Summer moved on

Flowers in the window

GoArge

I meant to make this post a gigantic yet coherent, doggedly adjective-free narrative relating everything that Goa was and wasn't, all that it did and stopped short of, in exasperatingly neat, chronological order, but I'm decidedly going to lapse into disorder and disarray, not in the least because Blogger doesn't make it fantastically easy to move pictures around. Far from. And I'm exhausted. And terribly afraid that if I don't write soon, it'll all just evaporate. The words, the events, the memory of it all. Heck, even last night (which has now become the night before last), as I tossed and turned in a half-hearted attempt to surrender to sleep and stop obsessing about the cockroaches tramping about happily over my sleeper-class train berth, the words just kept flowing in my head. Madly, they gushed, poured, screamed out of every pore, until I thought I'd explode. How much I ached to write! It didn't matter that barely any of it made sense, even in my head. Just random phrases, colours, and music, blinding light, little scraps and twinges of emotion, vast expanses of nothingness exploding with haphazard, scurrying words. Scrabbling about, without purpose or direction, vehemently pointless. Like this entire paragraph. And those goats.

Round 2: Let me try again.

After a thoroughly eventful/unnerving/boggling first day in Goa, encompassing, among other things, our first glimpse into the soggy, squelchy, disarmingly green days that lay ahead, we finally relocated to the prettiest little 'hotel' in Calangute. Raman's, at six-hundred rupees a night for a modest double with stubbornly sickly yellow lights, isn't your standard, shoestring Arambol-esque hovel. Still, shameless laziness, weariness, and a general reluctance to have to shovel a day's worth of sand into a thoroughly disagreeable, insect-infested, and gloomy abode entailed that we handed out the green to the caretakers of this quaint lodge without much mental anguish. An undeniable bonus was the fact that the orange beach is the tiniest hop away from Raman's. A visit to Tito's is slightly more... ahem... strenuous at about five hundred metres, and a trek to Infantaria (more about that later) takes about twenty minutes at a geriatric pace, just the right distance to whet a most obliging appetite.

(Okay, I'm going to do this backwards. Or randomly. I simply cannot be bothered with moving around hellknowshowmany pictures, which are starting to look so similar I can barely tell one from the other. Green, beige, grey. Red. Some blue and black. Lots of votr, rain and sea. And so many dogs!)

Thivim station, like nearly every Goan beach, is amazingly clean by Indian standards. Five days, and yet I remained befuddled. It's inexplicable how the entire state has managed to keep from plunging to the depths of filth that a city like Bombay seems to embrace so mindlessly. Somehow, most Goans and the gazillion tourists that visit each year continue to steer clear of that uncomfortably-familiar trait that is public apathy, particularly in matters relating to basic civic sense and a sense of ownership of anything lying beyond the four walls that encompass 'home'. At Fort Aguada, I actually counted the trash tossed over the bastion and onto the rocks below -- five banana peels, one plastic bottle. One non-biodegradable piece of trash. I'm embarrassingly impressed.

Fort Aguada is absolutely, manically gorgeous, without question. Entirely inept on two-wheelers (alright, four-wheelers too) and not proud of it, we walked. Everywhere. Plodded on sand, dredged through squishy mud, huffed over little hills, waded between poky plants, killed countless insects and other benign lifeforms, and emerged, stunningly filthy and chuckling stupidly. I'd nearly forgotten how much fun it is to undertake unquestionably foolish activities like hiking in hippie skirts and sandals. But it's always worth it. Always, always. Pristinely opulent stretches of beaches, uncluttered by roasted firangs, leery yuppies, pimpy female masseuses, and shack-touts with wild, crazy glints in their eyes. Vast kingdoms of heaven ruled by sanded dogs and scuttling crabs.

En route to Fort Aguada, we stumbled upon this River Princess. The Goa Lonely Planet guidebook helpfully instructs that this ship ran aground over two years ago and has ever since been entirely neglected. Unwanted, inconvenient, useless and therefore just there. Like some people, it merely exists, and that's all. A mildly interesting blot on the landscape, adding scale and aesthetic value to eagerly captured photographs. It didn't even appear haunted, unless those brightly dressed people waving and hollering at us from the deck were restless, otherworldly spirits. Actually, what were they doing there? Who were they? Strange.

Another 'trek' we undertook the following day was northwards, from Calangute to Anjuna. 'Trek', I say, because what at first appeared to be a moderately uncomplicated seven-kilometre gambol turned into an entirely boggling project, given that the gently undulating beach slowly morphed into weedy rocks, forcing us to look upwards -- at a startlingly green cliff that we figured we would have to clamber over. The initially encouraging trail that snaked deliciously up the cliff started to play truant after a while, with large chunks disappearing without warning, only to emerge cleanly an aggravating fifty metres away, again, positively out of nowhere. A bunch of locals, scaling and descending the cliff with effortless, goatesque skill, watched us, thoroughly entertained. And we obliged, grunting, puffing, wobblily, noisily, with as much grace as elephants on ice skates.

Nearly two hours on, and just before the rain engulfed everything all over again, we arrived. At Curlie's. And to this.

We spent the next several hours at the famous Curlie's, much beyond a cloud-shrouded, invisible sunset, vacantly staring at the leaden sea, the delightfully kooky hippies all around, through wisps and rings of bong effuse, reading, eating, drinking, and wallowing in wordless contentment. Mushroom Jack will have to wait for another cloud-soaked day.

Now about Infantaria, as promised. Located in Central Calangute, this 'Restaurant & Dessert Bar' is undeniably quaint and Irani-hotel-like, rather much like the Sassanian's and Kyani's in Bombay. But there's definitely more attention to interior decoration at this strangely named bakery, even if the odd, mosaic-tiled bench just outside is a puzzling piece of furniture. More impressive, however, is the separate coffee counter within the bakery. (Admittedly, the barista manning that counter really looked like that was his own personal prison... the counter was considerably cubicle-like.) More specifically, the coffee that it produces; I (finally!) had the most perfectly brewed coffee since I've been back... a strong, steamy latte spiked with hazelnut. Add to that a garlicky side of mushrooms with toast, and I was chubbily, insanely, instantly gratified.

The pouring rain followed us everywhere. Chased us off beaches and into rickety shacks, off the road and into squeaking taxis, off the road again and scurrying under oozing tin roofs, forced us to pick at a thoroughly unappetising breakfast near at a nameless shack within Raman's, and spend several hours reading, curled up in chairs like lumpy balls of wool.

And I wouldn't trade that weather for the world. Rain and Goa. Near perfection.

Bombay Blue

Fin

Nearly time to set foot on land once more. That is, if the violence in East Timor abates.

Six weeks of insane working hours, endless rivers of coffee, bunches of broccoli and fruit growing out of my ears, steady streams of small talk, exacting cheerfulness, muted fury, mad euphoria, unspeakable frustration, unshakable weariness, unabashed ecstasy, deadening despair, growing pains, unprecedented light-heartedness, and peals of laughter, and fat chuckles, infectious giggles, magnetic, captivating, disengaging smiles.

It’s heavenly to feel so alive.

"Stop the guns, stop the guns!!"

... is what I heard this afternoon, exactly 10 seconds before I was to leave the ship's bridge, done with my marine-mammal-lookout watch for the day. I lifted a pen to sign the roster, and at that exact instant, the bridge radio bursts into frantic yelling from the engine room, which, we were to find out at that instant, was filling up with seawater.

What ensued immediately was one whole minute of wild chaos, with more incoherent, panic-stricken engine-room hollers coming through the radio, and the captain running up to the bridge, banishing all us lowly seismic crew to the instrument room (where we spend over 12 hours a day), while he set about, with unnerving calmness, to decipher what exactly was underway. We tore back to the instrument room, on standby to shut all systems down in case a blackout was issued. Senior crew members on night-shift, frantically summoned, poured into the instrument room, bleary-eyed and puzzled at first, then quickly progressing to urgent alertness. Guns stopped, ship to a grinding halt, the chase-boat racing towards us to tow the ship if needed, and frazzle, frazzle, all around. Morbid excitement. Every person in the know making mental checklists of precious personal belongings to abandon ship with, if needed. It's embarrassing, the enlightenment that comes with making that checklist. Of priorities, imagined. Versus those, real.

In the end, in a nutshell, valve shut, leak stemmed, water pumped, and back to business, an hour later. Like nothing ever happened at all. I don't know what's more horrifying -- The possibility that things could have gone very wrong, or the fact that an hour later, it was all back to business. Frantic business. Single-minded business, unwavering priorities. Tick, tock, tick, tock, must catch up with the clock. Must make that money, must not stop, no matter what.

Bulletproof...

I wish I was.

Happiness is shamelessly relative. And so is misery. On a nice, broad, long time scale, I wouldn't exactly call now the epitome of perfection, joy-wise, what with ridiculously long hours at work that I don't exactly bubble over with enthusiasm for, the considerable lack of food for herbivores, the sameness of every day on a ship, the fact that work encroaches upon my dream-time as well, the drastic reduction in free-time, sunset-gawking time, shutterbugging-time, the lack of contact with the outside world, my outside world. Still, compress that time scale to little short of a year, and I'd call this heaven. Especially those nights when all I have to do is look up and melt, drowning within the rivers of shooting stars that dance for me.

What if?

Do we all have a few defining moments in our lives that irrevocably change its course? Do those crazily radiating roads emerging from every crossroad ever meet? Is there ever a possibility of finding two straight, diametrically opposite paths that, defying all conceivable logic and reason, meet, hundreds, maybe millions of miles down the line? Maybe there are a few, but I'm starting to think that those I've already crossed don't belong to that category.

I often wonder if life is passing me by, a life I think, in some undefined, intangible, immeasurable way, I should be living, that I was meant to live. But maybe it's just me who's stepped away, living this other, alternate, parallel version. I've always so vehemently, nearly forcefully tried to believe that I don't live in regret. It's always easier to lie to yourself than to acknowledge the substantial chasm that exists between what you want to be like, and what you really are.