Goa Untwisted

Beyond the rave parties and 'I love Goa' t-shirts , beyond the Anjuna market and Baga beach , beyond the foreign, NRI and Indian tourists lies the real Goa ... the Goa that I know. It is the Goa where my ancestors lived until two generations ago , their houses a living proof of the rustic lifestyle that is lost among the glamorous , hippy image of the new emerging beach neighborhoods.

My mother's ancestral home lies nested in a quiet corner of Pernem , a small town situated just inside the Goa - Maharashtra border. Here in this house which was literally built room after room over a century I have spent most of my childhood holidays. Like every village town house it has a well whose water tastes sweet and which is home to two tiny turtles that eat all the parasites and filter our drinking water. The jack fruit tree in the back garden bears huge fruit every summer so that the house never runs short of it's supply of dried jack fruit candy. A small road from the back of the house leads to a stream beyond which lie extensive paddy farms so lushly green that you feel they have been painted over. A road along the fields takes you to the center of the town which is adorned by the main temple and an adjoining market that sells fresh vegetables probably harvested that very day and fish that seem to have jumped right out of the sea into the fisher woman's basket. People are kind and gullible. When I walk up to them in my American military shorts and a 'hare Krishna' t-shirt they don't look at me strangely . One spoken sentence in Marathi and they treat me like a relative.

Just two months ago I was in Goa with my brother and my folks walking around the market on a sultry November evening . We decided to head over to 'Himalaya' , a small restaurant cum grocery store that embodies the hospitality of the state unlike the tourist shacks on Carambolim beach. We ordered a seven rupees falooda each, and the kid working there having recognized us from previous visits just smiled and started scooping up a mighty mean beverage. What landed on our table was eons beyond the famous 'Royal falooda of Badshah's in Mumbai . The ice cream was creamier , the syrup was not too sweet and the small bubbles floating in the concoction seemed crunchier and I fell in love with Goa all over again.

But if my appetite was not whetted enough, that same night it would explode because on the menu of our home cooked family dinner was the quintessential Goan dish called xacuti . It is a curry dish made of complex spices using local ingredients like freshly grated coconut and dry chillies with either chicken or pork and no one makes it better than my grandfather. That along with fried rava coated pompret and double roti was like bombarding your taste buds with flavor bombs that defied logic and made me wonder if I could ever get over that sense of fulfillment. Being a food junkie , I have eaten all over Goa , from the snazzy beach shacks on Calangute to inconspicuous little vindaloo joints in Mapusa , but never has anything matched the healing power of my grandfather's xacuti.

If xacuti is quintessentially Goan , so it the experience of driving from Pernem to the central district of Ponda. If you look beyond the newly constructed highways and the newly introduced pollution from the newly bought cars you will see acres of fields bordered with palm trees . You will see mud walkways running through the fields and farmers and their kids scampering along the walkways with natural agility and a smile on their faces. Along the road you will see narrow byways almost invisible to the speeding motorist that if followed lead you to congruous yet unique temples and churches nestled in their own ecosystem of vendors and devotees. You won't see topless , tanned and broke tourists zipping past in their rented two wheelers. Instead you will come across unknown villages and their village centres. You will cross their main markets and their panchayats and dainty little mud houses and cheerful playgrounds.

When the Portuguese started annexing Goa in the late 15Th century they began systematically demolishing temples in a bid to convert locals to their own religion. In the process many pandits packed up their Gods and retreated to hills of central Goa where they took refuge in the valleys and eventually established temples for their 'Gods on the run'. Many temples are still isolated, surrounded by as few as a dozen houses which call themselves a village. One such village called Keri is my paternal ancestral village. That village is what gave me my name and somewhere within my soul I still feel like I am home when I enter the village premises. The fact that the closest town of Ponda is 40 minutes away by rickshaw or that there are less than five families that comprise the meager population of Keri gives me the feeling that I am trapped in time, a feeling that enhances itself when I walk down the brick steps beyond the awning of my ancestors house and come across a lake, almost hidden in the hills that surround it. That November afternoon when I stood on the edge of my true Alma mater and spread my arms I still remember the excruciatingly numbing beauty that belonged to me for that instant.

If anyone said that Goa belonged to its beaches they would be wrong , if anyone said that Goa belongs to its churches and temples they would be even wronger. Goa belongs to its people. It belongs to the fishermen, and the farmers, the locals of dozens of cities like Panjim who zip around in their Honda Activa's on their daily trip to the market . It belongs to my grandfather who is spending his retired years in his childhood house after working hard all his life in Maharashtra. Someday in future if I can embrace Goa for what it really is , I hope it will belong to me.