You close your eyes when you feel its corrosive presence in
your gullet, the sides of which you imagine chipping away, when all you want to
do is retain some of it in your throat, feel the liquid accumulating around
your Adam's apple so that to anyone on the outside, it looks like a clear,
transparent patch that will stand out on your neck, making you the Shiva of
Saligao, the Destroyer who remained unpoisoned, the neelkanth, the fenikanth.
Feni and cunt. You open your eyes, and find yourself
chuckling, like a drunk in a taverna, which you are. Destroyer who remained
unpoisoned is far from the truth. Someone puts on a switch somewhere, and a
bulb half-heartedly illumines the figure in front of you: a dense haired,
wet-lipped apparition, but you notice only the freckles, which you have called
(will now call for the last time) stains on the face of the moon. The
Englishwoman is shaking gently, not yet undone by the liquid conductor of the
opera this evening, this First World Parvati of yours, and the professional
drunks of Saligao don't even look up as they go about their job with practiced
ease.
In this life at least, you're a bellboy at the Taj property
at Candolim. Too young to strut about like a fucking comprador, too old to
think that you've never going to get out of Goa. You're attractive in a wolfish
sort of way, the sort of way fellows like you are attractive to women like her.
In one swift motion, she has locked the door of her room and pulled you towards
her, attacking your lips with her own pink ones, even your teeth and an
unprepared tongue. There is no time for you to wonder whether she had caught
you staring at her heavy, dotted breasts, sticking out from under her summer
dress, when she was in the lobby. This was
audacious even by the standards of a washed-up English woman who gets on a
flight to this country within a country to get over a messy divorce.
You've never had an older woman before, and are still
reeling from the sex when she begins talking about herself. You see her hurtle
towards what you know she considers her redemption, her second chance, and you
say nothing even as you know that this deliverance might turn out to be her
biggest folly yet. Hypnotized by the sight of her breasts straining against her
t-shirts, and spoilt by the opportunity to free her of that yoke, at the very
least, you begin to listen. Pressing your wiry frame against a rear that eats
up, bit by bit, your capability for rational thought, you become her dumb assistant as she decodes her
sins, unhampered by red curtains and latticed windows. All the very well. Padre
Lucius would not be pleased.
It is monsoon. The only time of the year when Goa is for the
Goans. When it doesn't matter whether anyone has left for Lisbon yet. Quem vio
Goa excusa de ver Lisboa, they will say now. The awnings in Fontainhas drip
throughout the day, and the sullen Mandovi looks like she has finally had
enough of her reddish-brown burden. On the floor of the barge to Betim, you can
make out the brown imprints of the soles
of the cheap, black sandals that the middle-aged women of this state have made
a habit of wearing. Their black umbrellas tucked under their pudgy arms, they
gossip about other people's sons or if they are not in the mood for chatter,
try not to think about the day when their own boys will leave. While the
Englishwoman buys her smokes, you try to avoid the gazes of the gaunt, old men that
still carry the last dregs of a dream. In them, you see moth-eaten visions of
the Bombay docks and the bottle-green jerseys of football clubs.
You pick up Sabby's bike from his little dugout on what has
come to be known as the River Princess Street in Candolim, after the ghost-ship
that lies forgotten in the sea a few metres away, daring scrawny, enthusiastic
youths and pot-bellied men trying to spice up their marriages with a bit of
holiday machismo to swim upto its wreck, despite the warnings of the occasional
life-guards in garish red-and-yellow. You, in your local pride, hardly consider
the wreckage to be an ennui dispeller, until that night when the Englishwoman
drags you to the edge of the water at the witch hour, and you hear the waves
breaking against its ominous, ghastly silhouette, untempered by any sort of
illumination that the shacks on the shore provide when the sun makes an exit
after its cameo performance. In the silence that follows, you feel the manic
frothy foam accumulate around your ankles, tightening and loosening its grip
around them, fists of the vast, vast ocean clenching and unclenching, undecided
whether to take the fight to you or wait for you to forsake the shallows and
wade in further. For the first time, you notice that the Englishwoman, in the
four months she has been here, has gradually slayed the River Princesses of
her own past - the vacuity of an unhappy marriage, a job as a low-level
functionary in a firm managing hedge funds even as the creeping tendrils of the
recession were growing into unruly, self-strangling vines, her spectacular
failure as a writer in a previous avatar - not decapitating them with one
smooth stroke of her Exacalibur called Goa, instead chipping away at them with
it, eroding and discarding the past as only a change of air can. On the edge of
the water that night, you understand how one can fall in love with a place
through a person. Along with freshly-fried calamari, snatches of Konkani
drifting in from next door at the rented accommodation in Anjuna and the gentle
whistling of ancient, swaying palms in a ruined paradise, you have been
totemized. Love is nothing if not a totem for a new lease of life.
And so you ride with her on Sabby's bike to Morjim, as the
monsoon peters out and an assertive sun calls out to the denizens of countries
that colonized and liberated and re-colonized this place. This is it, you
think. The endgame. Let the season begin, let the hordes in oversized yellow
swimming shorts take over North Goa, and cause her to think of her admittedly
long vacation as just that - an admittedly long vacation. You're not too
worried about the people talking. Countless young men before you have tread
down the same path - fooling around with white women until it is time for them
to get on their flights to Riga or Birmingham or wherever it is they have to go
to next. Everyone knows how these things end, and such idle chatter is just a
way to fill up the hours, because a people need their intrigue, imagined or
otherwise, whether it is Goa or Gangtok. How else can we justify the tyranny of
never-ending afternoons and early evenings? The beginning of the tourist season
will mark the end of the courtship and the beginning of the marriage you think
will be her second failed one. But on that evening in the Greek's shack in
Morjim, as you watch her with her head bent down, rolling another joint, you
get the first signs that going back home is not very high on her list of things
to do. She sits back crossed-legged, seemingly unperturbed by the attention she
usually receives from the city-based adolescents
on their annual holidays, and imperiously inhales from the joint. Her eyelids
droop for a brief moment, like they do when you rub the day-old stubble on your
chin in her nether regions, before they open suddenly and she looks out on the
sea again.
You begin to feed off your own fear, revealing yourself to be
colonized by flesh. Not once do you
indicate that you are uninterested in emotional involvement, fearing that an
unequivocal rejection of her mind will cause an automatic relinquishment of
flesh, for she is now a woman in love. As she absent-mindedly circles your bare
chest while you smoke a cigarette, she whispers that she loves you. She does
not demand reciprocal declarations, and now you do not know how to deal with
the situation. The hunter has become the hunted.
And so you find yourself in this taverna in Saligao, when
you finally announce that you're getting engaged to Flavia next week, and
boarding a train to Bombay next month, where you'll begin a journey to Africa
that'll end with you posted as a cadet in an oil tanker off the Angolan coast.
This is your fate, you tell her. There is no question of wanting to leave. Like
generations of men before you, you have to. There seems to be no need to
explain. She has had a lot to drink, but she has nothing to worry about for she
is home. You ask her what she will do when you are engaged, and then gone. She
smiles, and as if to confirm your suspicion she says that she will wait for
monsoon to come again.
(I've entered this for the Saraang Writing Awards 2013 - http://www.facebook.com/swa2013).
