Back of Beyond (43 page)

The sadhu was smiling again. “I think I have spoken too long. You must be tired.”

I was. But he looked even more spritely than when we arrived. “You possibly understand far more than you think you do. It is always hard to see things from a new direction. As I told you, in Jainism we believe in Syadvada—the need to understand and tolerate many different ways of seeing things. I think you have a story about two blind men trying to define an elephant from a few little bits and pieces. Each conceives something entirely different from the other and yet, to a limited extent, each is perfectly correct. Given the appropriate additional information they would arrive at the same conclusion. We believe that to comprehend the real nature of anything one must pay due regard to all points of view and recognize that we may all be correct. So many philosophies—and religions—emphasize only one way of seeing and reject all other interpretations. We believe in complete tolerance—the unity of larger truth—an all-encompassing truth in which everyone, everything, is a part. The greatness of the state of Siddha—true universal brotherhood through tolerance—or, if you wish, love!”

Bombay certainly requires tolerance. In spite of its Anglo-European façade of monolithic Victorian buildings, graceful parks with round-the-clock cricket matches, double-decker buses, fancy high-rise apartment towers, elegant world-class hotels, and remarkably clean beaches along the ocean waterfront—in spite of all the trappings of a vibrant cosmopolitan city—there lurks eternal India herself. Beggars, countless thousands—maybe millions—of them in their sackcloth and tin-walled shanty towns behind the broad boulevards; the night streets littered with sleeping bodies; the endless offerings of “friendship” from drug pushers and sidewalk hustlers; the chaotic prattle and screech of traffic mixed with bullock carts and cows and mangy dogs and rivers of jostling bodies; the gross extravagances of the wealthy meeting head to head (but never perceiving) the utter degradation and squalor of the lower castes and the untouchables and the burnt-out dope-heads heaped like corpses under the Gateway of India (an enormous basalt arch across from the Taj Hotel), commemorating the 1911 visit of George V, during India’s heyday as Britain’s “jewel in the crown.”

But it’s time to go to Goa! Peace and palms in a true penny paradise. And a boat to take me there, a big one with three decks. I chose the middle level—second class—and arrived early enough to stake a claim to a section of wooden bench in readiness for the night. Talk about time warp. I could have been back in the sixties. Even out of season, the deck soon became a playground for a full range of hoary world-wanderers; dewey-eyed students fresh out of first-year college; a video team from Japan who insisted on interviewing everyone even though no one could understand their questions; two elderly ladies in horsy tweeds and brogues, fully equipped with umbrellas, binoculars, and a small library of guidebooks neatly packed in a pigskin case, and the inevitable group of sullen Germans, bronze-bodied and bored.

Green canvas sheets, salt-stained and torn, were stretched over the deck to give some relief from the afternoon sun. The water moved as slow as syrup, slammed into submission by the heat. Lukewarm soft drinks were offered at outrageous prices; the smell of curried cooking and little acrid bidis—the universal Indian cigarette—wafted up from the lower deck where I could see brown bodies crammed together like Coke bottles in a bottling plant.

On our deck everyone seemed rather subdued at first in the flesh-melting heat. But then the whistles and bells and hoots began and, with an alacrity remarkable in India, we were off, wallowing out into the Arabian Sea. Everyone suddenly started talking excitedly like children on a day outing from school; fishy breezes blew in and sweat dried; someone started up with a guitar, and illicit aromas floated around under the canvas awnings. All we needed was a chorus of “Kumbaya” or “This Land” and we’d be back in the heydays of Seeger and Baez and Dylan and Beatlemania and Kerouac and flowers in our hair and love in the air and hardly a care—anywhere.

At dawn, Panaji is pure Graham Greene. Sprawled lazily along the banks of the Mandovi River, the capital of Goa presents a shadowy, moss-flecked façade to the newcomer. Parts of a collapsed bridge across the river peep out of the slow rosy-red waters; a ferry now provides access to the other side, the only way north to the twenty-mile-long stretches of old hippie beaches. But behind the sultry river frontage, Panaji possesses colonial charm. Small parks and squares with parasol shade under banyan trees and palms; swathes of jacarandas, flowering bahuinia, and gulmohars (with fire-bright red blossoms) softening the sharp edges of the newer construction. And in the center, the oh-so-Portuguese triple white towers of Our Lady of Immaculate Conception rise up over the city, atop an elaborate staircase of carved white stone. Behind the church is the old town of clustered yellow and ochre stucco houses with white trim, verandahs, and red pantile roofs. Narrow cobbled alleys wind up around a steep hill; flights of worn steps lead higher to once-elaborate mansions, now a little unkempt, but still utterly Portuguese in flavor.

During the Portuguese occupation, which endured for over 450 years following the arrival of the conquistadores under Afonso de Alburquerque in 1510, this little fiefdom of Goa (a mere thirty by fifty miles in size) was known proudly as “Goa Dourada”—Golden Goa. Cut off from the rest of India by the tangled mass of the Sahyadri mountain ranges in the east, Goa has always been a “place-apart,” a green, forested “pearl of the Orient,” said to have been created by the Sea God when Parasurama—an incarnation of the Hindu’s Lord Vishuu—shot his golden arrow into the Arabian Sea to determine the site of the perfect place for penance. Traces have been found of neolithic occupation as far back as 2000
B.C.
, and for over 1600 years, from 300
B.C.
, to 1200
A.D.
, tiny Goa was ruled by Hindu kings and their vassals. Later known as the “Paradise of India,” the state flourished as a prosperous mercantile trading center, the “Emporium of the West Coast,” famous throughout the world for its Chinese silks and porcelain, Persian pearls, Indian spices, cotton, and indigo.

With the arrival of St. Francis Xavier in 1542, a relatively compassionate melding of Hindu and Christian cultures occurred, manifested in magnificent Catholic churches and palaces and unique Hindu temples that somehow managed to combine both architectural influences in a vibrant mélange of Baroque, classic-revival and Indian styles, complete with octagonal campaniles. True, there were anticolonialist tensions and Inquisition-style Portuguese purges against the Hindus, but Goa seemed to avoid many of the worst atrocities of European occupation in other parts of the Orient, and even after Goa’s hasty bloodless “liberation” by India in 1961, the proud populace insisted on maintaining its unique cultural identity.

“We are Goans first, then Hindu or Christian—or maybe a bit of both.” I was lucky. On my first afternoon I’d found a guide with his own car and a very benevolent attitude about daily rates. Angelo Fernandes was pure Goan—blithe-spirited, open-faced, and devoted to his little Rhode Island-sized country of a million or so inhabitants.

“So—where do we go?” He seemed as ready for adventure as I was.

“Well—I don’t particularly want to visit the hippie beaches up north, and I’m not really interested in the resorts. I want to see Goa as it was before the sixties—the real Goa. Maybe the south?”

“But nobody goes there.”

“Good. Then that’s where we’re going.”

And so we did. But not without a token visit to the strange colonial remnant of Old Goa, a few miles east of Panaji. I’d heard about this place from one of my many fleeting companions on the Bombay ferry.

“Weird place, man. I mean—really spacy. All these old palaces and cathedrals—they had about six hundred churches there once—can you believe that—six hundred! All left to rot. Just like someone came in and said, forget it, man, and they left it, sort of half-ass finished and spooky. You gotta go there. India’s a weird place, but this place is really something, man.”

Actually it was a little too familiar. The spookiness may have existed when Old Goa, Velha Goa, “The Rome of the Orient,” was abandoned as the capital in 1843 in favor of Panaji. At that time, the place was rife with disease and plagues and people refused to trade there. As the vines and weeds and moss took over the stern classical-style edifices the city must have had a decadent ghostly charm. “Those who have seen the glories of Old Goa have seen Lisbon,” goes the old saying, but I found it hard to see the correlation in today’s few scattered, primped-up remnants of convents and churches set in dull engineer-inspired gardens. Even the great Basilica of Bom Jesus, where devotees used to congregate once a year on feast day, to kiss the toe of St. Francis Xavier’s “miraculously incorruptible remains” (a custom now discontinued following the removal of the toe—actually it was bitten off—by a fanatical female worshiper a few years back) had little of the grace and delicacy of Goa’s other Portuguese churches. Possessing the bulk and bombasity of a fortress, external ecclesiastical accoutrements seem to have been added as an afterthought. Only the wild Baroque exuberance of the sixty-foot-high carved altarpiece and the shimmering cherub-graced silver casket of St. Francis gave it authenticity as a serious house of worship.

But the little church at Sancoale, a few miles to the south, is the epitome of Goan grace and architectural sensitivity. Angelo had been saving it as a surprise, and as we wound along the road beside the River Zuari, here she was—a tiny white confection, set by a small bay against a hill of eucalyptus and palms. Frangipani and flowering bougainvillea provided flecks of color, which made the delicately pinacled exterior appear even whiter, and lacy, with filigrees of decoration around its modest pediment. A perfect miniature creation, in perfect scale and harmony with its setting. No wonder people fall in love with little Goa.

Time to eat.

It was a modest beachside place, nothing fancy and not far from the Charles Correa’s Cubist Cidade-de-Goa resort, one of a handful of such enclaves on Goa’s still undeveloped eighty-mile coastline.

We were the only customers and sat at a window table overlooking the ocean. I’d eaten nothing of any interest since my farewell bacchanal at Bombay’s Taj hotel luncheon buffet (one of India’s most extravagant culinary displays) and expected the worst in this empty restaurant.

My fears were utterly unfounded.

Two little palate-cleansing bowls of a spicy seafood broth known as
tomyupkung
and a plate of steamed mussels in a garlic, cumin, and wine sauce appeared within minutes of our arrival, along with two loaves of crusty Portuguese bread, hot and smelling of San Francisco sourdough. We obviously didn’t eat fast enough. Another appetizer followed in a couple of minutes—this time delicate slices of home-smoked mackerel wrapped in little pouches of palm leaves. Then, with hardly a pause, came slivers of perfectly cooked suckling pig, crisp-skinned and juicy.

Even Angelo seemed surprised by the speed of delivery. We considered asking them to slow things down a little, but whoever was creating these magnificent degustation dishes back in the kitchen was well and truly on a roll. We decided to let him be and just enjoy his handiwork.

The chef was tireless. Tiny crisp-crusted vegetable samosas redolent with familiar Indian spices were followed by slices of
apa de camarao
, a sort of pie with a golden rice crust over a succulent mix of whole prawns cooked in coconut milk. Then a slight pause before the main dish, Pomfret Recheiado, a whole fish filled with a rich pungent stuffing of sour red masala and grilled until the skin crackled like cornflakes when you cut it.

This was too much. But whoever it was working back there hadn’t finished with us. Small bowls of vegetable vindaloo were accompanied by tiny crushed rice and lentil pancakes and, before we could raise our hands in defeat, out came a masala of miniature pink crabs in a sauce brimming with coriander, flecks of chili peppers, cumin, and garam masala. All this washed down with
capitos
of heavy Goan red wine, a little like young port but far more pungent. Angelo staggered to the kitchen and returned a few minutes later.

“Oh—she is so beautiful!”

“Who?”

“The cook—it’s a girl who is cooking all these things. She is…” he sought the most complimentary adjectives but failed. “You must see her. I will ask.”

He vanished into the kitchen again and seemed to be gone a long time.

And then she emerged.

She couldn’t have been much more than a teenager. A dark-eyed, golden-skinned Goan madonna, blushing a little, and carrying a round dish of something resembling crème caramel. Angelo was grinning like a gibbon.

“You know what this is?”

“No, but it looks good.”

“This is bebinca. She can make bebinca! This takes hours of work. It’s eggs, coconut milk, sugar…what else?”

The girl whispered something in a voice that sounded like a spring breeze.

“I don’t know how to say in English. Special spices—a special mix. Every cook makes a different mix. This is a very traditional Goan dish—but very, very difficult to make.”

He looked at his new love with adoring eyes.

“Isn’t she…?”

The girl blushed even more, placed the dish on the table, and scampered back to the kitchen.

And that was the last we saw of her. The bebinca was superb—light as a cloud, a melt-in-the-mouth creation that left the palate sweetened and refreshed. But Angelo’s only thought was for the girl, and he set off for the kitchen again.

This time he was unlucky.

A large man with a thick black mustache, large by Goan standards at least, stood by the door. Angelo made some complimentary remarks about the food, the man nodded but seemed aloof and wary. My friend returned with the bill. It was for a ridiculously small amount, hardly more than you’d pay at a roadside hamburger joint back home. He looked utterly forlorn and defeated. Love has teeth behind a pair of pretty lips, and he’d been bitten. His plate of bebinca sat untouched; his romantic urges had been crushed. The man was obviously guarding the door. Protocols had been infringed, and it was clear there’d be no more dallying with the pretty cook today.