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.

Why did the villager not cross the road?

In the village, people don’t give much value to roads. Roads are for cars and motorcycles and buses – for going long distances, like to the next town.

Within the village, everything and everyone is within a 2 km radius: short enough to walk. And who needs a road when you can get to your destination more quickly by walking across a fallow field or taking a path through someone’s coconut grove?

Short cuts are what people look for.

And if it means cutting across someone else’s patch of land, nodding a greeting at the owner of the house or stopping to chat, so what? Everyone does it. And nobody even thinks of minding, least of all the owner. The only thing to watch out for are the dogs, who know a trespasser when they see one even if their masters don’t.

Boundaries, in any case, are often rather fluid. Sometimes you can’t even tell where someone’s property begins because there is nothing to mark it: no boundary wall, not even a bamboo and hedgerow fencing. Where they do exist, their purpose is more to keep out cows than human beings.

This is particularly true of homes near the sea, where you can simply walk past little cottages nestling among coconut trees to get to the beach at any point.

Those who want to go some place that’s close to the sea use the long stretch of sand. After crossing the beach, they’ll clamber over the rocky promontory that separates one beach from another, wade through some seawater if the tide is coming in, walk some more on another beach, clamber over yet more rocks and voila! – they’ve reached their destination without once seeing a road.

But because villagers don’t see roads as a way to get somewhere, their road sense is zero. On a crowded market day, as far as villagers are concerned, the road is a place for socialising. Where else can you bump into so many people you know? And if you’re passing through on a scooter, or even driving a bus, and you meet one such person, what else can you do but stop bang in the middle of the crowded road and engage in a long conversation, oblivious of the city-bred car driver behind you, honking away in utter and senseless rage?

Neither sahib nor memsahib

In Konkani there is no formal version of the pronoun you, like the aap that exists in Hindi or aapan in Marathi.

So, I am tu to everyone in the village - whether it’s the girl who cleans my home, the rough labour I might hire to do some work, or the little girl who steals the flowers from my garden.

I shouldn’t find this offensive: after all, I speak English, which has only one pronoun for you. Yet, often, I find I don’t like it. And it’s not so much to do with respect or deference. It’s the over familiarity implied by the word tu that I object to. Tu in Marathi, Hindi and other Indian languages (even French, incidentally) is used only by those who know you well. To be called tu by a stranger always comes as a bit of a shock.

And yet, this only tells one part of the story.

In her insightful book, Goa: A daughter’s story, Maria Aurora Couto writes how the lack of the more formal you in Konkani has contributed to a unique culture of egalitarianism in the state.

But language alone is not responsible, she writes. Traditionally, the system of holding land – whether agricultural or village - was non-exploitative, with village gaonkars (the elite) representing the entire village, including non-gaonkars and new settlers, all of whom were accommodated on community land. The Portuguese too, unlike the British, did not encourage a culture of subservience. So Goans, according to Couto, never had to learn how to bow before authority.

Even today one is told repeatedly that there are no servants in Goa. The concept simply doesn’t exist. The girl who cleans my house not only calls me tu, she calls me by my first name - without appending a jee or even a madamjee. And if I offer her something to drink, she does not sit down on the floor to drink it, as domestic help anywhere else in India will automatically do. She sits in a chair.

In a strange way, I like it. She's clean, polite and pleasant. She helps me out by cleaning the house and in return I gratefully pay her some money.

If only Indians elsewhere would stop bowing their heads in deference to caste, class, money, authority and status, what an extraordinary difference it would make to the very fabric of society. No memsahibs, no sahibs. Instead, a natural respect for all.

Karmic blueprints, elephants and other exotica

Dr Newton invites me to go on an amazing journey of past life exploration, self-discovery and spiritual awakening.

I've never met Dr Newton, but I'm informed that's he a world-renowned Past-Life Regression Therapist and New Age Spiritual Master.If I attend his 2-day workshop I will uncover karmic patterns relating to disease, fears, phobias, addictions and more. I will access my karmic blueprint and know the true purpose of my life. In addition, the good doctor will also help in my soul’s evolution and bring about a complete transformation of my life.

I am very tempted to go on Dr Newton’s fantastic technicolored journey, but I am distracted by Joe, who wants to know if I am not tired of beach and party life.

If I am, Joe’s private tour promises to guide me to Heaven, which – Joe says - is the real India, where there are good roads with little traffic and even less police trouble. Learn 1001 survival tricks, Joe urges. Joe is a professional cook, and if I go on his tour I am assured also of picking up food and health tips for free along the way. If I so desire, he can also give me a Thai- or Indian-style massage in his air-conditioned home.

I am at Baga beach in north Goa, at a lovely old Portuguese house that has been converted into a restaurant and bar, reading with fascination the little adverts pasted on a pillar. I am only 80 km away from the quiet village where I live, but I may as well be on the moon, so strange does it all seem.

But like Alice in Wonderland, I find things just get “curiouser and curiouser”.

Wandering about in the garden I spy a piece of paper stuck onto a coconut tree. It informs me that Lucky the elephant is 12 months pregnant and that she lives in the temple courtyard and needs love and bananas!

On a patch of lawn at one side of the restaurant, foreign tourists are milling about outside a small cottage, tattooed and pierced. There are new-age hippies and children in diapers, men in blond dreadlocks. women in sarongs. A man has a flower tucked behind one ear. A tall woman walks about in thick woolen socks and a short sleeveless dress. There are a dozen-odd locals: a woman holding a spastic child, a man with the most sorrowful face I’ve ever seen. People are awaiting their turn to meet the local faith healer, Patrick. An elderly woman who is on her fifth visit informs me in an awed voice that he can cure anyone of anything, including cancer. The door opens and as a tourist slips in, I catch a glimpse of the faith healer, a young man in jeans and long hair that hangs down to his shoulders. He has very dark, intense eyes. One hand is pressed to his heart as he nods and smiles a greeting. The door shuts.

Full Moon Meditation is on the 1oth of April. If I like I can also donate old clothes. I read these separate snippets on the closed door.

It’s strange to think that such a subculture exists and has existed for a long time, separate from the other existing reality that is Goa.

Incy wincy spidery crabs

Crabs were strange to me till I came to Goa. Now I see them on the beach and in rocky pools of water and fish markets, and I am astonished by the many shapes and sizes in which these creatures appear.

These days one sees hundreds of tiny spidery crabs running around on the beach. They are light and feathery, light also on their “feet”. And unlike most crabs, they don’t seem to have a shell at all. I’m not even sure they are crabs, they look more like spiders. But they run in that hilarious sideways fashion that is so peculiar to crabs.

Despite being so tiny and also the colour of sand, it’s easy to spot them. Maybe it’s because they’re so full of energy, racing around like those zippy little toy cars, stopping only to pick up something, which they then eat at top speed.

Dogs love chasing them. And so do those delicate little birds that walk around on stilted legs (the sand plover, I think it’s called). So do I, actually. But they’re nervous little things and in a flash they scuttle into one of the many tiny holes made by them in the sand. Where the wet sand is flat and hard, you sometimes see only hundreds of these tiny holes surrounded by bird dropping-like bits of sand arranged with the symmetry and beauty of a rangoli design.

The other evening the beach was littered with tiny dead silver fish, the kind nobody eats. In the fish market the floor is always littered with them. The incy wincy crabs were busy picking them up and rushing off – but where to? I tried to follow one, but found it just rushed around like some busy little crazed creature, desperately holding the fish that was bigger than itself. For no apparent reason it suddenly dropped the fish and rushed off again. There was another tinier crab struggling with one such fish, rather like an ant holding aloft a large insect. Clearly there was going to be a feast that night.

But I can’t imagine anyone feasting on these skinny little crabs which have neither flesh nor bones.

Because crab meat is absolutely delicious. I have even overcome my horror at seeing a full crab, claws and all, sitting on a plate. Who cares how it looks when it tastes so good?