Memory as a camera

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beauty and beastliness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The day of the monkey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagine if you did.

People like us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The taboos of love and food

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

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

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

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

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

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

And presumably eat there too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Christians eat pork and beef.

Muslims eat beef, but not pork.

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

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

Why did the villager not cross the road?

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

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

Short cuts are what people look for.

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

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

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

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

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

Neither sahib nor memsahib

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karmic blueprints, elephants and other exotica

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Incy wincy spidery crabs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drunk on fresh air

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

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

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

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

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

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.