Roots

Four months ago, when I moved here, the fruit on the banana tree in our backyard had just begun to grow. Every morning when I’d wake up I’d watch the two bunches increase in shape and size. One eager bunch veered towards the neighbour’s territory while the other hung over home turf.

Two weeks ago there was a raging storm. The weather bureau warned of an impending cyclone. I was away in Reis Magos when the sky fell apart. I returned two days later when the rain-drenched earth had started to dry and I noticed that the prodigal bunch had disappeared. The next morning I heard someone calling out loudly. I peeped and saw it was the lady who lived in the plot behind us. She explained in konknni that the bananas had fallen down with the weight of the wind and offered to return the bunch. She lifted the huge cluster over the boundary wall while I struggled to bring it back to our side, amazed at how something that was so slight had grown so big and heavy. The bananas were green and unripe but long and plump.  I locked them in the cupboard so they would ripen with the heat, hoping they wouldn’t rot instead.

Two days later I dreamed of ripe bananas. When I returned to Navelim and I unlocked the cupboard I was overwhelmed. That passionate shade of green had mellowed into a beautiful sunshine yellow. I took a single banana and unfurled the peel. I bit into the flesh and was surprised by the tangy, ripe taste that settled upon my tongue.

If you lived here long enough you would know that any Goan would tell this story very differently. You’d be sitting in a taverna sipping on an extra-large peg of feni or whiskey and you’d probably overhear the unraveling. And suddenly, no matter how mundane the content, you would listen as though you were being told the story of the beginning of the universe. The voice will ebb and flow and you’d be caught in the tide, unable to breathe, so startled by all the intricate details that would suavely slip in. The gestures will mesmerise and you’d be hypnotised. The suspense would build as the ranconteur stops mid-sentence for a swig of feni and a bite of fish. And after he’s done you’d soon realise that you could never retell what you just heard.

Like that story of Minguel’s aunt who tore open a man’s langoti while he was still wearing it because his balls seemed larger than usual and she therefore surmised that he was hiding wads of cash in his groin; or why nobody will buy the house across that field even though it’s dirt cheap, not even the land-hungry folks from Delhi; or how Maria had a baby boy though her husband has been away at Sea for more than two years, or the first time Xavier took to the bottle when his brother hanged himself from a banyan tree.

Here in Goa stories sprout like paddy, by the highway or in fields you thought were barren. Each tale is tall and is watered by secret rivers that run underground. Once a year they are harvested and stored in warm kitchens to be told on rainy days when the lights are out and the sea rattles like a bag of bones.

Men tell me stories of the secret lives of fish; of sting-rays that flip in the water while giving birth, of dolphins that swim in pairs, of needle-fish that can be out-witted by torchlight, of mussels that grab anything that moves sinuously, like hair, of how the full-moon is the best bait and of the hundred different ways to grill mackerel.

I listen intently. With wonderfilled eyes I relish the details; I grasp all the sound effects they engineer with their tongues. The women, too, have me spell bound with retellings of their first night of marriage or how their bodies surprised them at child-birth or how they entered menopause or how vinegar is made when toddy is kept in a sterile container for at least 21 days. I live in this world of stories knowing I can never recount to you all the pleasures they contain, knowing I could never capture the universe of their songs, the rhythm of their feet or the rush of blood from the heart to the head.

I don’t know if the magic lies in the fertile red of the iron-rich soil or the pregnant waters that hug the coastline, on the white-washed facades of the church or in the sleepy winds that seep through the leaves of the breadfruit tree. Something utterly mysterious makes this land different from any other. Some strange concoction keeps my people wondrously alive and hopelessly in awe.

My feet continue to wanderlust. I write this on the second floor of a hostel in JNU. The sky is drenched with the unwavering light of the full moon, peacocks wail in the cold silence of this Delhi night and in the near distance I can hear the moan of traffic passing through the city. I have a painter for a room mate and every night instead of dinner she fills my plate with stories of her childhood in Hyderabad. And when I’m at my envious best she tells me of how she has lost all sense of roots because the land she grew up has passed into history.

It is then that I realise that no matter where I may one day wander, in the streets of Paris, in the staircases of the Vatican, in middle-eastern palaces, in in the high waters of the Atlantic, it is to Goa that I will return to die. There I shall be buried, in the red earth of the coast. And even if no one comes to honour my bones with heaps of candles or garlands and wreaths, there I shall rest in peace.

Ends and Beginnings

Reis Magos, Goa.

I didn’t hear mass on the second of November. It was All Soul’s Day, a day of obligation. I woke up dizzy from sleep, bruised from all my dreaming. My sister and I went to the graveyard in the middle of the afternoon when the flower sellers had left and the candles that had been lit in the morning had melted leaving behind small mounds of wax. Each grave looked spectacular, a sheath of petals and ferns draped across the muddy surface. Someone had placed a garland over the niche that contained the remains of my grandparents and over the niche beside it that held the bones of Uncle Leslie, my mother’s brother, a shippie who did not die at sea but on land, at 35, when his heart failed him. I pressed the stems of the red roses into the sandy earth below as I read the inscription on the niche: “Dr Jose Xavier Gomes” and “Marguerita Paes e Gomes”. The first name seemed almost alien to me. I had never met him. His heart had failed him a long time ago, when my mother was still a young girl, plunging the family into a state of semi-poverty. But I knew Marguerita, however vaguely. I had met her. There are photographs in the family album of her carrying me when I was a baby, barely three years old. Her dark skin clings to her, her smile is confused, tortured, almost. I am told that as she grew older she grew more and more obsessive. She washed her hands every second minute in her compulsive attempt to rid herself off not only her sins but those of all the world. She was mistreated by her sons, abandoned by her eldest daughter and kept away from my mother. She died alone in Goa in some home for the aged. They say I come from her, that I have inherited her dark complexion, her stately smile, her sculpted face, her sharp eyes.

I wash my hands only when necessary and avoid using too much soap.

A few nights later, I sat by the River Sal and searched the waters for traces of my history. I sought that elusive junction where the sweet water of the river mingles with the salt of the sea. I watched this lithe, sparkling estuary transformed by shifting tides until it was still and silent, smothered by the yellow gleam of streetlights standing vacant on the other side of the bank. I saw fishermen steering back to shore with their post-twilight catch, enormous creatures suspended on hooks, and in that liquid silence I thought I saw glimpses of my beginning cast upon the river’s skin. Each time I looked I felt the tide coursing through my blood as if it was on these very waters that I had been delivered unto life, as if I had floated here for months on end in a bulrush basked in search of a safe shore. Lifetimes ago, when my mother was but a child, she spent entire summers on the other side of this river, in Assolna, her grandmother’s home. There she feasted on watermelons, mangoes and cashew. She never cared to use a knife; she smashed the melon against the floor and devoured the red, ripe core. Mangoes and cashew were stolen from the neighbour’s tree.

But I remembered nothing of mai except her callused hands worn out from all her wasteful attempts to cleanse the world off sin. I never even knew her name until one day, on a visit to my mother’s ancestral home, we chanced upon a rosewood cupboard which had her name engraved upon it in rich calligraphy. It was one of the few relics of her dowry. 

I find it ironic that in my quest to unravel my history, I seem to move further away from my most immediate point of origin – my mother. I try, in vain, to separate myself from the same woman that I must have clung to so helplessly when I was a little child. Yet, no matter how many cities I put between us, she manages to track me down and make me report to her daily. She has evolved a sixth sense about me. She can see her little black sheep losing her way, wandering into a wild forest full of twists and turns and secret inroads. She wants to leave the rest of the flock behind just to come after me and bring me back into the fold. I wonder if she knows that this not-so-little black sheep is exhilarated to find, at last, the wilderness that was promised to her, that though the woods may be dark and deep, every road has room for dreams, for wild imagining and magic entities, mystical creatures that glow in the dark, incandescent beings lurking among the bushes, and that tropical paradise of words and lines that conspire with other words and lines to create new meaning, to invent fresh images, imagine new worlds of sights and smells and tastes. I’m content to be wandering, wanderlusting, and doomed to want much more than I need, compelled to fuel the excesses of my mind.

I don’t always sleep well at night, but when I wake up and glimpse at the sea stretched across the cost, the rocks sturdy and strong, the men and women gathering the vestiges of their morning catch, a kind of calm comes over me. The wind sweeps over and washes me clean. I’ve spent many mornings staring at the estuary, here in Reis Magos where the salty River Mandovi meets the Arabian Sea. To my left, barges carrying iron ore float gently upon the river, a few miles away, the texture of the river’s skin is transformed and the splashing begins, waves crash against the shore in sync with my heartbeat so that now, on my right, there is only the sea curling against the shore, foaming at the mouth, bristling with life.

I have learned to love simple things like the taste of fish fried on an open fire, or the chirping of sandpipers and kingfishers, the sight of dolphins splashing all over the coast, rosewood cupboards, cane chairs, cashew feni, sheetkodi. But most of all, bread. Some with half-inch thick crusts with soft, sweet flesh, some made entirely from wheat husks, some kneaded with coconut and sugar, some baked in the shape of bangles. It’s all I eat for breakfast: a well-baked loaf which I then slice and fill with butter. Wherever I may live, in Navelim or Reis Magos, my ears reach out for the sound of the baker’s horn. The poder comes riding by on a cycle, a large basket of bread strapped to the backseat, a sheet of cloth stretched across to preserve the heat. Just that timely honk and I know for sure that all is well in the world. The secret of happiness, the relics of everything joyous and glorious can be found in that act of desecration, consumption. I sing no more sagas for things beyond my means, for luxuries like love and tenderness, for the mysteries of the flesh. I have learned to pray for nothing more than this, my daily bread.

One Year Later

you remain a mystery.

I’ve been struggling to unlock you, to strip you off your disguises to arrive at your core.

I’m still dangling somewhere between your past and present. Like a fish out-of-breath, I’m gasping for a small sip of your universe, for some room in a tiny corner of your mind.

I cannot explain what draws me to you, some kind of chemical attraction, something about the way your body moves, the flicker of your fingers, your slick, sauve smile, something about the groves in your skin, the vanishing of all doubt in those few, callous seconds when your voice breaks over the phone as you reach across the miles and lure me to your den.

I’ve traveled distances for you, made giant leaps in my imagination, crossed over to the other side of desire. I cannot go back, there is no scope for any return to innocence. I lost myself on the road to your house and I left too much of my belongings in your store room.  No other choice but to continue on this dangerous path, past the warning signs, the traffic hauls, the blinding streetlights towards the dead-end.

I wear no masks, no clever robes…nothing to beguile you but the intent in my eye.

I’ve forgotten how to seduce, how to ensnare you and keep you within my folds. You are beyond solution, a package of positive and negative numbers that no magic formula can unravel.

You move in the realm of myth.

I move through shattered doorways looking for the light.

My body has betrayed me, can no longer bask in the shadow of another, can no longer glow in the aftermath of a stranger’s kiss, can entertain no one else but you.

You remain distant, indifferent to my excesses.

Tu me tues , tu me fais du bien.

Liar Liar

You’ve been lying to me for a while now. I’ve found a pattern to your deceit. You try to tease me with half-truths. It’s easy, I suppose, to lie about little things.

You said you never forgot details. I quizzed you to see if you could recall the colour of the lace panties I wore the first afternoon we made love. ‘Blue’ was your clever retort. Liar! It was a trick question. I was naked beneath my coat.

I inquired about the last time you fell in love. You shot a cold glance at me, said you never fall. I asked if you were falling now. You said you were already in love with me.

And just yesterday I asked if you had made the bed or whether it was still messy from the last time we fucked. You said it was remade. That you stretched the sheets yourself, tucked the corners neatly under the mattress, put the pillow back into place.

You lied.

I stopped by while you were away and found the bed umade and dusty. The sheets were crumpled and misplaced, even the pillow and displaced and reeked of me; your sitar stood like a bystander to your innocent crime-scene.

I made your bed again and graced your covers with my body. You returned and brought with you the mad scent of wet grass. I warned you not to enter your bed, which was now in my custody as punishment for your deceit. And yet you stole into the covers and peeped through the window of my back. You trespassed through private property. Your fingers scuttled over the steep incline of my ass and crept into my burrow, thieving my goods, my underground loot.

Let me assure you, you gave me no pleasure. I resisted you, didn’t twitch an inch, didn’t sigh or moan, didn’t melt or groan. I was stiff, like whipped cream. You sank deeper into my whole and unraveled me, struck a secret spring inside my cunt till music came gushing out of me and your fingers waltzed on my wet ballroom floor.

And now you rummage through my body as if it were a familiar room. You seem to know where everything is kept, can find my light switch unerringly in the dark, can navigate around my spiral staircases, my corridors, my rain-drenched roofs. Your flesh rides through my curves, my steep turns, the bend in my road, till you occupy ever sacred-square inch of space with white lies.

Muse (For B, who tried to make a poem out of me)

I confess you grabbed me by my collar, shook the sleep out of my drifting body and left me altogether speechless, tongue-tied and clueless, wondering how I must reply.

I confess I am flattered a poet of your intensity should find such bludgeoning beauty in my insecure, black body, that you should be mesmerized by my smile, that you should drown in the murky depths of my eyes, that you are probably drowning still with no hope for salvation.

How must I rescue you from this poem you are making of me?

Confess, B, that I am but a figment of your creative ecstasy. A half truth, a bold, distorted fragment of the real, carved from malleable clay, fashioned by your crafty eyes that peer into the soul of all matter in their compulsive quest for poetry.

Confess, B, that I am but a poem inside your head, one that escapes syntax, simile, economy. A poem you must pursue because it drives you mad, possesses you, etches its essence all over your hungry, prophetic tongue and remains unattainable because you can see, believe, but can never touch, grasp, contain, own.

Confess, B, that I am but a vision inside your soul, a stark naked angel wandering the smoggy terrain of your prophecy, a morning vision that will vanish by noon, that is vanishing so soon, vanishing as we speak, slipping away softly, on tipytoes, when you are asleep, while your body is breaking into the seductive arms of some other product of ecstasy.

Confess, please, that it will vanish in spite of all your pleas, your eager appeals to patron saints of memory.

This is how it will unfold,

The Vanishing;

It will begin with the forgetting of the curve of my smile and will steadily swallow all the intent in my semi-passionate eyes. This will follow; the sound of my voice blurring into oblivion. You will try to make it reappear but will hear only the sound of your own voice paralyzed by poetry, screeching in the deafening stillness of night.

You will shriek at the sheer wonder of this pure poem you have made of me vanishing into obscurity, too exuberant to have been true, too real to have been imagined, so incredibly out of reach, so unreasonably ideal, so fucking beautiful it makes you want to weep.

Espionage

I like to watch her tall body and its tiny movements, the pores of her skin always alive, like ripples on a lake, as if she were tickled constantly by the wind and its tiny summer breaths.

I watch her quietly, her bare, exquisite arms, the dense flesh of her breasts, the cliff points of her nipples that peep through her bra. Her hair is outlandish, locks of hair twirling in the dark, their fiery ends causing ruptures in the air. She is not aware of me or her body. She continues her task at hand, her body and its tiny movements sifting through sun-dried clothes. Through a borrowed lens I watch her make a dance out of the simple chore of folding her skirts. She wraps her fingers around the fabric as if she remembers the precise moment she unfurled the layers of its flair and held her cunt on display to an unsuspecting him.

I spy with my sleuthing eyes something beginning with the letter ‘b’- back, her back, no, the small of her back that her blouse unveils for all the world to see. She has ripples there too, her pores blushing on the edge of the wind, like leaves. My fingers itch to touch the delicate roundness of her ass. I touch with my naked eyes, I marvel at the beauty of its ratio, its precise proportion to her luscious breasts. Her legs are long and fit. I spot the muscles of her calves as they move in communion with the rest of her body and its tiny movements; picking up her small pile of folded clothes from her unmade bed, treading the short distance to her wooden cupboard, putting them neatly into place upon a shelf.

If only she knew that clothes lose their meaning when they wear her, that she gleams through cotton, reveals so much more than she tries to conceal, that I know her body well already, in spite of all the clothes that adorn. I have studied its arithmetic, its intimate geography:

Breath of wind + Nuance of touch = the delicate ripening of her pores, goose bumps.

Two inches north from her resplendent buttocks lies her delta, her mound. I know her cartography; can trace historic passages that lie submerged on the surface of her belly. Most men may have stumbled upon them, accidentally, but would never have recognized the antique trail.

She has the wealth of ancient cities buried inside her cunt. If only she would let me dig, let me excavate, I would uncover her, would dance sprightly around her riches, would sift through her pile of jewels and tuck them quietly back into place, for future reference and mark the spot with an ‘X’.

The Gift

I give you my heart.

It is torn and bleeding.

You stuck your fist inside my rib cage, plucked my heart out and held my empty body on display. The blood dripped from your fingers and you made a mess of my clothes, left them sullen with stains the colour of red wine.

Soon my body will shut down. My vessels will collapse, my veins will run dry, my brain will grow numb, my skin will turn blue and my lungs will take a final gasp of air before they malfunction.

You couldn’t keep up with my tempo. My heart beat too wildly for your taste. I loved easily, in excess and without fear.

Your blood was full of poison. You couldn’t withstand my warm caress, my wordless flights into the great beyond, my joy that knew no bounds.

You scooped my aching core and  left my body out to rot.

I give you my heart.

It is torn and bleeding.

I have no use for it now.

Statement of Purpose

I write that I may remember.

I write that I may forget…all your petty grievances, your empty anger, your lopsided temper and your foul, random moods.

I write that I may remind myself of your basic goodness, your innocence, your wounded, fragile self.

I write to chronicle my passion, to record your histrionics, to document  my profound insights about your body,  its secret chambers and its embellishments  (that shade of  indigo you wore last night or the way the light shone upon your skin while you lay dreaming in ‘technicolour’ right before your symphony of snores, as we sought refuge from summer heat through fan blades and eucalyptus leaves).

I write that I may conquer you, that I may no longer hunger for the slight touch of your feet against mine or for your arm to stride across my breasts while I’m asleep, soaked in sweat and dreams, that I may no longer be dismantled when you stare at me across a crowded room or offer me a quick drag of your rolled cigarette or when you hover around the periphery of my cunt, teasing my appetite, upsetting my calm, my quiet ease.

I write because I am helpless against you and your thirst for life, your delight in all that moves and breathes, combusts and seethes with a force unrivalled by your own,  your propensity for laughter, your mystical soul.

I write to conjure you, to mould you into shape and form, trim you down to size…

I write because I have no choice in the matter, no say in how I must feel or think or act, because you seduce me with your wide-eyed wonder and your understanding of loss.

You reduce me to silence!

I write  to cure this disease, this unbridled obsession with love and lust and all the holy madness that inflames your beastly heart.

I write, aware that everything I say or won’t can and will be used against me.

I write, knowing that nothing I write will inspire you to love me, that my words lack lustre and can never incite your passion or your curiousity.

I write in spite of me.

An Appeal

“A man’s love is so tragic, he loses exactly what he loves the most” Albert Camus.

Last night I couldn’t bear the weight of your body. You were heavier than ever before, like a cotton blanket drenched in water. Your arms and legs held the burden of a hundred years , your heart beat slow and loud and your breath, too, was heavy, as if you had seen infinity in the breadth of a dream.

You overwhelm me, still, with your fits of kindness and your bouts of rage. I have no defence against your madness. You’ve turned me into the culprit, the smooth criminal who slays at will, Judas who betrayed with a kiss.

I’m only here to love you, to soften your antique heart that’s hardened through years of misuse. I’m here to strengthen your muscles, to thin your blood, to lighten your body and guide you into ecstasy.

Let me unravel you, unfurl you bit by bit, layer by layer till I arrive at your core. Let me nurse your open wounds. Let me cure you with my secret recipe for hunger and desire. Let me fill you that dangerous longing for excess.

Let me save you from yourself.

Letter of apology

It’s been a month since I arrived and I’m already afraid to leave this cityofdjinns. I’ve been living in a house that’s soaked in sunlight and every morning the same silly bird makes a dash for the bedroom window, begging to be let in.

I wake up to castleton tea, vintage darjeeling, poured from a lovely, white kettle. On most mornings, I go for a brisk walk in the huge garden outside and look for the baby owls he once showed me. I’ve added my clutter to his clutter and the house is so wonderfully messy and yet everything is in its place, as it ought to be.

The evenings can be windy, stormy almost, punctuated by bouts of lightning and thunder and a light, cooling rain. The temperatures drop and everything is still, again, and beautiful.

I’m in the midst of so much movement, so much is brewing in all the minds I met, fresh caricatures, new compositions, epiphanies about line breaks and novellas and science fiction. It’s contagious… the waistline of my novel has begun to expand, slowly and steadily, spoon-fed on this intoxicating diet of passion and mystery.

I’m audacious, once more, no longer inhibited by a profession that was never meant for me. I feel un-fettered, free to live on the tail end of a violent wind.

My family worries about me. I do, too. I don’t know how much longer I can sustain this inebriated state of being. The sea calls out to me and every alternate night, I dream of the coastline speckled with pregnant clouds hanging heavy, longing for downpour. I still long for Goa, the land I inherited. Its rivers call out to me, tempt me with the promise of fish and ripples and canoes and fields of paddy stretched along the horizon. An empty house beseeches me, lures me with the promise of square feet of privacy. I long to be, saturated, isolated, pensive, solitary.

I’m trying to inch my foot forward, cross the border and head for monsoon-tossed shores. But I’m hesitating, something draws me back, lures me to stay still in this land-locked city where I first learned to breathe, where my heart learned to beat and my body learned the art of shape-shifting and moved into being.

I regret to inform you, fair, ex-city that you’ve lost me to Delhi. You tried to tame my heart, I tried to adapt to your fast-track ways, attempted to engage with your point of view. But you have no space for me. There are too many whose affections I must compete with, too many who lay claim to you, who live and lust for a piece of your core.

I’m here and I’m happy. And for this small, quiet instant, in this soft, sober moment, I want to be nowhere else but here, in this hot, dry city where the laburnum grows and the eucalpytus leaves outside the bedroom window sway sweetly as I sleep, where the ring-roads are speckled with roses, where the dust-storms sweep over and unsettle and then quell gently as I sip my Kahua tea brewed by the Kashmiri refugee at South Ex (Phase I, only seven rupees), where my lover woos me as he whistles to Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie.

I will be back, eventually, but I hope never again to stay. I’ve outgrown your salty charm. The flamboyant, restless part of me will remain in this city that adopted me.

Weather Report

Its 41 degrees Celsius outside. Inside, it feels like 45 or 50.

If it wasn’t for this sweltering heat I would have seduced you. But the air hangs heavy and we run the risk of fusing into each other, our flesh stands the threat of getting enmeshed. What if we melt and never untangle?

Love-making can be lethal in such extreme degrees. If we lock the door and close the windows, which we are known to do, our muffled cries will get veiled in moisture and as we unravel, as we unfurl on your cotton sheets, our bodies will break into a silent sweat and we might get glued together: your smooth, delicious skin will bear imprints of my fingertips and the space between my breasts will be dank with your wet, hungry sighs.

The fan-blades would be helpless against this ungainly heat. Our moans will ruffle the bedspread, cause ripples in the air. Breathlessness might ensue as you heave against me, as the weight of your body pounds against mine, as we course through regions of ecstasy. Its possible that you may not ever be able to leave.

The pressure of my cries will spring a leak in your walls, will break down the doors and all your neighbours will hear of our afternoon delights, our attempt at pleasure in this paralysing heat. They’ll find us preserved in sweat and tears, with pockets of salt in every untouched crevice.

If it wasn’t for this sweltering heat, I would have consumed you and left you out to dry. But we’ve seen a sharp rise in levels of humidity and you’d lie wet for days, waiting for sweat to evaporate, longing for a sip of cool air, a steady wind, a breeze from the hills or a gentle storm, anything for relief from my warmth.

I’ve spared you this summer.

I wait for winter to arrive on swashbuckling heels.

Self defence

My moleskine has been lying limp for days. Sometimes, in the still afternoon, I undress it and attempt a short scribble, a few scattered lines about nothing at all.

“My body has been soaked in brine, sweat, tears. Ocassionally, the skies unveil drops of light, limpid rain and the virile sounds of thunder intoxicate.”

Then, I lie vacant on the double-sized bed, my arms hanging around me, my gaze fixed on the eucalyptus tree he planted. I marvel (as does he) at how the leaves still shimmer though a branch snapped in last night’s storm. Sunlight glides off the sprightly, green edges and the world seems dazzling and un-contained.

Often, I read. I lie unabashed with a photocopy of Anne Carson and I make notes about her quest for beauty. Everyday I soak I soak in everything: the glistening leaves, the scent of damp earth, tablespoonfuls of desire, his temper and his calm, the cold, callous call of the wild, the bitter-sweet longing for him to come inside me and rob me of my fears, the taste of sweet bread and variety meats, the warm, oozing flavour of ripe muskmelon or litchis, the chirruping of the squirrels who made a nest near the window and the city that stretches out before me when I step beyond his door: the ring-roads, the murals, the nimbu-green rickshaws that speckle the landscape. So much more to absorb, so much yet to imprint upon my skin. I hardly know where to begin.

So I don’t. I sit still. My moleskine stares at me as if I had betrayed it, broken some sacred promise, erred unknowingly. I avert each haunting glare. I make up excuses, I remember letters of rejection: “I’m sorry but you’re writing is too ethereal”. I look up the dictionary;

Ethereal

1. Characterised by lightness and insubstantiality; as impalpable or intangible as air.

2. Of heaven or the spirit.

3.Characterised by unusual lightness and delicacy.

I look for synonyms: airy, celestial, supernal.

I cannot understand.

I return to my hesitating, my reluctance to commit to time and place, space and face and context. I refuse to tell you too much for fear that you will learn and remember. I will not tell you where and when for how does it matter, these trivial details. Is it not enough for you to know that when I placed my hand against his tired face, he swallowed my tongue and unhooked me and tossed me on his bed and he refuses to let me leave.

There is no truth in geography. Longitudes and latitudes reveal nothing except the position of cities, they will not inform you of the lust that brews in wild, beating hearts, of loves - lost and found or rediscovered, or excesses and indulgences. There is no science in locating, in describing what happened when and to whom and what was I wearing when I first met him, or what language did we speak in, French or German or Gibberish. The heart speaks its own tongue and there is no script to record the making and un-making of love, the blood beating, the pulse racing or subsiding, the sudden flights of fancy.

If fact is your concern; precision, attention to minute detail, this is no place for you. Here you will only learn of moments and remembered things. If a face is what you seek, a name and pincode, I have none to show except those inscribed upon my palm; lines that criss-cross like tributeries, going nowhere, chasing the everywhere and the everything, trekking the distance of the boundless horizon.

I may striptease before you but I’ll keep that diamond on my nipple and that jewel on my cunt.

You shouldn’t see too much.

The Goa Monologues

Day One

Gracias a la vida isn’t just a song, it’s an incantation, each beat is a mixture of magic and madness, each refrain strained with aching and contentment. I cannot be an innocent listener, I want to whirl like a dervish on this cold, granite floor, I want to chant along. I want to burst into being till words drip from my core, till my heart combusts into flame and the ashes splatter across this coast, this hungry stretch of earth.

In between these bouts of stupor, I take sips from my salt-rimmed glass of cashew fenny. Barely two hours since I arrived and I’ve already begun with household chores. I walked to the market to stock up on fruit and ice cream, patties, coconut pie, sweet bread, sausages, eggs and beans. In a little while I must start the fire for dinner: stir-fried French beans with a drizzle of pepper and garlic, and sausage chilli fry. 

I have yet to bathe: wash off those leftover stains— Bombay sticks to my body like venial sin.

The journey was exquisite. Between draughts of sleep, I saw the landscape stretched before me; the mountains speckled with waterfalls, the fields pregnant with stalks of rice glistening in the slight rain, the earth rich and full and gleaming in the fresh afternoon light.

I’m slowly sinking into my self-willed isolation. Sometimes, the rocking chair gets possessed by the wind sliding in and the trees in the backyard (banana, chickoo, breadfruit, guava and coconut) rattle against the glass windows and the house is at its eerie best.

If he were here the image would be complete. We would have danced to Sosa after dinner in the balcony under the desolate sky full of broken clouds and scattered stars.

Home alone, I raise a toast to solitude.

The Goa Monologues

Day Two

He called (long-distance) at 3am and for a few, precious minutes, the silence dissolved. I had been running from one dream-strip to another and could hardly tell real from imagined. All I remember was his soothing voice telling me he would speak to me at length when he returned.

I’m snuggling under a blanket, Jeff Buckley takes his place, he sings the Hallelujah and calms me. I slowly forget the flying cockroach that terrorized me a few minutes ago. I’m trying to be brave, talking myself into small acts of courage…

The days are beautiful. The clouds hang heavy in the sky but the wind still whizzes past my ear and sometimes I can hear its heartbeat, can feel its pulse coursing through my veins.

I was up at 6.30 this morning and after the castleton tea which I drink in memory of him, I went out to run.

I spent the afternoon mesmerized by colours; violent indigos, tempestuous reds and sunflower yellows splayed over the walls of almost every building in Panjim, by mica-lined window-panes and music seeping through. We stopped at George for lunch, a cozy, little restaurant overlooking the church.  Over sausage pulao, beef, and prawn chilly fry, K and I spoke of revolution, dessert and filing RTIs.

I fell asleep in the shuttle back to Margao, lulled by the sounds of rain and rocked by the motion of the wheels going round and round, sliding from one end of the city to the other.

Satiated by sounds and sights, I now whet my appetite with red wine and proceed to hand-write a letter. Night slips in with the scent of wild flowers and a wave of heady breeze. There are no stars out in the sky; they lie submerged behind a thick peel of clouds. And as the cricket rubs its limbs to sing, I unleash my pen. I begin…

The Goa Monologues

Days Three and Four

I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write and write and write, even if everybody in the world advises you against it, even if nobody believes, perhaps the real secret lies in making people believe.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

I wish it wasn’t so difficult, this task of writing; constructing sentence upon sentence, layer upon layer in my attempt to build a private language, a secret grammar that will help bridge the silence, help me report all that I see and hear, smell and touch and all that I have yet to feel.

Often I spend the day in a series of delays, postponing this moment of truth as if it were a tedious chore. I procrastinate, read entire novels, re-arrange furniture, clean as many rooms as I can before I reach for the kettle to make myself some more tea, or sink into the sofa and watch some mindless TV until words begin to chase me, till the backlash begins and I have no choice but to yield to the call, to let the words dictate themselves to me, allow the lines to fall spontaneously into place until I lose all traces of origin.

It isn’t easy to believe. It seems incredulous that I should abandon all responsibility and choose to live in isolation, even if it’s only temporary. There’s so much danger in an experiment like this… the threat of learning that this isn’t my true calling, the possibility of regret, the shame of being too wildly imaginative, the risk of ruin, the fear of failure and that small chance of sheer contentment that doesn’t exist independent of all these.

I talk myself into small acts of courage, like rummaging through my moleskine and building upon stray lines, tattered thoughts and leftover ideas. I even tease myself with the promise of red wine, I try to restrict distractions but still this landscape calls out to me, lures me with the sound of rain and the fury of leaves lapping against the edge of a breeze.

I am seated on the rocking chair which I’ve placed in the balcony. A few houses away, believers and non-believers are chanting the rosary, singing the litany. The evening sky has dissolved into an endless spread of indigo. The trees still try to reach for the stars; they stretch their leaves and sigh. Suddenly, the world seems still, like time itself has yawned or slipped and lost track of the hour and we lie suspended in the fabric of an eternal twilight.

I write between gulps of my screwdriver, there is much to tell and it’s hard to find a place to begin. Perhaps I should tell you about this house in which I’m living. It isn’t ancestral, in fact it’s been painted just twice and is part of a residency, a friendly neighbourhood. You’d have to take the first left from the 400-year-old church to get here, past the Panchayat’s office, the cemetery and some spooky bungalows. I live beside deserted fields so that the view from my balcony extends to cover this expanse of uninhabited, uncultivated land. Intertwined among these fields are winding roads that lead to the station. The sky seems close at hand and the horizon is flanked by hills. Throughout the day I see a variety of birds but they disappear before I can note the colour of their beaks or the span of their wings.

No one from my family was born in his house. And yet, over time our lives have been inscribed upon the walls. Seven years ago we had the house-warming party; everyone was there except for me. I had board exams to prepare for. Fr Lionel blessed the house. It was a curious coincidence. Decades ago, when my father was courting my mother in Bombay, my grandmother, uncomfortable about the affair, confided in this now-deceased priest. She was apprehensive that my mother, a woman four years older than her son, would steal him away from the herd. I was told later that many cases of beer were brought along with numerous bottles of whiskey and soda and towards midnight everyone broke into song, Uncle Wolton began to sing fados in Portuguese and my father struggled to keep pace with his unsteady pitch, Cedric, too, played the guitar and stopped each time a song demanded a chord other than C, F and G. That’s how most family dinners at this house conclude, with joyous refrains from old Konkani songs and the longing for childhood contained in the fado.

But this is a first for this house – playing host to just one person, keeping her safe, protecting her from the giant red ants that crawl over the mango tree or the ghostly solitude. For the first time the rooms are filled with echoes from conversations with myself, the sink isn’t besieged by pots and pans since the cooking is done by one for one. I try to make it easier. I distribute my presence. I spend the morning in the bedroom, the afternoon on the couch downstairs and the evenings in the balcony upstairs. The kitchen walls document my comings and goings, and the many pots of tea I have consumed in just three days.

Cocooned in silence, I will myself to write. I persuade myself to believe.

The Goa Monologues

Days Unlimited

 Our Lady keeps the hours. I hear the church bells ring but I’ve lost track of time. The days have piled up and melted into each other so seamlessly that I can no longer tell what happened when and where and why.

Two weeks is certainly not enough. There is so much yet to accomplish. I’ve only just begun to shape and define the book that’s growing inside of me. I can feel its rough, unpolished contours. It hasn’t yet started to kick but it has developed a heart beat that’s independent of mine.

I relish this feeling of dubious belonging to a landscape drenched with life. I’ve come to enjoy the curious glances that come my way each time I walk down a street or when inquisitive waiters ask me about the country of my origin. I want to tell them I’m from the Republic of Nowhere; a nation full of longing. I don’t. I tell them this is my native land but they’re seldom convinced. They probe deeper, ask if I speak the language. I don’t, I say. They laugh; tell me I have no right to say I’m from here. How to tell them I communicate best in an unspoken tongue, a private speech filled with absent words and lazy metaphors that my body invents in the throes of passion?

The house I live in has become my fortress. In it I am not contaminated by the thirst for excess. Here I am still. I’m in the hub of all things domestic; a world of masalas and beef roast and sorpotel, there’s a fisherman who rides by on his cycle, he honks to tell us of his arrival, he brings me the paper, there’s the pao wala who comes by in the evening selling podis, can-con, and sweet bread. A world of mothers, wives and children and sons and husbands out at sea. Our Lady keeps the hours. I live on the fringes of these lives. Mine is a world of Miller. I breathe the dust between each syllable as he tells me about the Land of Fuck, of ripe, juicy cunts and the irrepressible, uncontainable call of the word.

Often, I indulge myself in reading the local papers— works of innocence with secrets tucked between typos.  Never before have I looked forward to obituaries. These are not mere square inches of print. Each block tells a story of regret, mourns the ‘sad and untimely demise of our most beloved friend’, announces the timings for the requiem mass, warns you, ‘No condolence visits please’. Each name sits on your tongue like a song, Miniato Barreto, Ritinha Fernandes e Ratos, Manuel Jose Dias, Armando Faria Fernandes, Satirio Afonso, Camilo Vaz, Josemaria Inacio Camil Fernandes. There are days when entire pages are filled with birthday greetings for ministers, paid for by friends, colleagues, and members of Unions—Lives compressed into a little poems that mark how much the departed will be missed.

Our Lady keeps the hours. To think there’s someone whose job profile includes keeping time, tugging at strings so that the bells will ring and mark the passing minutes. In a little while I must start packing, putting things together, lock up the house and return to Bombay. I know my wanderlustingfeet will bring me back here soon enough. I want nothing more than to be here, to live here for a while.

There’s so much to look forward to… that little restaurant in a bylane of Fontainhas, more like a little house than a café… the rain gushing outside the window as I downed an afternoon whiskey. Hours spent wandering the ruas of Fontainhas, soaking in the colours, the music, deep indigo, inside-of-a-raw-mango green, sunflower yellows and pinot-noir red. The jazz band with Yvonne, a brown-skinned Ella Fitzgerald, and Lester Godinho, a drummer who understands the nuances of time like no one else I’ve heard before, the rush of blood to my head as they perform St Louis’ Blues and How High the Moon. The sweet scent of the air, paddy fields that glow in the naked sunlight, birds flying high….you know what I mean.

My past keeps coming back to kiss me on my lips. It seems tantalizing the thought of returning to an older self. But I’m just getting settled in this new skin. I’ve only just discovered secret passageways, underground rivers, diamond mines hidden in my core. The conversion isn’t entirely complete, I have yet to map this new territory, yet to chart fresh routes, yet to name the many criss-crossing streets.

Will you stand by as I unravel? Will you watch as I whirl and unwind and replenish myself with fresh aching, a renewed commitment to life?