Life in a Goan village

Listening to flowers

2010-10-29T15:43:00.002+05:30

There are people, I’m told, who talk to their plants. Some even play music for them, and classical is supposed to be especially popular. Sounds crazy. But there's a theory that plants feel pain and pleasure, just like us. And because soothing sounds make them happy, they thrive.

I’ve never been much of a talker. I’m better at listening.

And sometimes it seems the plants are telling me all kinds of things in their strange, silent, cryptic way. When the bougainvillea starts to bloom, I know it’s saying that the rains are over. When a flower opens languidly, it’s signalling: ‘Look at me! Aren’t I beautiful! Notice my colour. Observe the delicate formation of my petals.’

When the yellow hibiscus folds its petals to die at the end of each day, in sign language it’s saying: ‘Goodbye cruel world’. And when the white hibiscus opens its petals wide and glows in the moonlight, isn’t it mocking me for going to sleep when the night is so beautiful?

Sometimes it feels like that.

But flowers give out secret signals through their fragrances as well. And fragrance is more mysterious. Not the light scent of flowers like the rose, but the dark, hypnotic fragrances exuded by certain small flowers like the raat ki rani. When I planted the creeper, my village neighbours shook their heads warningly and told me that snakes loved the smell. I laughed. Snakes can’t smell, I told them.

It took me some time to understand that certain insects are attracted by the powerful fragrance, and that frogs come to eat the insects, and snakes to eat the frogs.

I got the signal wrong. I thought the fragrance was telling me to breathe deeply. What it was actually signalling was: Watch out for snakes!

This year the monsoons continued right through October. As a result the flowers are all late. The few that struggled into existence soon began to rot away. ‘Too much water, we're choking,’ they signalled frantically.

Global warming, I told them sadly.

I think I heard them sigh.

River of words

2010-10-26T16:26:00.003+05:30

It’s fascinating how our language (at least the English language) is replete with references to the forces of nature and the natural world. The sun and moon, volcanoes and mountains, thunder and lightning, the seasons, the birds and the bees, trees and flowers and weeds, snakes and snails and puppy dog tails – all this and more have profound, usually metaphorical, significance for us.

‘Sun is shining, but it’s raining in my heart,’ – goes the song. Corny, and yet how much more evocative than to blandly state: It’s a sunny day but I’m feeling sad.

Our language is richer, as is our imagination, as a result of this mingling of nature with our own moods and feelings:

"I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark,/Insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,/Going on down, into the moist guts of the earth. . ."

Even while man conquered the wilderness and found shelter from it, he continued to use the language of the wilderness, and cities came to be called concrete jungles - as though somewhere deep down he was bitter about the beauty he had left and of the ugliness he had created.

Nowadays environmentalists weep for the damage we are inflicting on the earth. There may be something in what they say. But I think what is sadder is how much more artificial and ugly things are becoming for the sake of convenience. Nowadays the fragrance of flowers is bottled. Nowadays milk comes in tetra packs, peas come frozen, meat is tinned. We grow expensive plastic flowers in rooms lit by fluorescent lights. We wear synthetic fabrics. Children’s toys are made of plastic, not wood.

We’d be dead without progress and all the goodies it brings us. But perhaps we don’t have to go all the way and discard everything that is natural and more beautiful. If we do, perhaps a day will come when we have nothing but the words themselves rooted in nature.

Mr Ambani's garden, and mine

2010-10-15T14:08:00.004+05:30

I wonder if Mr Ambani has a garden?

I read somewhere that he lives in an apartment in the sky, in a swanky penthouse in south Bombay. And it's the most expensive apartment in the world.

I wonder if this swanky apartment has a garden.

It probably does. On the terrace of his house he probably has a landscaped garden designed by some incredibly expensive landscape/penthouse artist. Probably a little Japanese affair with a little rockery, and an electric waterfall that goes into action at the touch of button, causing little fairy lights to come on. Like Richard Cory, Mr Ambani probably sits there in the evenings with his lovely wife and children – when he has the time – and tells himself how lucky he is.

This is how I imagine Mr Ambani’s garden to be.

Poor Mr Ambani. Poor lil' rich Mr Ambani.

This is what I think when I survey my own little garden. Do you – dear city dweller – know what it is to have a little garden? I never did when I lived in the city. I didn’t think of such things. When I lived in my several different little barsatis in Delhi, I never even bothered to have potted plants. Too much of a hassle. Only once I experienced something that came close. The tenants before me had completely enclosed the terrace in bamboo and left some pots filled with green. The sunlight filtered through. I bought myself a little table and I’d eat my meals on this lovely terraced garden.

But now, now I have a real garden! It’s not in the front of the house, like most gardens. In fact, anyone passing by would think: ‘What a sorry house. No garden.’ Little do they know. My garden is on one side of the house, overlooked by a long (not so long, actually) veranda. I often sit there, dreaming. Sometimes I half close my eyes and look at it. This, I think, is how the Impressionists must have viewed reality. I see a blur of colour. Pink, purple, blue (yes, blue flowers!), yellow, red and, of course, green – countless shades of green. I don’t have a gardener (only Babuli, aka the village idiot, who sometimes clears the weeds). I’m not a keen gardener myself. Too lazy. But somehow, putting a plant here, a plant there, the garden has grown – and grown pretty lush. Last night I was amazed to see one yellow hibiscus awake and open (this morning it was dead, or perhaps still asleep). Its chrome yellow petals were peeled back and the stamen was sticking out – like a tongue. It was incredibly erotic, actually (now I have the word erotic on my blog, in addition to the word sex, and all the perverts searching Google are going to find my posts and be incredibly disappointed because all I allude to is the activity in the garden.) Every now and then I think I should sell the cottage (time to move on), but it’s always the thought of the garden that holds me back.

I wonder if Mr Ambani (who, according to Forbes, is one of the richest men in the world) has butterflies – huge butterflies in the most incredible colours – in his expensive penthouse garden. I wonder if he has caterpillars (the bad guys) eating his plants, and hundreds of fireflies (the good guys) giving him the feeling that he is in a tropical paradise. Maybe he’s imported them. Maybe he has robot fireflies and caterpillars who just look pretty instead of ravaging his garden. I wonder if he has real earth on the terrace of his penthouse garden, or only a readymade lawn. I wonder if the magpie robin sings for him (on a Sunday, a holiday). I wonder if he has woodpeckers banging away or the red whiskered bulbul courting his loved one passionately. I wonder if he has red ants in his garden or if squirrels run about, shrieking (when I lived in Delhi I had a doorbell that sounded exactly like a squirrel, only I didn’t realise it till I came here). I wonder if he has trees – a coconut, maybe. With money, anything is possible. Or so I’ve been told.

I know one thing for sure. There'll be no frogs in his garden, not even the odd snake. Lucky, lucky Mr Ambani. It's lovely the things money can buy.

Saving the planet

2010-10-09T15:54:00.002+05:30

Does the planet need you and me to save it? Is there an implied arrogance, even conceit, in such a notion? Personally, living as close to nature as I do, I've often felt I could do with a little saving myself - from the fury of the monsoon gales, from snakes and rats and frogs, from thieving monkeys, and many of god's little and big creatures who seem to conspire to make life quite, quite difficult for me (see an earlier post: Save me from the environment).

But this hilarious short video by comedien George Carlin says it all.

Who's the greediest of us all?

2010-10-08T14:59:00.004+05:30

I wonder why, of all animals, the pig is considered so greedy.

Of course, pigs are greedy alright. I’ve often observed the piglets around the cottages behind Palolem beach; dirty little things, their once pinkish skin covered in dried mud and worse filth. They have their snouts perpetually in a trough of food. Or they’ll be running around with their noses to the ground, constantly gobbling bits and pieces of unmentionable things.

But pigs are not the only creatures who go on eating, and who will eat just about anything: edible or not. Cows are as bad. And hens? All they do is peck all day long at the dirt, squawking all the while as if outraged by their own appetites.

And anyone who has had her garden demolished in minutes by a goat knows that the prize for greed should probably go to this insatiable creature. There are not too many goats in Goa. As the guy who sells chicken explained to me: ‘It’s very greedy, the goat. It will eat up all the plants.’ Close to where I live is a Muslim guy who butchers goats twice a week in his front yard. His goats are always tied up. And the poor things are taken to graze like dogs on a leash.

But observe, if you can, god’s little creatures. I watch them in the garden and am amazed at how they spend the entire day - from dawn to dusk - eating, generally each other. Big birds eat baby birds. Lizards will stalk a moth and pounce. Spiders will weave the most incredible web from tree to tree and sit in the centre, waiting for dinner to be served. A line of ants will be dragging some dead insect away, or even a bit of lizard shit. On a bad day there'll be a snake chasing a frog, or monkeys grabbing and stuffing their mouths with whatever they can steal.

My teak tree recently came into leaf (the branches were cut off during the rainy season). I was admiring the freshness of the green colour, but by afternoon the entire tree had been ravaged by little black and white caterpillars. All that was left were the skeleton leaves. And while the caterpillars were busy chomping away, little birds kept landing on the leaves and rubbing their beaks into them. They were eating the insects and the caterpillars who were eating the leaves.

The most astonishing of hungry creatures that I’ve seen at least, is the big red ant. During the monsoons, particularly, they are everywhere, busily bending leaves to create nests for themselves. First they drop some sticky whitish solution on the edges of all the leaves. Then they bend these leaves back and forth in the strangest way to create a nest the size of a football. I’ve seen this happen many a time. But the other day I observed them more closely in the mango tree. A line of ants had carried a dead wasp into the tree and were holding it on a leaf while the other ants were bending the leaves around the wasp. What’s the point of a home, I guess, if there’s no food to eat.

And if these creatures are not eating, they’re crapping or reproducing endlessly. To what purpose? God alone knows.

Nature's graffiti

2010-10-05T15:41:00.004+05:30

Recently my garden was thick with weeds and grass. So I invited some cows in to eat them.

The two cows were grazing just outside the gate. When I asked the boy who was overseeing them if they would eat my weeds instead – please, I added - he laughed and led them into the garden.

Predictably, perhaps, the two cows lunged for the nice flowering plants. I cried out, the boy shouted. The cows wouldn’t budge. Stolidly they chomped away at the round leaves of a small tree that in season has beautiful purple flowers. Finally one cow was led out of the garden in disgrace. The other, a rope round its neck, I coaxed into tasting some of the weeds. She nibbled at them delicately. To my relief, she seemed to like them.

I was thrilled. I began to make plans to go house to house, inviting the villagers to send their cows into my garden for a feast. I imagined disciplined cows nibbling away at the weeds, giving me the most beautiful weed-free garden ever. Never again would I have to depend on Babuli (aka the village idiot) to do the job badly. And then, just as I was wondering why nobody had ever thought to employ the cow in such a useful activity, the cow in my garden stopped eating.

Maybe she’ll like that, I told the boy, pointing at another clump of fresh weeds that had tiny purple flowers.

The cow turned to my hibiscus and began to eat it. I wanted, like AA Milne, to tell her: Weeds are flowers too, you know, once you get to know them.

But no. The cow was simply not interested in getting better acquainted with my weeds.

Later, while I was counting the number of good plants that Babuli had uprooted along with the weeds, I wondered what purpose a weed could possibly serve in nature’s grand pattern.

Weeds, I found, are not so much villains as simply plants whom no one loves. You call a plant a weed when it is growing where it is not wanted. Basically, a plant that’s in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I’m told that tobacco was once called the noxious weed. Some garden flowers, likewise, were born as common weeds till someone noticed how pretty they were and cultivated them for the garden (something like My Fair Lady, I imagine, only without all the song and dance). And cannabis, of course, is still called “the weed” though any die-hard smoker will tell you it ought to be "the crop". There are other good weeds, weeds that have healing properties. There are even some that are edible. In the monsoons I’ve noticed people here searching for these. One such weed has large heart-shaped leaves and is supposed to be very tasty.

The problem with most weeds is that you dare not be kind to them. Give them an inch and they'll soon want the whole garden.

The case of the biting dog

2009-08-21T12:55:00.005+05:30

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

2009-08-20T12:48:00.002+05:30

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

2009-08-18T19:26:00.002+05:30

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

2009-08-08T12:07:00.003+05:30

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

2009-08-07T11:56:00.003+05:30

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

2009-07-13T16:13:00.002+05:30

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

2009-07-10T17:13:00.000+05:30

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

2009-07-09T14:24:00.002+05:30

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

2009-07-04T20:17:00.001+05:30

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

2009-06-29T13:51:00.001+05:30

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

2009-06-28T12:50:00.000+05:30

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

2009-06-25T16:00:00.001+05:30

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

2009-06-24T13:31:00.002+05:30

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

2009-06-15T20:59:00.001+05:30

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

2009-06-13T12:22:00.001+05:30

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?

2009-06-12T13:36:00.005+05:30

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

2009-06-10T12:05:00.002+05:30

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

2009-06-04T11:50:00.000+05:30

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

2009-06-02T15:22:00.002+05:30

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

2009-05-29T10:37:00.001+05:30

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

2009-05-28T14:50:00.002+05:30

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

2009-05-27T11:40:00.003+05:30

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

2009-05-13T16:37:00.002+05:30

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

2009-05-05T14:53:00.002+05:30

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?

2009-05-04T10:06:00.001+05:30

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

2009-04-30T11:23:00.002+05:30

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

2009-04-29T12:50:00.002+05:30

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

2009-04-28T12:34:00.002+05:30

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

2009-04-24T12:29:00.002+05:30

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

2009-04-23T15:08:00.005+05:30

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

2009-04-22T11:44:00.001+05:30

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

2009-04-21T15:36:00.003+05:30

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

2009-04-20T13:33:00.002+05:30

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

2009-04-18T14:45:00.003+05:30

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

2009-04-17T11:18:00.001+05:30

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

2009-04-16T13:15:00.004+05:30

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

2009-04-15T15:20:00.002+05:30

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

2009-04-14T15:28:00.001+05:30

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

2009-04-13T15:56:00.001+05:30

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

2009-04-11T15:01:00.002+05:30

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

2009-04-10T10:42:00.002+05:30

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

2009-04-09T16:03:00.003+05:30

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

2009-04-08T13:51:00.003+05:30

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

2009-04-06T14:38:00.003+05:30

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?

2009-04-04T16:03:00.004+05:30

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

2009-04-03T15:09:00.003+05:30

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

2009-04-02T17:55:00.003+05:30

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

2009-04-01T16:19:00.002+05:30

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?

Drunk on fresh air

2009-03-17T07:10:00.001+05:30

The strong smell of cashew feni permeates the air these days. Even the cows stand around looking a little more dazed than usual, if not positively drunk. Must be all the cashew fruit fermenting in their stomachs.

While children go around with plastic bags, eagerly gathering the cashew nuts and tossing away the fruit, the adults are more keen on the rotting fruit, which is transformed into a potent alcoholic drink at home. Free booze!

But cashew feni stinks. What is much nicer is urak. This is a drink made from the first distillation of the fruit (or something like that). It's much less potent than feni. And really quite an exotic drink in its way.

If there is a problem it's only that everyone is making urak, and not everyone's urak tastes good. Also, since most people sell it on the sly so that they don't have to pay excise duty, you really don't know what you're getting in all those old Bisleri bottles.

I had my first taste of urak at Longuinhos, an old-time restaurant in Margao. A small shot cost four rupees. I like to buy the bottled stuff from them because – though it's a little more expensive – the stuff is more reliable since Longuinhos has been buying it from the same old supplier for donkey's years. The owner of the restaurant even told me what was the best way to drink it.

Add a few drops of lime juice and a dash of cold water and sip it slowly. There's a faint whiff of cashews, which is quite pleasant. And you get a nice, light buzz. Some people like to drink it with Sprite or some other lemony drink, but that would be like drinking Scotch with cola.

Like grappa in Italy, ouzo in Greece, schnapps in Germany and absinthe in the old days in France, urak is typically Goan. But sadly, the rich Goans don't take much pride in it. What it needs is a campaign to improve its image and promote it as an exotic, upmarket, lightly alcoholic drink.

The thing with urak is that it must always be drunk fresh, though it stays for a few days in the fridge. Once the cashew season is over, with the arrival of the Monsoons, it's not available at all. Until the next year.

The cows look sadder without it.

The curious sounds of silence

2009-03-16T16:01:00.003+05:30

The other night the electricity failed and I went out onto the veranda and looked about me.

It was very quiet. The small garden seemed to be fast asleep. The trees that surround this place seemed very tall and still and silent in the half-light filtering from the hidden moon.

Somewhere an insect was making a soft whirring sound. Yet I was aware only of an absolute, perfect silence.

And I thought how curious it was that silence should not be just the absence of sound. On this beautiful night it had an aura, a hypnotic quality that was strangely calming.

But there are silences and silences. And some silences are more terrible than the most terrible noise.

Think of the silence of animosity, as between a warring couple who declare an uneasy truce. Or the pregnant silence, a silence so uncomfortable that even the inane chatter that might follow it is welcomed with relief. Think of the solitary silence of despair, which is no silence at all but pure war, a cacophony of words and pain ricocheting in one's brain.

The best silences are those in which there is harmony. But this must be a very rare and delicate harmony, one that is not so easily achieved. Does it happen because of the absence of noises in one's own head? Is it a balance between the inner self and the outer world?

How does one experiences this perfect silence other than by chance, on a rare and magical night?

With the cunning of flowers

2009-03-11T16:30:00.002+05:30

The humble bougainvillea flower is generally not thought to be particularly beautiful. People love roses, orchids, tulips: flowers that are mysterious and exotic and fragrant.

But the thick clusters of pinkish-orange bougainvillea flowers that fill my living-room window these days give me immense pleasure. Strictly speaking, what we think of as the "flowers" of the bougainvillea are not even flowers, but something called bracts. It is these papery-thin bracts that are brilliantly coloured, and within them can be found the tiny white delicate flower of the bougainvillea.

In his fascinating book, The Botany of Desire, Michel Pollan suggests that flowers – which existed on earth long before humans did - use their beauty as a cunning survival strategy to make us desire them, and so help to propagate the plant.

Without flowers [writes Pollan], the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers we would not be. . . So the flowers begot us, their greatest admirers. In time human desire entered into the natural history of the flower, and the flower did what it has always done: made itself still more beautiful in the eyes of this animal, folding into its very being even the most improbable of our notions and tropes. Now came roses that resembled aroused nymphs, tulip petals in the shape of daggers, peonies bearing the scent of a woman. We in turn did our part, multiplying the flowers beyond reason, moving their seeds around the planet, writing books to spread their fame and ensure their happiness. For the flower it was the same old story, another grand co-evolutionary bargain with a willing, slightly credulous animal –

I have a strange fascination for the bougainvillea. And nowhere else have I seen it grow in such profusion as in Goa, or in such a profusion of fantastic colours: from crimson and orange, to mauve and even purple. In most cases it is just allowed to grow wild, often entwining itself into an an existing gigantic tree, offering its own flowers to make the tree more beautiful. Some bougainvillea plants themselves grow tall as trees. Bougainvillea growing near the beach has almost no leaves, but only cluster of flowers. Flowers and yet more flowers. Perhaps to teach us something about the deeper mysteries of beauty.

Tomorrow is another day

2009-03-10T16:30:00.002+05:30

Phale is one of the Konkani words I've picked up from Babuli, the strange, sweet, maddening creature who brings fresh milk for me every morning, and whom strangers might call the village idiot.

'Babuli,' I say, 'will you dig a small hole for me? I want to plant something.'

Phale, he replies. Tomorrow.

The next day I ask again.

Phale, he says again.

When the dialogue continues in this vein over several days, I stop asking.

Then one day Babuli turns up and gives me one of his pleading smiles, showing tobacco-stained buck teeth. 'Give me 10 rupees,' he says coaxingly in Marathi. 'I want to cut my hair.'

'Dig a small hole for me,' I say immediately. 'I want to plant something.'

So Babuli at last gets down to digging a small hole. Picking up the pickaxe (pickass, he calls it) he throws it into the soil with enthusiasm. Soon he hits a stone. Paathar, he says, looking less enthusiastic. Stone.

'Just take it out, Babuli,' I say.

He smokes a beedi. He attacks the soil again. He stops. Pura, he says. Enough.

'Little more, Babuli,' I coax.

'Pura, he says again, more crossly.

Suddenly he remembers that he has to go into the fields. He'll come again, he tells me, to finish the job. Phale.

Ten rupees are gently extracted from me for his haircut.

The next day he appears looking bleary-eyed, as if he's been up drinking.

'You didn't cut your hair, Babuli,' I say.

'Phale,' he replies. I'll cut it tomorrow.

Feasting, feni and firecrackers

2009-03-09T15:06:00.003+05:30

The sound of firecrackers going off at any time is very common out here. In fact, whenever Goans are feeling uncommonly happy or have something to celebrate, they'll burst crackers to show their joy.

For the last couple of days, firecrackers have been going off to celebrate Shigmo, a grand festival spread out over several days.

Troupes of performers from the temple (as well as local villagers), dressed colourfully in exotic headgear and costumes, beating the dhol and playing other musical instruments, go slowly from house to house, dancing and singing in each courtyard. It begins in the morning, and continues through the day and late into the night. For the pleasure of seeing and hearing these folk dancers and singers – uncorrupted by any filmi influence - you must make a token offering of a little cash or at least a coconut.

Shigmo is a happy time. Apart from all the song and dance, it's a time for feasting. Every large household in turn provides a feast to which half the village is invited. I was lucky to be invited to one such lavish meal by the woman who provides me with fresh buffalo milk every morning. Fish was bought specially from the big market of Karwar, 35 km away in Karnataka, and four different kinds of fish were cooked. There was chicken curry and dry masala chicken. All cooked slowly on a wood fire in the backyard by the women of the house. The men got very merry with beer and feni.

More firecrackers explode in the evening. But this time it's not for reasons of joy, but only to frighten away the monkeys.

The great cashew wars

2009-03-08T11:26:00.002+05:30

Spring is in the air, the cashew fruit is ripening on trees, and war clouds have already gathered.

The fighting is an annual village ritual.

Blame it on the cashew tree, which must be the most untidy tree in the world, sprawling all over the place so that very often though the tree itself may be on one person's property, the branches dangle the cashews over someone else's land.

The fiercest warrior in this war, at least in my neighborhood, is a toothless old woman with bow legs who owns much land and most of the cashew trees.

Five and six times a day she'll appear, waddling among the trees, with a long stick attached to a hook to pull down as much of the ripe fruit as she can before the looters swing into action. Very often she's too late. When she arrives the ground is already littered with the discarded fruit, the looters having seized the precious cashew nut and run off. Many times she catches them red-handed – men, women and children – and then a war of words breaks out.

My cashews, the old woman screeches. Mine!

My property, the other shouts in turn. Mine!

Get off my cashews!

Get off my property!

The children run when they see her because she's a cranky old lady, at her crankiest during the cashew season.

The monkeys don't care. They'll sit high on the trees and eat the fruit while she shakes her fist at them. Unlike most of my neighbors, she doesn't throw away the fruit when she gathers the nut because the fruit is used to make kaju feni and urak. All over Goa at this time of year people are gathering the fruit and the nut, because cashew trees grow wild. They're everywhere.

When all the cashews have fallen from the trees and you think peace will descend at last, a different kind of war breaks out.

Drunk on cashew feni, which is prepared by many at home, men totter in the middle of the road, in the hot sun, and shout drunkenly at each other.

And cityfolk who go quietly to a dry fruit shop and pay good money for cashew nuts know nothing of the drama that goes on behind the scenes.

Fishing for the soul

2009-02-26T11:37:00.003+05:30

There is a small cove here where the shallow sea is calm, lapping gently about the many small jagged and smooth black boulders covering the seabed.

In the evenings when the sun is about to set and there is a rosy glow in the sky, there are those whose thoughts turn to food, to the fish that fill these calm darkening waters.

Their silhouettes stand out in dark relief against the deep rosy sky.

There is the kingfisher perched on a the peak of a low triangular rock, watching the water, its big beak like a long nose, patient as any fisherman.

There is the woman bent over the rocks on the narrow shingled beach, scraping and knocking at the shellfish clinging to them, the rhythmic tapping of her tool almost the only sound to be heard in the quiet evening.

A solitary seagull flutters about the tiny pools of clear water caught between rocks. A crow skims repeatedly over the water, hoping to feed on the remains of another's feast. Slithering among the rocks is a scorpion, black and menacing.

Immersed in the sea is a large fishing net, its floats bobbing on the water. Some hundred metres away three tiny, rickety-rackety boats are anchored.

All is quiet. There is an air of expectancy, everyone waiting to catch his dinner.

On an enormous flat rock high above the water, the figure of a woman can be seen sitting cross-legged, her back straight. She seems to be meditating, looking straight at the setting sun. You can tell she's not thinking of her meal that night. What she seems to be angling for is food for the soul.

I''ll never love green eyes again

2009-02-14T09:55:00.003+05:30

There's an old Bob Hope joke that goes:

It was dark. A small red light was glowing in the distance. It came closer and closer. I saw it was the end of my cigarette.

A variation of this happened the other day.

It was dark. Two tiny green lights were glowing in the distance. They came closer and closer. I saw it was a tiny little frog.

Frogg froggy, what glowing green eyes you have.

All the better to see you with my dear, heh heh. Croak.

The last mud house

2009-02-13T15:50:00.002+05:30

There are still a few mud houses standing in this neighbourhood, all a hundred years old, some even older. But most have been painted over in recent times and they look shabby and dilapidated. It's hard even to tell they're built of mud.

The one I like has retained its mud character. It looks a bit like a squarish anthill, but one with a roof of Mangalore tiles. The reddish mud walls rise from what seems to be a tall, crumbling mound of mud. If you scrape the walls while passing, the mud crumbles. Yet the structure is sturdy and has been standing for almost a hundred years. The old man who built it is dead, but his middle-aged granddaughter lives there now with her brother and his wife.

It's a very large house, but clearly a poor man's dwelling. You climb up rough mud steps to the high veranda. The mud floor is covered with a thin paste of cow dung and feels cool under bare feet. The old wooden pillars that used to prop up the veranda roof have been replaced by pillars of the local red stone known as cheera. Inside, the house is dark. There's only a single small window with a thick horizontal plank of wood acting as a beam to support it. When I comment on the dimness, the woman explains that they couldn't put a few glass tiles in the roof to let in some light because the monkeys would break them.

She points to the pictures placed haphazardly all over the walls. We have to search for a spot where the wall won't crumble when you hammer a nail in, she explains. That is also the reason why they've not been able to put up shelves in the kitchen. The kitchen is a very long room, without a single window, running the full length of the house.

The best thing about the house seems to be that it was built practically for free. The mud was free, so were the stones, while the wood came free from one of the trees.

Why don't people live in houses like this anymore, I ask.

Nobody knows how to make them like this, she says. It's a long process with the mud.They have to soak it in water and bake it and whatnot.

It's rather sad how traditional crafts and techniques – whether it's woodwork or the treatment of mud to build houses – are all dying out in the villages. But villagers seem to have had enough of them. They love cement and concrete roofs and bright modern paints. It's only city people who romanticise things like mud homes and tile roofs.

In another mud house in the vicinity, bandicoots have tunneled into the mud foundation. Look! – the woman wails, pointing to the hole. One day the whole house is going to fall down on my head.

Dust to dust, as they say.

An owl drops in

2009-02-12T17:28:00.002+05:30

Last evening, a baby owl crash-landed on my dining table. Luckily, I wasn't eating at the time or even sitting at the table.

The owl didn't fly in from the window, as bats sometimes do. It literally fell from the roof. How and why remains a mystery.

Why was it there in the first place? Are there some owl eggs I know nothing about sitting somewhere up there, waiting to hatch?

Was the owl recently hatched in the angle formed by the tiles in my roof or on the ledge outside?

Was it learning how to fly? Maybe it was just taking off, when some crows attacked it and in its terror the poor thing somehow backed its way into the house and toppled over. I heard a cacophony of crows just before the crash.

Owls eats rats and mice. Does this mean I have rats living in my roof again? "If this is so, they may lay more eggs to raise a bigger brood, being assured of feed for their little ones," an expert warns in the Times of India.

Oh my god.

I've seen little owls flying about at twilight around a tree near Patnem beach. It's an extraordinary sight. You can't tear your gaze away from the little round staring eyes. Creepy or sweet, depending on your point of view.

Sometimes I wish I was safely back in my nice barsati in Delhi where the only creature I ever encountered was a cockroach. Oh to be hounded again only by cockroaches. (I never thought I'd ever be wishing for something so absurd.)

Mad dogs and Englishmen

2009-02-11T11:46:00.003+05:30

Anybody who's taken off to the hills or to some other quiet spot for a holiday knows how the experience calms the mind.

There must be something about the hills and the sea, about fresh air and miles of green coverage, about the sounds of birds and insects that is enormously healing.

According to psychologists, people who are born and brought up in cities are twice as likely to go mad than those who live outside cities. Even those who are genetically disposed to psychoses like schizophrenia can avoid going insane if they don't have to live in cities. So the shrinks say.

It's a grim thought. Cities are where people are forced to live in order to earn their bread. Cities are also where many choose to live for the stimulation and diversions they offer.

But madness, of course, is a very relative thing. And the line between sanity and insanity a very fine line.

I think this as I sit in the shade of a beach shack one morning and gaze at the shimmering sea and the foreigners lying on the hot sand in the hot sun, tanning themselves. Some of the bodies are slowly turning a lobster red. Even the dogs are sitting in the shade.

Completely mad, the Indian waiter says to me, shaking his head and gazing at the sun bathers. Only someone mad will lie in the hot sun like this all day.

A surreal sea of rocks

2009-02-10T13:03:00.003+05:30

The thing about the sea is that it is never the same.

There are, of course, its many moods and colours. Sometimes tranquil, sometimes ferocious, sometimes lazy, sometimes playful. As to colours, depending on the weather and sky above it could be any shade from a bilious green to a muddy brown flecked with grey, or even a pretty shimmering pink.

But for those who have never experienced the sea, particularly along a hilly coastline, what can be most surprising is the way the water sometimes recedes completely.

Patnem is a lovely crescent shaped beach here. At the curved end of the beach is a rocky hill, on the other side of which is another beautiful beach that is accessible only when the sea recedes.

At such a time, when you go to Patnem beach you find its entire topography has changed almost overnight.

It's not only that the sea, which only the other day was lapping about your feet, is now some distance away. It's that by receding it has revealed an unseen, almost surreal landscape of tall rock shelves standing on the sea bed, rather like a Dali painting.

The existence of many of these rocks was only suggested earlier by the way the sea seemed to break at certain points into sudden surf. But now you find yourself wandering about on what is the bed of the sea, and marveling at the fact that you can do so. The sand here is wet, but flat and hard, and in parts stained a dirty seaweed green. The shelves of black and brown rocks, which are taller than I am, are craggy, deeply eroded by years, perhaps centuries, of battering waves. And they're embedded with millions of whitish shells and with tiny green and white pebbles.In some seasons, these rocks are densely covered with live mussels and then entire families of villagers come with buckets, and spend hours scraping off the green shellfish. Mussel curry is quite delicious.

When the tide starts coming in, you retreat from the incoming sea and climb the rocky hill that separates Patnem from the beach on the other side. Even at this height there are pools of water among the rocks. And you realise that the tide probably comes all the way up at night. But your gaze will be on the sea. As the water comes in it hits the exposed shelves of rock first. As the water ebbs and flows, it sprays over the rocks and then dribbles over, creating the most fantastic miniature waterfalls.

The lazy flower

2009-02-07T11:11:00.002+05:30

The white hibiscus has got to be the laziest flower on the planet.

There's a tall plant growing just outside my bedroom window. And when I wake up in the morning, I notice the hibiscus flowers are still fast asleep. The long white petals are closed and the flower itself is drooping, as though nodding in its sleep.

By 9 o'clock the flower opens just a little, like some bleary- eyed teenager reluctant to get out of bed. But it is almost 11 o'clock before this lazy flower wakes up completely. Even then it looks a little sleepy, the petals curled back as though in a yawn.

I think I've discovered why the hibiscus is a late riser, though I'm certain the botanists have a different theory.

The hibiscus is a night bird. It stays awake quite late into the night. It is at night that the flower truly blossoms, so to speak. The petals are completely open, while the pistil and stamen stick out rather naughtily.

In fact, the blacker the night, the more beautiful the hibiscus plant looks, its open white flowers glowing in the darkness.

But for whom, I wonder, is all this loveliness?

No bloody chicken for me, thank you

2009-02-06T14:32:00.002+05:30

Is it kinder to wring a chicken's neck or to chop its head off? (See an earlier post, Not for the chicken-hearted).

Macabre as it sounds, from the chicken's point of view, the question is probably irrelevant.

All the poor thing knows is it's going to die, and all it can do is struggle and squawk in terror, hoping somehow it will be saved.

One can sympathise with the chicken. If my executioner asked me whether I'd like to die by electric chair or hanging or lethal injection, I'm not sure I'd be able to decide. If he told me that one of these choices would be less painful, even more humane, I think I'd laugh in his face, a last death rattle.

Just kill me and be done with it, I'd probably groan.

Yet, we debate and agonise over the kindest way to kill a chicken, one that would cause it least suffering.

Are we hypocritical or kind when we do this?

As far as the butcher is concerned, it simply doesn't matter. Do you want me to wring its neck or what? – he'll say. His only aim is to satisfy his customer.

The chickenwallah I occasionally buy from wrings the necks of his chickens and then leaves them to gasp for a few seconds before dying. I asked him why he didn't just chop off their heads.

Because, he said, there is so much blood.

You can wash off the blood, I pointed out.

He shook his head. The blood stains the body and no amount of water will wash it off, he told me. People don't like to buy such chickens.

If we did,I suppose like Lady Macbeth we'd all be rubbing the blood stain on the chicken and crying: Out, damn'd spot! Out, I say!

Thank goddess it's Friday

2009-02-05T10:29:00.002+05:30

Every Friday night, the goddess Santoshi Ma enters the body of a village woman who lives in the neighbourhood. It happens late in the evening in the temple of the devi, as classical bhajans fill the night. The woman jerks and sways as though she's having a fit. When she calms down, the goddess who has possessed her body speaks to the faithful who've gathered. For it's said that this most gentle of goddesses grants any wish that's asked of her.

It was not always like this. The woman, Nirmala, was once just an ordinary village woman. When she got married thirty-odd years ago, she was frail and sickly and regularly had fits. Believing some evil spirit had taken hold of her, her husband took her to all kinds of healers to have the spirit exorcised. One such witch doctor told him it wasn't a bhoot, but Santoshi Ma herself.

How he knew this remains a mystery to this day.

But overnight Nirmala was transformed from a poor sickly woman to the voice of the devi. And pious villagers began to crowd her little house in the hope that she would help make their every wish come true. Grant me a child. Let my husband not drink so much feni. Take away my sickness. Let my daughter get a good husband. Stuff like that. Many of the wishes, I'm told, came true.

She became so popular that the villagers contributed money to build her a temple and a large porch where the devotees can gather on Friday.

But only on a Friday. Only on a Friday Nirmala get fits. Why Friday, I asked. Because that's the devi's day, a woman replied simply. And she told me about the Shukrawar vraat, which is Friday fasting, and which if observed pleases the goddess very much.

All other days of the week, Nirmala – in her normal avatar - reads grains of rice to predict the future of all those who come wanting to know what's in store for them. People pay what they can.

I know it's Friday when at 9 o'clock in the morning the loudspeaker sings the first devotional song.

Mat ro, mat ro, mat ro, it sings consolingly, endlessly going on and on with same refrain of 'don't cry, don't cry' till you're ready to weep.

By nightfall I have bhajans coming out of my ears. The rest of the world might start partying on Friday night, all I do is wait for the miracle of silence.

Why is it that Hindus are so noisy in their worship? Why can't we observe the silent night, the holy night, where all is calm and all is bright?

Van Gogh's Yellow House revisited

2009-02-04T15:13:00.003+05:30

Vincent Van Gogh went through his yellow phase, and it seems as if village painters are going through something similar these days.

Yellow is the colour this season. Bright egg-yolk yellow. Jaundiced yellow. You-name-it lurid yellow.

And just as Van Gogh was so obsessed by yellow he even asked that the house he rented in Arles be painted that colour, village painters are telling house owners: Try yellow. Maybe they've seen Van Gogh's famous painting, Yellow House. Maybe they all admire Van Gogh.

In the beginning there was only one yellow house here. It was such a shock to the eyes that it quickly became a landmark. Take the first turn after the Yellow House, people used to say.

Now I can count at least three. And they're not even the colour of Van Gogh's yellow House, which is a soft buttery yellow.

It's weird, but when it comes to painting their houses something happens to people in Goa. It's as if they've suddenly discovered colour, and like children with a box of paints they simply go wild trying out everything.

So far, this village has been safe from the colour mania. But now every time someone builds a house here I wonder what bizarre colour they'll paint it. Will it be the colour of hot fresh blood? A lurid dark purple, maybe? Shocking pink with all the windows edged in green? Turquoise blue? A pretty peach?

But no, Van Gogh's yellow is the favoured colour still.

I wish the village painters would realise that Van Gogh chopped off his ear while in his Yellow House, and was dispatched for a while to live in a mental asylum.

The paradox of the holy cow

2009-01-31T15:18:00.003+05:30

Every now and then a stranger, usually a poor migrant in ragged clothes, will turn up in the village towing a colourful cow. Not an ordinary cow. This one is decked up like a bride in mirror work and embroidered cloths, her horns decorated in ribbons, with gold tassels hanging from the tips.

The other day one such stranger turned up, playing the shehnai and adding a touch of festivity to the occasion. He was tall and dark and handsome, and looked like a rogue, but the shehnai, which he played well, made him seem more mysterious: a down-and-out musician perhaps? With him were a daughter and wife. They lseemed like beggars, dressed in unwashed rags and with that grimy look of those used to living on the pavement. The cow looked magnificent in contrast, even though its clothes were somewhat faded.

What surprised me most was the reaction of the villagers. My nearest neighbour Nirmala rushed out of her house and bowed low before the cow with folded palms. A quick aarti was performed solemnly on the road. The cow stood passively as cows do. As the man towed the cow from house to house, playing his shehnai, others came out. All offered money or a handful of rice or some old clothes, which the woman and the little girl received eagerly in a soiled piece of cloth. The man clearly was not from any temple. He looked as if he'd borrowed the cow to earn some money. Yet everyone offered alms as they would to any holy man. Even Christina, who is no Hindu, gave old clothes. I guess it's not called a cash cow for nothing.

A few days later in the market, the cow was yet again the centre of attraction, but this time the villagers responded very differently. It was the weekly market day and some villagers were squatting on the ground with vegetables piled in small heaps before them. Cows love market day. It's a lovely change from rummaging around in garbage. And they turned up as they always do, and wandered through the market nosing the tomatoes and cauliflowers and cabbages and quickly gobbling up whatever they could. Shoo! Scat! Go away! – the villagers shouted. And laughing and shouting they drove the cows away.

I guess the cows were not dressed for the occasion this time.

Nightlife in the village

2009-01-29T13:21:00.002+05:30

The evening star – for whatever reason – is so big and bright these days that the eye simply can't help being drawn to it.

Even after the other stars appear, it's the one you look at again and again.

This might sound very dull to many, but living in a village one is so starved for diversions that you tend to notice these silly little things.

While city folk are caught in the mad rush to get home, or already drinking in a pub or watching a movie in a darkened theatre, the evening here is unfolding its few simple diversions.

You hurry to catch the last show of the Psychedelic Sunset starring Purple Haze, the Colours Pink and the Moody Blues at the open air theatre. There's often much drama in the performance, but you wish you had some popcorn to munch, and that the stones you were sitting on weren't quite so hard, or that the kayak you're in didn't rock so on the waves.

Or you can take in The Return of the Bats on the hillside, and shriek and shout as they go skimming over your head. Beats sitting in a giant wheel or visiting Appu Ghar.

There's the Sound and Light show – entry is free – at the Mango Tree, but only in some seasons. Then you can watch glowworms dance sensuously to the music of the Beetles and other insects. Not quite the Egyptian belly dance, but not bad considering it's just a little worm trying hard.

Those with somewhat kinky tastes can watch live porno shows in which lizards mate, or they can get their kicks from some S&M as the lizards do it with the moth inches away from a hungry mouth. It's not only the suspense that's killing.

Or you can act in a version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarf Frogs. Put on an apron and sing while you cook and the little frogs hop about,watching you with bright little eyes. And then have a romantic dinner in the garden under the stars with all the little creatures of the night in a live band singing specially for you.

Encore, anyone?

Not for the chicken hearted

2009-01-28T08:04:00.001+05:30

How you get your chicken to the table surely says a lot about which part of civilisation you inhabit.

The guy who gets his chicken frozen from a plastic bag with a brand name lives in a different world from one who visits a supermarket and can choose his favoured bit of anatomy, who in turn is cultures away from the man who goes into the jungle to chase his lunch.

Out here it's a little better than it is in the jungle, but not much.

You can ask one of the villagers if they have a jungle chicken to spare, one of those magnificent multicoloured birds you'll often see scrabbling about in the dust or being chased by dogs. And leave it to them to do the needful. This is usually the tastiest chicken you can find.

Otherwise you head for one of the many Fresh Chicken outlets at the side of the road or in the market. These are normally open to the skies - where blood and gore rule, and crows hang around like vultures waiting for the tastiest morsels to be tossed to them.

To avoid all this I drive down the highway a little to a quiet and solitary chicken shop just off the road in the middle of nowhere. The white broiler chicken are all squawking away in an inner room. I tell the guy the size of chicken I want. I'm told a good chicken is no more than 1600 grams. The bigger ones are never tender, probably old chickens past their prime.

The guy grabs the victim and holds it over a weighing scale. Then he wrings its neck. Before it is quite dead he tosses it into a blue plastic bin and puts the lid on. What follows is a violent thrashing from inside. The bin rocks dangerously. I look at the scenery. The hills are silent and all about is quietness.

My chickens are very tasty because I make a special feed for them, the chicken guy says. And he tells me not to trust the chickens in the market. Some of them, he says, come tightly packed in a crowded van from across the border. All that stress, he says, shaking his head. How can a chicken taste good after so much suffering

While he is talking the dead chicken is taken out and its feathers ripped off. The skin is removed, the innards are pulled out and the mess is tossed onto a heap. Then the chicken is chopped up, put into a plastic bag, which is put into another plastic bag and handed over to you.

Gingerly you accept your yet-to- be cooked lunch. There is some blood and a bit of flesh sticking to the bag.

It's all enough to make you turn vegetarian.

I think, therefore I'm chicken

2009-01-28T08:00:00.000+05:30

While on the subject of chicken, what happens when ancient Indian philosophers ponder the eternal mystery of the chicken and its crossing of the road?

You get some fresh chicken jokes, with a very Indian twist, invented by my funny friend Nandu Rao.

Upanishads: Then Nachiketa asked the Lord of Death, "O mighty Yama, why does the chicken cross the road?" Yama pondered the question and gently replied, "Understand Nachiketa that the road does not exist, neither does the chicken. Yet, there exists the desire of a chicken to cross the road. It is this desire that we have to rid ourselves of to become one with the unmanifested Brahman."

Bhagavad Gita: Rain cannot wet the chicken, knives cannot cut it. Fire does not burn the chicken, the wind does not ruffle it. The chicken is beyond the twofold confusion of life and death. Still, the road must be crossed. Pick up thy mighty bow O courageous son of Kunti and cross the road. It is thy duty, as it is the duty of every chicken, to cross the road and come to me.

Puranas: And then the sage Vishwamitra went to king Ajatashatru and demanded the compensation of a chicken. The humbled king offered him a barn full of the birds. Vishwamitra took only one saying, "The road is narrow, the path is hard and I am old. There is room and time for only one chicken to cross."

The Vedas: The road was black, darker than darkness. A faint stirring, a desire emerged from the blackness. A yearning to cross the road. Desire manifested. Took the form of chicken. Who knows when it will cross the road? Time is a cycle, without beginning and without end. We sacrifice to thee O Agni, the chicken that would cross the road.

Ramakishna: The road and the chicken are one and the same. Yet they seem to cross. Why? Let us bow our heads to mother Kali and pray for the vision of the manifested oneness of the chicken and the road.

Vivekananda: Arise chicken! Awake! Leave thy egg and cross the mighty road!

And on a less philosophical note there are these ones, also by Nandu:

Balbinder Chatwal, Roadside Dhabba owner: Was it a butter chicken or a tandoori chicken?

Sumeet Gosalia, Jain Dhabba owner: There is no chicken here nor is there any onion, potato, garlic or ginger. We do have vegetable kheema and can deliver it across the road.

Ministry of Health: We will not allow any chicken to cross the road till further notification. The bird flu epidemic is under control on this side of the road. Our jurisdiction does not extend to the other side.

God, give me a sign

2009-01-27T09:33:00.002+05:30

If you're a stranger in these parts, the chances of you getting quite lost are quite high.

Unlike city folk, villagers don't need signs to tell them what is what. They know, as they've always known: where the bus stops and how to get to wherever it is they want to go.

So there are no bus stops. But if you find some people standing aimlessly by the side of the road, chances are they're waiting for a bus. But equally they could be just standing aimlessly.

As for road signs, it's not as if there are none. There's some very grand looking signage in blue and white, but it offers information that's quite useless. So a stranger looking for Palolem beach will learn that Mumbai is 590 km up north, or that Cochin, in the opposite direction, is 720 km away, but he will remain quite clueless about the direction to the beach.

Those who've been here long enough don't bother with road signs. They look around instead for a walkie-talkie. A walkie-talkie is a local passing by, someone who might give you a sign that you're not lost.

Where's Palolem beach?

Two kilometers, the walkie-talkie sign will say, pointing.

Agonda beach?

Two kilometers, pointing in another direction.

Patnem beach?

Two kilometers, waving in yet another direction.

Providing a postal address to locate someone's house is equally useless. The only way is to describe the person or the landmark.

Yellow house with green gate and very ferocious white dog somewhere near the masjid? – you ask hopefully.

Ah, see there? Go left, go right, go left right left right.

So you go left, go right, go left right left right – as directed. And when you find you're quite lost, you stop to ask yet another walkie-talkie sign.

With a friendly smile he'll direct you.

Like a bird or a tree?

2009-01-26T13:16:00.003+05:30

The other day I was talking to a village woman whose family has lived here for generations, and who – like most villagers - has never been out of Goa. Don't you ever want to see the big wide world? I asked. She shook her head and her smile seemed to say: What for? Villagers here don't even dream of running off to Bombay to become Bollywood stars.

It makes me think they're not so different from their coconut trees: Rooted to the spot till they are felled by disease or old age and then, useful no more, fit only to be used as firewood.

Yet I can't help being bewildered by such passive rootedness, such apparent contentment in living each day with never a desire for something new.

Isn't restlessness in the very nature of human beings? Or do these villagers possess that secret something, which more restless souls have yet to find?

Is it better to be rooted like the trees or to be free as a bird?

There is no happiness for the man who does not travel, the Aitareya Brahmana says. Living in the society of men, the best of men becomes a sinner… therefore wander!

And since the beginning of time, like migratory birds people have left their homes for the unknown, crossing oceans and continents in search of a better life. Sadhus and mystics have always been wandering men. And whoever heard of the hero of a great epic finding adventure at home? There are those for whom wandering is an end in itself, those for whom sleeping under “the star-eaten blanket of the sky” is nothing short of heaven. People move to escape their ghosts and to ponder the condition of their souls and to find happiness.

And yet the Buddha did not wander the world to find enlightenment. He sat rooted like a tree for many months in the shade of a bodhi tree. If he'd been a Goan it might even have been a coconut tree among whose branches restless birds fluttered.

The eternal ocean of life

2009-01-23T10:28:00.002+05:30

There is a rocky outcrop on the beach nearby, a low hill actually, from where one gets a magnificent view of the sea.

Sometimes I clamber up the rocks and sit there to gaze at the sea.

From my lofty perch up on high the beach looks small and insignificant, a long curving strip of sand on which little stick figures scurry about like ants.

But if I look straight ahead I can see nothing but the ocean, a silver expanse of water stretching endlessly to the point where it becomes one with the sky.

The sun has set and I am still gazing ahead of me, lost in the sea and the sky. On a good day I am the sea and the sky, my consciousness no more than a raft bobbing on the lapping water.

Only the changing light reminds me that I am sitting alone on a rock and that it's time to go down to the breach and mingle again with the stick figures that still remain, before winding my way home.

The other day I came across an interview in Uncommon Wisdom, a book by Frank Capra. And it seemed curiously apt. Capra interviewed Stanislav Grof, psychiatrist and author. Grof is one of those 60s' characters, well-known for using LSD as a research tool for the exploration of the human mind.

This is what he said:

One of the most frequent metaphors that you find in psychedelic reports is that of the circulation of water in nature. The universal consciousness is likened to the ocean - a fluid, undifferentiated mass – and the first stage of creation to the formation of waves.

A wave can be viewed as an individual entity, and yet it is obvious that the wave is the ocean and the ocean is the wave. There is no ultimate separation. The next stage of creation would be a wave breaking on the rocks and spraying droplets of water into the air, which will exist as individual entities for a short time before they are swallowed again by the ocean. So, there you have fleeting moments of separate existence. The next stage in this metaphoric thinking would be a wave that hits the rocky shore and withdraws again but leaves a small pool of tidal water. It may take a long time until the next wave comes and reclaims the water that was left there. During that time, the tidal pool is a separate entity, and yet it is an extension of the ocean which, eventually, will return to its source. Evaporation is the next stage. Imagine water evaporating and forming a cloud. Now the original unity is obscured and concealed by an actual transformation, and it takes some knowledge of physics to realise that the cloud is the ocean and the ocean is the cloud. Yet the water in the cloud will eventually reunite with the ocean in the form of rain. The final separation, where the link with the original source appears to be completely forgotten, is often illustrated by a snowflake that has crystallized from the water in the cloud, which had originally evaporated from the ocean. Here you have a highly structured, highly individual, separate entity which bears, seemingly, no resemblance to its source. Now you really need some sophisticated knowledge about water to recognise that the snowflake is the ocean and the ocean is the snowflake. And in order to reunite with the ocean the snowflake has to give up its structure and individuality; it has to go through an ego death, as it were, to return to its source.

Rich as a Goan fish curry

2009-01-22T11:01:00.002+05:30

One of the things that struck me when I first moved in here was not only that even the humblest villager owns property. But that each of these little red-tiled cottages has wooden window frames and shutters. This might sound like no big deal, but the fact is that wood is fantastically expensive and even middle-class flats in cities nowadays prefer to use aluminum.

How, I wondered, could these simple villagers afford wood - often teak wood - windows and doors?

I asked a young woman whose family have traditionally been fisherfolk.

Oh, we got the wood from the jungle, she told me.

And the beams for the tiled roof?

From the jungle and from their own coconut trees.

What jungle, I asked.

And she explained how till 15 years ago, this entire area was practically jungle. When people wanted wood for furniture or for a roof, they simply cut down a matoo or teak tree. When they needed bamboo to erect cow sheds and sun porches they cut down a bamboo tree.

And she grumbled how it had all become so difficult now, what with less trees and a vigilant forest department.

And she grumbled about how these days they had to buy fish. When I was small, she said, the sea used to be full of fish and prawns. We didn't even have to go far to catch them.

The old days she described sounded like some primitive paradise where people lived off the bounty offered by nature.

In many ways it is still like this. Villagers here are still used to the easy life. Most families have a cow which gives them some milk. They have fruit trees. They get coconuts from their own trees for cooking. Those who still work the fields grow their own rice. And every family (almost without exception in this district in the southern tip of Goa) owns property with a house and a small garden, apart from the field (all this the result of tenancy laws in their favour).

These simple villagers here are rich. Goa, according to a recent study, is the richest state in India with the highest per capita income.

Doesn't it make you want to be a villager?

Of flying penises and other wonders

2009-01-21T11:58:00.002+05:30

Looking at the poinsettia that's growing in my little garden - the way the blood-red petals gape open so shamelessly to reveal the flower's private parts (so to speak), the way they yearn towards the morning light – I'm not surprised flowers are often described in a language that 18th century prudes considered shockingly obscene.

Botany in the early days (I read somewhere) was fraught with sexual symbolism, most of it the creation of an innocent Swede called Carl Linnaeus, who classified plants in a way that is followed even today. An outraged Encyclopaedia Britannica declared: A man would not naturally expect to meet with disgusting strokes of obscenity in a system of botany, but. . . obscenity is the very basis of the Linnaean system.

Yet all the poor man did was to clearly spell out the sexual analogies between flowers and people. The calyx, according to his erudite explanation, was the bedchamber, the pollen was sperm, and so on.

Botanical textbooks were naturally considered too risqué for nice young ladies. It was only after the language was sanitized that botany was taught to them.

And in those days erotic poems about plants were what soft porn magazines are today to those seeking a little titillation. Even Darwin wrote a long and erotic poem called Loves of the Plants, with many learned footnotes.

I have so few flowering plants that when they do flower, the pleasure I take in them is immense. A flower is born! Yet no one bursts crackers and no sweets are distributed to celebrate the birth, and the flower will die in a couple of days and no one will grieve. That might be in the nature of things. But do human beings have to behave as if they alone – in all of nature – possess procreative powers?

Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it – so goes the song.

The humble bee has even been called a flying penis by one enraptured botanist. If only the bee had an ego, how it would boast!

Incredible sunset #117

2009-01-20T17:02:00.001+05:30

I was walking in the lane that curves along a rocky part of the shore. Beyond the expanse of small black boulders was a tranquil blue-grey sea. I could see it in that lovely curve of bay, between the low green cliffs at either end.

The cloud formation that evening was such that it seemed as if pale mauve hills with sharp peaks rested on the horizon, on the shining rim of the mauve sea. And into these hills rising from the sea, a brilliant orange-red sun was dipping. All was grey and mauve, but for a hint of rose in the sky, and the vivid orange of the sun that contrasted with the blackness of the little boulders in the foreground.

Why are words so utterly useless in conveying the beauty of a sunset?

I think even a camera could not have captured the glory of that sunset.

Perhaps there are things, like love, that can only be experienced. And neither words nor pictures can ever really tell you what it was like.

Froggy weddings

2009-01-19T10:46:00.003+05:30

Two little girls were married to two frogs the other day in a regular Hindu wedding ceremony. The marriage, villagers believe, will help to ward off evil spirits and prevent mysterious diseases. After the ceremony the frogs hopped back into the village pond and everyone forgot about the event.

It didn't happen in Goa, but I'm thinking: why not?

The frog here is regarded as Lakshmi, in any case.

Why not have young men marry the frog princess and bring the goddess of wealth home? It could be a rehearsal of sorts for the real thing. And a nice twist to the usual frog prince story.

Villagers, after all, love nothing more than big fat weddings.

And this one could become a big tourist attraction, given the fascination foreigners have for colourful and exotic Indian weddings.

Maybe frog brides will become the next big thing. Men wanting to ward off evil spirits will all come to Goa to get married. There'll be sunset weddings and beach weddings. The froggy bride will learn to love the sea and the sand and will hop daintily in the surf.

Of course, the frogs might not like this.

And then we might have one of those Mad magazine situations in which a very angry frog husband turns up at the wedding, trailing his little froggy children, and croaking: That's my wife there, you %$%$#@!

A Disneyland for rats

2009-01-17T12:44:00.003+05:30

All I wanted was a roof over my head.

What I got was the kind of little cottage in which almost every room has windows on three sides.Which makes the roof a complicated arrangement of triangular shapes. From the top it looks a bit like a cluster of hills, with peaks and valleys. Inside, the ceiling is a maze of wooden beams and gables.

It's the kind of roof that roof rats dream of living in.

I moved in unsuspectingly, little realising what terrors lay in store for me.

The rats were there from the beginning, running around merrily, playing hide and seek and snakes and ladders, and every now and then peering down at me with bright little eyes. At night I'd hear leaves being dragged and I knew they were nesting in the walls. Entire families of rats, it seemed, were squatting in my roof. Once I saw a little one just sitting quietly, scratching itself and yawning. Another time I was in the garden when I saw it on the TV cable wire that runs from the roof into the trees of the compound behind. As if the cable were a tightrope, and it was performing for my benefit, it tottered along the length of wire at great speed and disappeared into the trees. In spite of my utter terror, I couldn't help giggling: the little rats were so like the mouse in Tom and Jerry cartoons.

But something dire had to be done.

Poison, I was told. But I didn't want dead rats raining down on me while I slept. I tried rat traps, but the rats never seemed to come down from the roof. I imagined them living there for ever, rat cities springing up over my head.

In desperation I called the rat catcher (actually a half-drunk roof carpenter who was willing to help). Just take them out somehow, I told him.

He climbed onto the roof with a long bamboo stick and began to remove the tiles where I thought the rats were most likely to be found. He removed a nest with little white baby rats and threw them out. And then, while I watched from inside, he poked the stick down the many long tunnel-like stretches that join sections of the roof. There they are, I shouted. Three little rats were scuttling down the beam in fright, one behind the other. And in spite of my terror, I found myself singing in mind: Three blind mice, see how they run! They ran with the rat catcher chasing them up and down the roof. At the end of half an hour, I had to believe they were gone.

But they returned, loath to give up the Disneyland that offered them such amusement.

In the end I had to put bits of rat chocolate at strategic points along the roof. It worked. Slowly they disappeared. I found dead rats in the garden. But they were dead. Peace at last.

The gora invasion

2009-01-16T11:02:00.003+05:30

There are villagers here who see foreigners as a threat to their way of life. As an elderly fisherwoman whom I met in a queue (of all places) told me in some anger, 'First it was the Portuguese who conquered us, and now it is the tourists who will take over.' The woman lives at Palolem beach, and though she can earn good money from foreigners, she says: 'I will never rent out my rooms to the goras.'

Yet there are many who are happy to do business with the goras. And more and more foreigners are settling down here, wanting to invest in property or simply to rent, thought it's nothing like it is in North Goa (where an entire village is inhabited by Russians).

They live here at least eight months in the year. The funny thing is that most of them say they cannot afford to live in their own country.

An Irishman I met, who was a mason back home, told me that in England all he did was pay bills. 'Bills, bills and more bills,' he said in disgust. 'Here it is cheap.' The Irishman has built himself a nice house here where he lives with his wife and son. The son goes to school in Margaon, the nearest town, 35 km away. And the Irishman works here as a kind of contractor, helping other foreigners to build.

An elderly, retired Dutch woman, married to an Indian, has bought a house here and converted half of it into a hotel. Back home, she says, it's hard to make ends meet on the pension she gets.

Two women from Amsterdam have for years been living in a little rundown house which has a loo outside. One of them makes costume jewellery which she tries to sell to tourists in season, the other gets the odd assignment to be a DJ.

An elderly Italian with a ponytail runs a pizza joint by the beach.

A retired cop from England has opened a shop with some other foreigners where they sell mostly Indian exotica at extravagant prices.

An elderly, artistic couple from France live here eight months in the year,France being too expensive.

A Brit couple runs a popular hotel listed in Lonely Planet.

There are many such people whose euros and pounds and dollars buy them the bit of paradise that so many crave.

The question is: where do Indians go when they can't afford to live in their own country? Africa?

Howling gigantic curses

2009-01-15T16:27:00.001+05:30

Why do dogs howl at the moon when it is full? For the last couple of nights the village dogs, particularly, I think, the homeless ones, have been howling and yowling and wailing as if at some midnight dog funeral.

Some say the moon affects mad people in the same way, that they became madder on such nights. One theory holds that the brightness of full moon nights keeps people awake and it is this lack of sleep that brings on the mania.

I think it must be the same for vagrant dogs.

They’re hungry and cold and wretched. They've been shooed away from warm verandas where luckier dogs snuggle down to sleep. All they can do is slink away and lie down in the dust to sleep, perchance to die. And then the full moon shines in their eyes, keeping them awake, snatching away even that tiny bit of comfort. It's enough to make anyone howl in rage.

And so that's what they do. When the moon is full they howl gigantic curses at the moon, at the unfairness of it all.

I feel like doing the same to them when they keep me awake with all their yowling. I wonder if dog lovers feel the same?

Sweet, intoxicating females

2009-01-14T10:18:00.002+05:30

In the big bad world of Man, baby girls might be bad news.

But in the world of plants, the female of some species is greeted with cries of joy by both men and women.

Take the papaya tree. Unlike most trees, the papaya comes as a male tree and a female tree. So when you scrape out the little black seeds from your breakfast papaya and toss them into the garden, you don't know which tree you're likely to get.

Slowly a sapling rises from the seed, slowly the tree grows (along with the suspense). Male or female?

And then one day you see little white flowers on the papaya tree. And you curse your luck. It's a male tree. And whoever heard of a male doing anything as useful as giving fruit?

But if bigger flowers grow (out of the trunk rather than the stem) you know you've been blessed. This is the tree that will yield you sweet papayas. And in your joy, you cry jubilantly: It's a girl!

And you cut down the useless male tree and toss it among the rotting leaves without a thought.

I'm told the same is true of the marijuana plant. It is the female ganja plant that has the power to intoxicate. The (pollen carrying) male is worse that useless since its presence alone reduces the female's intoxicating gifts. Without male plants in the vicinity, females thrive by remaining unpollinated and seedless and thereby more potent. Wherever marijuana is grown under artificial conditions, the males are carefully weeded out before they can do too much damage.

If there is a moral in all this for chauvinistic males, I hope they're getting it.

The colours of tranquility

2009-01-13T10:32:00.002+05:30

One of the things that so differentiates the urban from the rural is colour.

What are the colours of a city? If you stop to think about it, there's no such thing. The city is a chaos of colour. Hoardings, cars, buses, people, houses, exhaust. The eye does not once focus on any one colour.

Here on the other hand, there are three distinct colours that dominate the landscape. Whenever I am away and I think of this place, it is the sense impression made by these colours that come to mind.

There is green, of course. Countless shades of green, from bright, almost fluorescent greens to dark sombre greens, from yellowish greens to olive, lemon, jade, emerald and you-name-it greens. Green that is always lush and, in the rains, almost mesmerizing. Not surprising since it is the trees and the endless wild vines and plants that stand out most.

Then there is brick-red. This is the colour of the earth here, a colour you see a lot of since much of the ground is covered only by trees or fields. It is also the colour of the stone blocks that are used for building. Even though many homes have plastered walls, the burnt red of the cheera, as it is called, is still seen in abundance, often fusing with the ground so that some homes and boundary walls look as if they have sprung directly from the earth.

And above all this is blue, the endless expanse of cloudless calm skies touching the horizon and merging into the blue of the ocean.

Green, they say, is most soothing to the senses. And green and red in conjunction, as anyone who has studied colour knows, are complimentary colours and therefore most harmonious and pleasing to eye. Blue too is the colour of tranquility: of space and quietness.

There is a certain beauty in these colours, and much of this beauty comes from the fact that the natural landscape often seems to have the harmony otherwise seen only in an artist's work. If only artists could decide the colour scheme of cities, how beautiful they would be.

Sometimes I think the environmentalists and doomsday prophets are right. Man will ultimately destroy all natural beauty.

As the poet Primo Levi writes:

We, rebellious progeny
With great brainpower, little sense,
Will destroy, defile
Always more feverishly.
Very soon we'll extend the desert
Into the Amazon forests,
Into the living heart of our cities,
Into our very hearts.

Vogue for villagers

2009-01-12T11:47:00.003+05:30

One of the most bizarre fashion trends I've seen is the long gown that village women hang around in. This is basically a loose cotton nightdress that is worn in the daytime. A kind of day-nightdress you could say. It has short sleeves, a modest neckline, and it falls all the way down to the ankles.

Women wear it through the day, traipsing around the village as if any moment they'll be jumping back into bed.

The gown is eminently practical. It's cool, comfortable, easy to wash and, most important of all, it keeps their nice clothes nice and new. Why bother to dress up when there's nowhere to go? (This place doesn't even have a movie theatre.)

The only time most of them get out of their day-nightdresses is when they have to catch a bus to go to Chaudi, a dirty little market on the highway. Saturday is market day, and villagers come from the nearby villages dressed in their Saturday best. This means a salwar-kurta for young women. Once called the Punjabi dress and worn only in the North, the salwar-kurta now seems to be the favoured garment in all the villages of India. National unity!

And though the village belle might look drab on most days and nothing like her counterpart in Bollywood films, when villagers dress up they do it with a vengeance. Particularly the Christians.

As I saw yesterday.

It was a sunny Sunday morning and the feast of St Theresa was being celebrated at the imposing village church set on a slight elevation on a dusty stretch of national highway. Old fashioned dance music was playing. And colourful stalls selling orange ladoos and toys lined the road. Milling about in this carnival atmosphere were excited village women and young village girls, all resplendent in dresses made from satin and velvet and other shiny material, in shimmering purples, greens, blues, reds. Dresses glittery with sequins. With yards of lace and ruffles and nets. With bows and frills and other baubles. Dresses that looked straight out of a catalogue for bedecked Christmas trees. In comparison the men were positively dowdy, in identical oversized and rather mossy black suits.

When the party was over, I knew that like Cinderella they'd be back in their day-nightdresses, broom in hand, sweeping the leaves in the courtyard. Until the next festivity.

It's like that only

2009-01-10T10:09:00.003+05:30

A villager's attitude can often be quite baffling to one who has lived and grown in a city. And most baffling of all is his tendency to shrug off just about anything and say: It happens.

Did you know a coconut tree has fallen and blocked the road?
(shrug) It happens.

But it's snapped the electricity wires! We'll have no light till they fix it!
(shrug) It happens.

Some insect has eaten up every single leaf on my teak tree. What to do? (Why do I even bother to ask?)
(shrug) It happens.

There was a snake in my garden yesterday!
Ohh. Ahh. (shrug) It happens.

Sometimes they'll add for good measure: It doesn't matter. Or: It's like that only.

Why, why, why does it have to be like that only? I want to ask. Why can't something be done?

(Shrug.)

It's not so much that they're fatalistic, but that they accept the things that I (with the city in my blood) find hard to accept. And this is particularly true when it comes to the natural environment that we share.

I often think this must be what is meant by "living in harmony with nature". They don't struggle against it as I do. They placidly accept the frogs in their well, the monkeys who steal their chikoos, the ants in their food, the rats nesting in their roof as a natural part of their world. A villager will briefly lament the dog who kills and eats his rooster, but he won't threaten to sue the owner of the dog. The owner of a mud house will bemoan sometimes the bandicoot who has tunneled underneath and threatens to bring the structure tumbling down, yet he won't lose too much sleep over it. If a cow eats up a favourite plant they only shake their heads.

The huge palm leaves that crash down to the ground, and which I don't know what to do with, they will weave into a canopy to protect them from the heat, the wind and the rain. The cow crap they're happy to collect (the dog crap they ignore).

They do what they can since they know they can't change what's like that only. They add alum to the well water they drink to cleanse it of the frogs who live there. They avoid planting large trees near dwellings so that rats and snakes don't have easy access. They keep cats and dogs to take care of unwanted creatures. They gather and burn dry leaves so that white ants won't breed there. Beyond that they can do nothing.

The only thing that seems to spur them into action is the presence of a snake, especially if it's known to be dangerous. They won't go to work that day. They'll gather neighbours and relatives, and armed with sticks they'll hunt down the snake.

Sometimes I wish I could be like them.

My sporty little red bike

2009-01-09T09:56:00.002+05:30

One of the nicest things about living in a small, uncrowded place is that you can cycle around.

I got a cycle not because I want to help save the earth or because it doesn't pollute the air – nothing quite so noble. I cycle simply because cycling makes me feel like a kid again. Kick the pedal and - whee! away I go!

Some lazy folk say cycling is not a good idea in Goa because it tends to be hilly in some places and there are far too many upward slopes. But that, I think, is what makes it such fun. For what goes up must come down. So you may pant a bit while climbing a slope, but then after that there's that long, long curvy downward trip when you're just whizzing along at the most tremendous speed, so fast indeed that you know that if a dog decides to suddenly cross the road you'll probably go flying, and so you gently touch the brakes every now and then just to control the cycle.

Cycling is also fun because while you lazily pedal along you can look around and absorb the scenery, which is generally worth absorbing given the graceful coconut palms and other natural stuff. And if it's a little sunny you wear a straw hat and pedal along slowly in case it flies off, feeling a bit like an old woman, but a rather eccentric and youthful old woman. And just that slow, unhurried pace gives you a good feeling because you realise that if you were on a crowded city road you'd probably be tense and ready to explode with rage at the stupidity of drivers. Though I had a cycle when I lived in Delhi. One wintry day I even cycled to meet a client whose office was close by. The receptionist, who was new and didn't know me, looked at me with the disdain reserved for those poor people who need to cycle because that's all they can afford.

It's a great pity that cycling has such an unglamorous image. Because, even in cities, it's perfect when the distance to be traveled is too short for a car ride and you're too lazy to walk it. For me, 2 km is a lovely cycling distance and I can go up to 4 or 5 km without too much sweat. The only problem about having a cycle here is that it tends to rust very quickly because of all the salt and moisture in the air, particularly during the monsoons. And the paint and chrome on my little red cycle (a children's cycle, I'm embarrassed to say, because I'm not very tall) is already peeling and looks quite shabby.

One day maybe I'll get one of those flashy new cycles one sees with gears and other gizmos. But only because I can't afford ever to buy a Ferrari. Frankly, I'd rather drive a Ferrari at top speed than zip along on a sporty cycle.

But, alas and alack, that will never happen.

The poetry of the sun, the sea

2009-01-08T10:42:00.002+05:30

I can hear the sea at night nowadays. The rolling sound of the tide coming in, and then the distant crash of waves on the shore. After a pause the sequence is repeated, the rise and fall, the rolling, the crash. The steady rhythm lulls me to sleep like some otherworldly lullaby.

It's funny how very large shells seem to capture the very same sound. I gave a large cowry shell to my niece Maithili when she was five, and I watched with pleasure the wonder on her face when she put it to her ear and heard the sound of the sea. It's the never ending story of the sea, I told her. She was amazed that the sea somehow lived inside the shell, telling its tale, never stopping once. Intermittently through the day she put the shell to her ear to see if the sound had stopped. What story is it telling? - she wanted to know. And I told her it was probably about life under the sea, but we would never know because we didn't know the language.

There is probably some dry scientific fact that will explain it all, but sometimes I like the imaginative truth better.

Not always though. Many a time I want to know the why of many things I see and wonder at in my ignorance.

Like yesterday. The evening sun was a huge blazing orange ball. I could glimpse it through the trees and I hurried a little, hoping to see it set over the sea.

Why is the setting sun sometimes so huge and at other times just a regular size?

And why does such a glorious sun, which is almost a blazing ball of fire, not result in an equally glorious sunset?

By the time I reached the sea the sun had just set. And there was not even a hint of all that fiery, fantastic orange to be seen in the sky. Anticlimax. How could it all have just vanished so utterly and so soon?

Maybe not knowing and always wondering is precisely what makes the sea and the sun eternally enthralling. I know a poet called Nazim Hikmet must have felt something like this.

I came across his poem just yesterday:

as a kid he didn't pluck the wings off flies
tie tin cans to cats' tails
lock beetles in matchboxes
or stomp anthills
he grew up
and all those things were done to him
I sat at his deathbed
he said to read him a poem
about the sun and the sea . . .

My new year wishes

2009-01-07T15:49:00.001+05:30

Dear god, this is my wish list for the new year (can you hear me, god? It's me, the disbeliever, the enemy of all those absurd beings you created).

I wish that all monkeys learn graceful manners and that they find ways to be gentle and good and kind and that they stop snatching and thieving and destroying what is not theirs.

I wish that all frogs (the ugliest and creepiest particularly) tire of village life and abandon my garden to hop and frolic on the beach where the tourists will love them and adopt them as pets and take them back to Germany and France and England and Russia.

I wish that every rat in the village is eaten up by every cat, all of whom will then grow so fat and big that the dogs who howl at night will run away in fright and there will be peace on earth and goodwill to all feline creatures.

And this monsoon I wish that you will not send playful little flashes of lightning right into my living room to strike terror in my heart and that you will go easy on the thunder (we're not deaf, you know) and that the rain will pitter patter gently down the window panes instead of huffing and puffing and threatening to blow my roof away. And I wish that the huge rat-like creature that has been digging up my garden is struck by lightning (since it's impervious to everything else) and that it turns to ashes before my very eyes (please god). And I wish that small insects do not crawl into my ears when I'm sleeping and buzz in there and refuse to come out.

I wish also that you could do something to stop the rooster crowing at 3 in the morning.

And while you're at it could you also stop my neighbour's hens from laying eggs in my garden. Dear god, that's all I need now, bloody little chicklings hatching in my hibiscus.

And I'd be really grateful if once in a while you could do something to kind of curb mother nature. She seems a little crazy sometimes, almost manic as the shrinks would say.

And before you think I'm ungrateful and greedy, I thank you dear god for the moon and the stars and the sunsets and all the pretty things you created.

Dear god, if only you wish it I could wish myself a happy new year.

Itsy bitsy, teeny weenie bomb blast

2009-01-05T19:53:00.002+05:30

The new year celebrations are over and the cops are gone from the beach.

Dozens of them, toting guns – some in khaki, others in jungle camouflage – have been loitering around for days in the sand, looking hot and uncomfortable among all the bare bodies.

They've left behind ugly sand bunkers bang in the middle of the beach. What they hoped to achieve with these bunkers remains a mystery. Did they think they could hide behind them and shoot at terrorists who, of course, would conveniently be standing right there? But the sand bunkers were in the end more useful than the cops.

I saw a slender woman in a bikini reclining on one and gazing dreamily at the sunset.

Ironic, that, given that the bikini was named after an island in the Pacific ocean where the first atomic bomb tests were carried out in the 1940s. The reason being, of course, that the effect of this itsy-bitsy swimsuit on the susceptible male was thought to be as powerful as a bomb blast.

Sad how people now associate the word bomb only with horror: with blood and gore.

It make one long for more innocent times when the word bomb referred to silly things like beautiful women in itsy-bitsy bikinis.

But happily for all, sex bombs in their bikinis were the only bombs the cops found on the beach.

The best things in life are free

2008-12-11T15:11:00.002+05:30

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

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

I wander about in bare feet among tanned bodies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love, peace and happiness.

My rat in shining armour

2008-12-10T11:50:00.002+05:30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To die for

2008-12-05T15:12:00.002+05:30

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sleepless at the station

2008-12-04T19:55:00.003+05:30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kissing the frog

2008-11-27T19:19:00.001+05:30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Help!

Bullfight, Indian ishtyle

2008-11-14T15:21:00.004+05:30

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

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

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

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

Show over.

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

Two little birds

2008-11-13T16:12:00.003+05:30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Let's migrate to the city!'

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

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

'And watch movies at the drive-in!'

'And sit on taxicabs and buses!'

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

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

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

But maybe that's not how the story ends.

The bride wore bulbs

2008-11-12T17:20:00.003+05:30

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

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

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

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

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