobs, businesses and wives to become tulip growers, that tulips cost thousands of guilders, that tulip bulbs became a currency, their value quoted like stocks and shares. But to cost so much they must have smelt really beautiful, isn’t it? - I can imagine her asking.

Though village women value flowers for their fragrance and beauty, they see them also in purely functional terms. This means flowers are grown essentially to either adorn themselves or to offer to the gods. The idea that a flower could be grown only for the sake of its beauty is deeply mysterious to them.

But then it’s funny how flowers mean so many different things to so many different people and cultures.

Vincent Van Gogh found a sunflower lying in a gutter in Paris and created one of his most famous paintings as a result. In A House of Pomegranates, Oscar Wilde writes a poignant tale of a romantic nightingale who, for the sake of love, sings all night long with the thorn of a white rose piercing her breast in order to draw out, drop by drop, every bit of her blood to stain the rose red. As the pop song goes: Roses are red, my love.

Flowers and their colours are deeply symbolic, and many are considered to have a special spiritual significance. They represent birth and the cycle of life, youth, beauty, love and what not. They are used as funeral wreaths, to festoon marriage beds, to garland politicians. Some flowers are said to ward off the evil eye, others are said to bring good luck. To the flower children of the sixties, they were symbols of the desire for peace.

Here in the village, flowers are as simple as the villagers themselves.

Will the cow eat them? – is an important consideration while deciding which flower to plant. Do they need to be watered regularly? – is another. As a result you rarely find exotic flowers here. Mostly, they’re the ones that grow easily from cuttings, from the stalks that are trimmed and discarded during the monsoon. The traditional red and white hibiscus, yellow oleanders, bougainvillea, some sacred flowers used only in pujas, and the many fragrant flowers for the hair.

Buying flowers for someone you love is now a cliché. Not buying them can sometimes be more memorable, as in this poem by Wendy Cope:

Some men never think of it.
You did. You’d come along
And say you’d nearly brought me flowers
But something had gone wrong.

The shop was closed. Or you had doubts –
The sort that minds like ours
Dream up incessantly.
You thought I might not want your flowers.

It made me smile and hug you then.
Now I can only smile.
But, look, the flowers you nearly brought
Have lasted all this while.

The dead dry leaves of summer

This is the season in which leaves fall a lot.

Mostly they’re dead, dry leaves: brown in colour or a pale sickly yellow. They don’t leave you with a sense of beauty, as do the glorious red and yellow autumn leaves you see in more temperate climes. These are leaves that must be swept up and burnt ritually every year.

Walking through an empty tract of land in which nothing but teak trees stand, I wade through a sea of dry, crackling teak leaves. They’re eaten up by insects, and many are no more than skeleton leaves, ghosts of their former greener selves. High above me, the tall teak trees bereft of their large, unwieldy leaves seem naked and forlorn against the sky. There is no green to enliven the eye: everywhere is the bleakness of a summer death.

Soon the villagers will come and gather these dead leaves, piling them into separate small mounds. And then they will burn each pile as if it were a funeral pyre of someone not much loved, who will be forgotten with ease.

I am reminded of a gloomy poem by Robert Frost:

All season long they were overhead, more lifted up than I.
To come to their final place in earth they had to pass me by.
All summer long I thought I heard them threatening under their breath.
And when they came it seemed with a will to carry me with them to death.

They spoke to the fugitive in my heart as if it were leaf to leaf.
They tapped at my eyelids and touched my lips with an invitation to grief. . .

But, in another month or so, the rains will come and then these teak trees - which are as numerous as coconut palms in the landscape of Goa - will sprout green afresh. And everything will grow lush and green again.

And there will be a poem for that, too. A happier poem by Philip Larkin, a poet I really like.

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Patrick, the faith healer

Faith in the mysterious – even miraculous - healing powers of an ordinary individual seems strange, even laughable, to those who don’t share it.

Patrick is a faith healer based in Goa, whom hundreds flock to everyday in the hope that he will cure them of their various ailments. ( I wrote about him briefly in an earlier post).

Are these people crazy? I used to think so, but now I'm not quite so certain. Crazily irrational, certainly, but most of all they are desperate. And perhaps only those who themselves have suffered as a result of some disease or other – which doctors and allopathic medicines could do nothing to alleviate - can understand this desperation.

I met a woman who, as a result of some dreadful injury, has been suffering from paralysis in one side of her face for the last fifteen-odd years. She has difficulty eating, and when she eats she drools in a way that has made eating in public a hugely embarrassing experience. As a result of meeting Patrick several times, she has some sensation at last in the dead side of her face and can eat without dripping saliva. Her faith in Patrick is immense. Every few months she goes to see him and she is convinced that she will soon be cured completely.

I met a man who had a hernia that required surgery. He told me Patrick healed him in one sitting. He also told me of an artist friend of his who had cancer of the liver. The doctors had told her she had six months to live. She went to see Patrick on two occasions. Subsequent medical tests showed no signs of the tumour. She was cured.

How does one account for this? Is there really such a thing as a miracle?

In one of his Unpopular Essays, Bertrand Russell writes that ‘there are a number of purely theoretical questions . . . which science is unable to answer, at any rate at present. Do we survive death in any sense, and if so, do we survive for a time or for ever? Can mind dominate matter, or does matter completely dominate mind . . .?’

Russell, of course, was not thinking of faith healers when he wrote this. And yet it is apt. He adds: ‘What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or of ignorance. Knowledge is not so precise a concept as is commonly thought. . .’

Of course, the world is full of people who will believe every kind of mumbo-jumbo, to whom blind faith is everything, and who never use reason to think things through.

Yet, even I have had to admit that faith healing is a mystery. I don’t believe, and yet, how can I not believe perfectly decent people when they say they've been cured?

The demand for certainty, writes Russell, is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.

Sometimes it’s important to have the humility to say: I don’t know.

I don’t know how a man’s hernia can disappear so miraculously, but apparently it did.

There are mysteries we don’t understand.

Maybe it’s the mind and body connection. The mind is a very powerful organ. A person's psychology is not something we should dismiss so easily. Can a man psych himself into getting cured?

I don’t know.

All I know is that allopathic doctors often can’t help, that allopathic medicines usually take care of only the symptom and not the cause, that faith in doctors (particularly specialists) is increasingly on the wane, and that people are desperate to get cured.

Why laugh at them?

(For those who are interested in meeting Patrick, the faith healer, I’ve managed to get hold of the phone number of someone who can tell you when he is available and where. The magic number in Goa is: 9226387931.)

Only the temple bell rings

Villagers don’t have doorbells. They don’t need them. They have dogs who bark when a stranger approaches the house. Everyone else simply walks in through the door, which is left open all hours of the day and closed only at night.

My doorbell has grown rusty from disuse.

Despite my urgings, nobody rings it, though some have pressed the switch simply for the novelty of hearing a bell ring inside.

It’s a bell, is it? a neighbour asked me in some wonder. But why do you need a bell? Don’t’ you hear the gate creak when someone enters?

At least she came in through the gate, unlike her son who once simply leapt over the wall and surprised me in my nightclothes.

Most people just stand at the gate and keep calling my name till I am forced to drop everything and pop my head out of a window to ask, in exasperation: What?

Most exasperating of all is Babuli, who some would call the village idiot.

Oye! - he’ll shout. And if you don’t respond in exactly thirty seconds, he’ll shout it again, louder still: Oye! And keep shouting the word till someone appears at the door.

I’m not one of your buffaloes, Babuli – once I told him crossly.

He looked abashed. But the next time he came round he was shouting it again: Oye!

Sometimes I miss the sound of the bell ringing in what was once my home in the city. I miss the way people used to stand patiently outside till you opened the door. I miss peeping through the peephole to see who it is. If the visitor is unwelcome, I miss most of all not answering the doorbell and watching the person quietly go away.

The politics of cheese and butter

Europeans on a shoestring budget come to Goa to live here temporarily, as once the English and Americans went to Europe.

In the first half of the twentieth century, people who were broke could live in Paris cheap. George Orwell was famously down and out in Paris (and London). A broke Ernest Hemingway lived in Paris, as did James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and others. Many also spent time in Italy, Spain, Germany. D H Lawrence lived in the Tuscany region of Italy.

Since Europe got expensive, even for its own citizens, those of modest means come to south Goa and live here for six months or so in a year. They’re not really tourists, more like people who like to holiday here and who supplement their finances by running shops and restaurants around the beaches of Palolem and Agonda. South Goa is much cheaper than north Goa. (Though I’m told the beaches of Gokarna in Karnataka are even cheaper.)

But now a certain section of environmentalists and Save Goa campaigners from the north are crying foul. Foreigners are overstaying, they allege. And they’re running restaurants illegally: sixty percent of all restaurant shacks along the beach are run by foreigners.

They’re demanding that cops take action.

What if they succeed?

How on earth, I want to cry, will I ever get a chance in this little village to eat a chicken escalope or a chicken schnitzel if they go? Where will I find a beef steak with blue cheese sauce, or the delicious wood-oven-baked pizza which an authentic Italian makes? Where will I get Hungarian Goulash and Spaghetti Carbonara and homemade liver pâté on toast, and the best bruschetta ever with olives and lots of herbs? Where else will I pay half of what I would in any up-market restaurant in an Indian metro?

And I want to cry: But what will happen if the nice cheese lady has to go? Where will I get my smoked Mozzarella and feta cheese, which she makes right here?

And what will happen to the locals who buy licences to run shacks from the Municipality, and then are only too happy to hand over the running of these shacks to the foreigners?

It’ll be as it always is when the tourist season is over. Making do with the bare necessities. And being thankful that I can at least buy Amul cheese and Amul butter while the season is on. When the foreigners go, even these little luxuries vanish from shops.

Village life murdabad.

Spellbound in Goa

If you look for Fonda on the map of Goa, you’re unlikely to find it.

This is because in Goa words are written in one way and pronounced in another. Fonda is actually Ponda. But this doesn’t mean that all words starting with a P are pronounced with an F. They aren’t. Palolem beach is still Palolem and Patnem beach Patnem.

But the M at the end of these words is silent. If you’re looking for Patnem, say Patnay. Palolem is Palolay, and Panjim Punjee. But Candolim remains Candolim.

The A or aah sound at the end of a word is also often suppressed. So if you stop to ask directions to Agonda beach, remember to say Agond. It makes you sound more like a local. Funnily, and also most aptly, Goa is pronounced with the aah! at the end. So you don’t ever say you’re going to Go, unless you’re really going to go.

And don’t even try to look for Kaypay on the map, as I was stupid enough to do. When finally I asked somebody where on earth I could find it, I was directed to Quepem.

They say most of these place names are a corruption of the original Indian term by the Portuguese.

The beach called Benaulim (the M is pronounced here!) in south Goa was originally Bana Halli, literally meaning a village created by an arrow. Halli, of course, is a Kannada word. According to legend the land of Bana Halli was reclaimed from the sea by Shiva when he shot an arrow into the ocean. The Portuguese didn't care too much to preserve the legend in the word.

But while the Portuguese mispronounced many words, very much as the English did in the rest of India, many Portuguese words themselves have entered the Konkani language in a way that would not be recognized by the former rulers today. The word susegad, which is often used to describe Goans, and which suggests a laid-back attitude, is a corruption of the Portuguese word soce gado, meaning exactly the same thing. Latin words were also once used frequently, and the educated Goan often strung together Konkani, Portuguese and Latin words all in one single sentence.

The Goans themselves were once called Goanese. But call a Goan a Goanese today, and you’re likely to meet with a very hostile reaction. Go and ease yourself, they’ll retort sharply.

This little politician went to market

Politicians are coming here with their big talk and smarmy smiles, begging for votes.

On Saturday evening, one of them stands on a makeshift stage in the only open area of the market, making his speech. Not many are listening. A scattering of individuals occupy the many empty chairs. Some curious passersby stop their scooters to look and listen.

Otherwise, the entire market ignores him.

Saturday is a bad day for a politician to visit. Didn’t anyone tell him that?

It’s the day workers are paid their weekly wages. It’s also the day the weekly vegetable bazaar is held. By evening, when prices have dropped and the day’s work is over, all the sad little shops so typical of a highway market town - and offering no more than the bare necessities - come ablaze with lights. The place is crowded as it never is otherwise – with migrants who work as masons, plumbers and laborers, with small businessmen of the area, with families from the many neighboring villages. All are busy stocking up on food and vegetables, fish and chicken.

Nobody has time to think of politicians. And for the moment, at least, no one is interested in the free rice this politician is probably promising. All are busy trying to find the best bargains for their own hard-earned money, hurrying from vendor to vendor, lugging heavy bags, dodging honking buses, trucks, scooters, cows and bicycles.

In any case, this market on the NH-17 is not a space where you linger to do some window-shopping. It’s easily the ugliest spot in all of Goa. The narrow highway doubles as the main street of the market and, together with an adjoining road constitutes the entire market, supplying the needs of all the villages in the district.

People do what they have to do and return in relief to their homes set amidst coconut palms, oblivious to the neta and his speech.

The poor little politician probably went wee! wee! wee! - all the way home.

Chronicle of a bird foretold

Tragedy struck yesterday at 4 pm, as I had long suspected it would.

The bulbul in my garden - whose song kept me enthralled for days - had found himself a mate and built a little nest, only to have the eggs destroyed yesterday afternoon.

I’m not a sentimentalist, not even an animal lover, but it’s hard to remain indifferent when you watch the courtship of a bird so closely, and then see violence done to it in your own garden.

I knew something had happened when I heard the little birds shrieking. I looked out of the window to see the two bulbuls in a frenzy, their feathers all ruffled and fluffed, frantically crying out while a greater coucal, that big sinister bird, was hopping about inside the zai bush where they have a nest. Slowly it slid out from among the leaves and flapped away, no doubt after having eaten whatever was in the nest. In a dog eat dog world, why should it be surprising that birds prey on each other?

The wailing bulbuls fluttered about the bush for a while. Then they perched on the horizontal rope that holds the madhavi-lata creeper, looking about them in a shocked kind of way, not making a sound. Perhaps it was grief.

I have not seen them since.

But the death was foretold in a harsh jungle law that says almost every baby garden bird must be killed, while eighty percent of adult garden birds must perish in their first or second year of life, long before their normal lifespan of four to fourteen years is over. A house sparrow can live up to 13 years, but almost never does. Who has ever seen a doddering old bird?

Large birds and sea birds tend to live longer. The sea eagle will often live twenty years. While the albatross, at 37, holds the record for the longest living bird.

Aristotle said that man is a rational being because he can calculate. Apparently, arithmetic in ancient Greece was impossibly difficult. Perhaps the birds are fortunate that they can’t count their dead. Their grief must be short-lived.

Funnily enough, birds in captivity are known to live to a ripe old age. A common Australian parrot who lived in a zoo died at eighty.

But does the caged bird sing?

And given a choice, would a bird rather be free and dead before its time? Or caged and alive?

Who can say. It’s something even we humans might ponder if we had such a choice.

Memory as a camera

It’s a peaceful evening on Palolem beach: a cool breeze is blowing, the tourists– bronze, lobster red, pale ivory - are lazing about in the sand, watching the sky and the sea.

And then, as the sun starts to sink, there is a sudden spurt of activity. The sun worshippers rise and throng the shore’s edge, whipping out cameras, clicking furiously.

The sun sets. Slowly the sky changes colour, the sea transforms. Everything grows a little darker and moodier and quieter. The sun worshippers become stick figures, black against the still bright sky now streaked with pink.

Please take a picture of me – a woman in a sarong says, thrusting her camera at a stranger and posing against the sea and the evening sky. She unties her hair and shakes it over her face. She spreads her arms wide. She strikes a pose. She smiles.

The camera captures the moment, as I look on in bemusement.

She shows the picture to me in her excitement. Look, you can see the sky – she says, pointing.

I look at the picture in her itsy bitsy, 4 x 2-inch camera. I look at the real sky. That anyone would even attempt to capture and condense on a teeny-weeny camera the colours of this sunset, the gloriousness of the endlessly beautiful sky, seems more than just laughable, it’s like a trivialization, an affront almost to the mystery of beauty. And before I can stop myself, I tell her: You can’t really capture it, you know.

I know, the woman says regretfully. But always I try.

Only foreign tourists (rarely Indian) regard sunsets with such worshipful reverence, only they take so many photographs of it. Maybe in their own, colder, countries they rarely see the sun setting over the sea, or perhaps the colours are never so vivid. But surely memory is a better camera, capturing not just the visual element but the entire experience of it? No camera can see what the roving eye in seconds captures: the hills already grown dark at one edge, how the sea darkens on this side while remaining bright where the sun has set, the colours that change every moment. But then, once you return home, how do you share with a friend a memory of a sunset on Palolem beach? A visual suggestion is all you can offer, a literal reproduction without the magic of the original, which remains embedded somewhere in memory, somewhere in the heart.

Beauty and beastliness

When you think of Nature, you imagine sunsets and trees, flowers and pretty birds. But there’s no getting away from natural ugliness. From the hideous toad to the pig with his little piggy eyes and strange snout, nature is filled with all that’s obscene, repugnant, frightening, abject and monstrous.

Why is a bird so pretty and a frog so ugly?

There are those who say that ugliness, like beauty, also lies in the eyes of the beholder, and says more about you than the creature you behold.

Ask a toad what is beauty, true beauty, says Voltaire. He will tell you that it consists of his mate, with her two fine round eyes protruding from her small head, her broad flat throat.

Ask such a frog to sing and surely it will croak (like Dylan) something on the lines of: There's beauty in the silver, singing river,/There's beauty in the sunrise in the sky,/But none of these and nothing else can touch the beauty/That I remember in my true love's eyes.

Fair is foul and foul is fair, as the three witches cried.

In the evolutionary scheme of things, beauty is said to be simply nature’s strategy to help attract one of the opposite sex and so perpetuate genes.

The experts say ugliness, likewise, is nothing but a deliberate strategy. The very features we find grotesque are vital for the animal’s survival.

There is a purpose behind the pig’s little piggy eyes and snout, mysterious though it might seem.

Unhappily it doesn’t seem to help the poor little pig. It still gets eaten by humans who, while calling it dirty and greedy, find much to praise when it arrives on the table as bacon,sausage and salami. Mmm, beautiful.

The day of the monkey

Today is Hanuman Jayanti, a day to ponder the mysteries of a faith that makes a monkey out of god and vice versa.

Granted that Hanuman was strong and brave and did many good things in the Ramayana. Hurrah for him.

But monkeys are not like Hanuman. They just look the same.

Monkeys are thieves and vandals, particularly the black-faced monkeys who live in this area. They would rather beg and steal than forage for food in the jungles where there is plenty. They are greedy, destructive, vain, lazy.

In fact, they are a lot like all those people we don’t like or would rather not be friendly with. Except those people don’t come swinging through the trees to land on your roof or pop their heads in through your window. They don’t break into your home to pee and crap all over the place. They don’t bare their teeth at you and growl. Or admire their black faces in your windowpanes.

You don't build temples to such people and worship them.

And you don't have special days when you feed these thieves and vandals.

Imagine if you did.

People like us

On an average day I see, hear, and experience birds and animals more than I do human beings.

This is not surprising when you live in a village with no immediate neighbours, when your front vista is a mango tree the size of a large building, and your back overlooks an untidy coconut and cashew grove. In all four directions can be seen the tops of endless coconut palms as well as other trees that stand alone: teak, acacia, silk cotton, and some old jungle trees whose names I don’t even know. In the distance is visible the wide canopy of a leafless champa tree filled with white flowers. My own tiny garden offers its own modest vista of plants and flowers: bougainvillea, white, yellow and red hibiscus, the fragrant, flowering pink creeper that Bengalis call the madhavi-lata, other odd shrubs and small trees.

These days the first sound I hear around dawn is the loud call of an unknown bird in the mango tree. Vow-vow-vow it goes, and again more insistently: vow-vow-vow-vow, falling silent only when an answering call is heard from another tree in the distance. The sound wakes a rooster somewhere. Loudly and rather peevishly, as if annoyed at being upstaged by a mere song bird, it crows with all its might. Sleepily I think how odd it is that Indian roosters cry ku-ku-ru-ku rather than cock-a-doodle-doo. Or is it just the way we hear it?

Thereafter, there is no stopping the birds, so many these days that it’s a pure delight. I’m still learning their names and sounds, but from my meager knowledge I have been able identify the oriole, a strange flycatcher with a long brown tail, the drongo, the hoopoe, the bee eater. There’s a kingfisher that regularly sits on the branch of a cashew tree. When it flies off it’s in a flash of brilliant blue. A greater coucal, those heavy, silent and rather furtive birds that normally hop about in the undergrowth, quietly creeps up the breadfruit tree as I lie in bed and watch. The koel is rarely seen, but always heard, a sound that fills me with nostalgia. There are woodpeckers who sound exactly like Woody Woodpecker. This year I haven’t spotted any magpie robins yet. These are amazing little black birds streaked with white who actually sing entire tunes.

A kind of bulbul with a cocky little crest has taken to hanging around and singing loudly on the madhavi-lata. It’s so beautiful, the sound it makes, that I’m sure it will find a mate soon and together they will build a nest, perhaps in the hibiscus. In the past, such a coupling had ended in tragedy when a black-faced monkey ripped out the nest, possibly to eat the eggs or baby birds. This time they might be luckier. There has been a lull with the monkeys. Maybe some large creature has devoured the lot of them, but I’m sure that’s wishful thinking. They’ll be back, as thieves and vandals and villains always are.

Through the morning the cicadas can be heard in the trees, buzzing insistently and loudly. And always, like some perpetual background music, there are the crows.

I regard the birds as delightful neighbours who don’t bother you.

The animals are another story, usually offering tales of horror, gore and suspense. Like the little frog who every evening materializes from behind the bookshelf. Last evening it hopped onto my little book of poems, then took a flying leap onto the spine of a fat Bertrand Russell. A gentle prod with a stick saw it landing on a P D James Omnibus and jumping down onto the dhurrie where it quickly peed before it was picked up and thrown out.

Cows appear in the evening, nosing around among the weeds and bushes outside. If I’m buying some poli (a flattish Goan bread) from the paowallah, one of them invariably walks slowly and rather threateningly towards me. And then I have to dodge this way and that with the cow determinedly after me, trying to grab the pao. The dogs are no better. A mangy black and white dog some months ago produced a litter of pups. And now there’s a fresh lot of tiny pups, red from rolling around in the dust. All of them want what I have, making me feel foolishly guilty for having the ability to buy food while they are starving, though flourishing nevertheless. The cat is cleverer. I once left a fresh, hot loaf of whole wheat bread to cool on the table, only to find a cat hungrily devouring it.

On bad days rats will appear, or snakes. Tree ants – big and red – come into the house in summer and get into everything. On really bad days, hordes of black-faced monkeys will turn up, breaking the tiles on the roof, shitting all over the place and creating havoc.

Animals are everywhere. If you go for a walk in the village you sometimes pass a row of marching ducks or some strange speckled birds that look like turkeys. Gobbling and gabbling, quacking and waddling, they are a sight. Pigs, many very dirty little pigs, are always seen near the beach. On the beach, of course, there are yet more creatures: from crabs and shell fish to some strange black otter-like animals I once saw swimming in the sea.

And living among all these ‘good creatures’ (as my friend Jayram calls them), I have for the first time grown conscious of the fact that we share this planet with a million other beings. They are often strange and baffling in their ways, yet it seems they share with us many of our emotions. Like us they feel hunger and thirst, fear and anger, joy and sorrow. They go to war sometimes. They love, hate and procreate. Birds are masters at courtship. Like some of us, frogs are timid and solitary creatures. Others, like owls and bats, can be likened to party animals who emerge at night to eat and be merry. Monkeys are the outlaws. Cicadas resemble noisy children. And so it continues.

In the end, love them or hate them, they’re very much like us.

The taboos of love and food

Village customs are often baffling to one who’s not steeped in them. And none is stranger than those to do with religious taboos.

I have Muslim, Christian and Hindus neighbors. All seem to coexist quite peacefully. The women draw water from the same well. They stop and chat in a friendly way. Some of them visit each others' homes. They invite one another to weddings.

But on the issue of food and marriage, mysterious walls spring up to divide them.

The young man of a neighboring Hindu family went off some years ago to a Gulf country to earn his fortune. There he fell in love with a Goan Christian girl and married her. His sister Jyoti related the tale of her brother’s folly to me. Why, she said bitterly, did my brother have to be the only boy in the whole village to do such a thing?

And she proceeded to tell me how awkward it was when the girl turned up to stay with them for a few days.

It was the kitchen that was the crux of the problem. How could we allow a Christian girl into our kitchen? Jyoti asked. What would people have said? She had to sleep in Christina’s house.

And presumably eat there too.

Surely, I said, it shouldn’t matter so much. After all, she is your brother’s wife.

But Jyoti shook her head in pity at my ignorance. They had a responsibility to the neighbourhood temple, she explained, with which traditionally her family was associated. If it became known that a Christian girl had entered their kitchen, they would not have been able to participate in the temple rituals during the big festivals of Shigma and Ganapathy.

Nobody from the temple would ever visit our house again, she said. What could we do?

The brother has taken his wife and child and settled in Mangalore. He never visits and the family is bitter about it, but they dare not relent.

The food taboo cropped up yet again, some other day. I had some Goan sausages, which some friends had left behind in my fridge. Goan sausages are a delicacy, but I can’t stand them. Knowing Christina and her daughter would enjoy the sausages, which are not available here, I went over to her house with a packet.

She was sitting in her veranda. Do you want some Goan sausages? I asked.

Shh, Christina said, looking round fearfully to see if anyone had heard.

Don’t tell anyone you gave me these sausages, she whispered, taking the packet from me. If the others get to know we eat such food they’ll never accept anything from my kitchen ever again.

So Christians eat pork and beef.

Muslims eat beef, but not pork.

Hindus regard both with horror, and want to keep both people and food of a certain kind out of their kitchens.

The love for fish is what all faiths have in common. But presumably it's not enough to unite people in love or marriage.