Goa Unplugged

-->

After All it’s Indian

So here we are in Ucassaim, Goa again. It’s been raining for the past three days and now there’s bright sunshine; warm humid days, cool starry nights. And I think to myself what a wonderful world. There are high-pitched songbirds in the morning; an irritating rooster with five-o’clock-alarm regularity; peacocks romantically a-braying at the prospect of snakes. The bread guy, the egg man and every other vendor has this little rooty-tooty horn that starts blowing from five in the morning to midday.

Our little village is, as such, a bucolic place. After three days of rain and a day of sunny blue skies, you can sit in the verandah and hear the water dripping from the trees at night. You get up from your armchair and look up at the million trillion stars in the sky to see if it’s clouded over again and it’s raining. And you realize with some impeccable insight that dripping water is the main event in Goa during the monsoon. Even after two days of sunny skies, the trees are still dripping; star-filled, moonlit nights notwithstanding, the drip-drop of the water from the trees never ceases. It is soothing, almost mesmerizing. The sound complements the sight of the starry, black-ink sky.

The wonder of this place is that is a feast of vision and sound but also of heavenly aromas of food: the overwhelming smell of feni, the acrid odor of Goa vinegar and the lustful noseful of seafood. Apart from the hedonistic cornucopia that is the very essence of Goa, there are other, more mundane aspects: good roads, polite drivers, great bars, good restaurants. For people like us, Goa is a discovery…a great view, a wonderful bar, a nice restaurant. Mostly, we wander through the towns, villages and beaches during the day and eat a simple dinner at home.

We love our little village. It is bucolic. Sadly, it is full of envious neighbors. We’ve tried to reach out to them but their world is so different. The amount of money we spend going back and forth from Delhi to Goa in a year surpasses their annual earnings. If we were foreigners, nobody would hassle us; if we were rich, we would have people to contain them. Being neither, we face the hostility of neighbors, who are nice to talk to; it is clear they have a hidden agenda. And they operate stealthily through the Panchayat.

In our case, they cannot complain in terms of religion or caste: my wife is a Goan Catholic; I am a Hindu Brahmin. Between Pereira (my wife’s maiden name) and Desai (also a Goan name), we easily blend in, especially because we live the local life. The problems our neighbors are causing us just for having our house are petty but stressful. One neighbor is a police constable; he earns less in a year than what we spend on airline tickets. Another neighbor started an ambitious project to build an additional floor but ran out of money; a third has cattle in his living quarters and the family is always at war, using loud voices and sometimes even physical combat.

All these years, we’ve ignored them, valuing the physical allure of the village. We’ve weaved that attraction into a pastoral experience. I was hoping to write poetry like William Blake, instead I am constrained to write a Marxist tract. Now that we are sprucing up the property for our daughter’s wedding in the next few months, we’ve had people coming out of the woodwork, objecting to walls; this, that and the other. All complaints go to the Panchayat; there are inspections, without any reference to the alleged transgressor.

In the past few weeks, we’ve had all manner of neighbors complaining about our plan to rebuild the garden walls. Forget sharing the cost, which we asked them to do and they refused, pleading poverty; they are of a completely negative frame of mind. One neighbor complained that we had encroached into his property; another complained, and he lives across the street, that the wall would block the breeze in his house. A third simply said we could not do it unless we built ten feet into our property, giving him the land for free.

We come to Goa to get away from it all. We stay at out second home, mind our own business and reach out to the locals. There is, however, such a simmering pot of envy that you can neither touch nor swallow for fear of burns. We have decided to fight it. Never mind religion or caste, the hostility has to do with socioeconomic differences. Though nowhere rich by global or even the new Indian standards, we nevertheless pay our caretaker more than the per capita income of the village…we probably spend more than that on dinner, when we go out.

That is the truth. But I see no reason why they would gang up on us, except because they believe they can wring a few thousand rupees out of us. Apart from the fact, I would not even part with a paisa, I am shocked that these people have such a skewed view of the world: the idea you can gang up to extract money from your better-off neighbor.

As my daughter says, “Man, Dad, they picked the wrong guy.” And indeed they did. My wife is from Goa and I am Goan by choice. We will fight them to the end of time and we will win for the same reason they seek to extort money from us. We have the resources to tie the Panchayat up in litigation for the next 10 years. Our taxes are 122 rupees a year because that’s really what residents can afford. I have no qualms in using my financial clout to screw their happiness.

On the other hand, despite the pathetic real estate taxes, the village is clean; everyone manages to dispose off their garbage and there are no smelly bins of the type you find in Delhi’s villages. We know because even in the capital we live surrounded by a village that immensely wealthier and depressingly dirtier.

So there we have it. We live in this bucolic village; we spend more money in a day than the local residents do in a month. But we will not give in to the egregious demands of our neighbors, who are simply hoping to make a buck by slowing our renovation.

I told members of the Panchayat, who came to visit us, that we will support the local orphanage (imagine: in this little impoverished community, there is one). But we have no time for envious and greedy neighbors. And we refuse to let their petty concerns spoil the time we spend in our little getaway that we call “Imagine.”

copyright rajiv desai 2008

American Life

Manhattan: Shakespeare in the Parking Lot

So there we stood in the parking lot at the corner of Ludlow and Broome in New York’s fabled Lower East Side watching a performance of Shake-speare’s Measure for Measure. It was a warm August evening and all the chairs were taken. Eventually we just squatted on the ground. I thought it would be some amateur effort but was pleasantly surprised at the caliber of the actors and the innovation of their production.

The play was staged by The Drilling CompaNY, an Off-Broadway troupe that proclaims it is a jazz player that endeavors “to extend the same free-dom in creation and production to theater artists that jazz extends to mu-sicians.” The play performed that evening was truly Haryanvi in its in-trigues and malafides. It got a bit uncomfortable after an hour of watching it and a Martini beckoned, so we left. It’s not like we didn’t know the end. We luxuriated in the performance, walked to a wondrous bistro: there to eat, drink and be merry with our daughter and her friend.

As we walked back to her place in Gramercy on that night in Manhattan, I couldn’t help marveling at her world of hard work and joyous play. As a twenty-something, our daughter lives this carelessly sophisticated life that is enviable. To live in Lower Manhattan, to have a good job, to have good friends, to shrug off care with awareness and compassion is a life de-voutly to be wished.

Beneath her seemingly hard Manhattan exterior, she is good for a cuddly hug and nostalgia. “I’m not ready for this scenario,” I told her: a stereo-typical situation when parents visit from the Old World and she takes care of everything. “Deal with it, Dad. This is a different America than when you lived here,” she said. Truth is both our daughters are “cool.” They get it from us because we defined “cool,” way back in the 1960s and 1970s.

Regardless, we spent a wonderful weekend with her. She had a problem because I like steak and burgers; her mother prefers exotic foods like tapas and sushi. “Ok parents, you can visit only one at a time. I can’t han-dle these different tastes,” she said as we ended up in a low-grade Italian restaurant with terrible food and brown bag wine on McDougal Street in the West Village, after much this and that.

Our first weekend in Manhattan was a revelation. Our daughter runs an enlightened home, small but neat and comfortable. We got an insight to her life, which seems to be a lot more about quality than quantity. It is so different than when we lived there in the seventies. She fits into the Man-hattan life so easily, where we had to make certain painful adjustments living in Chicago. She was born in America but grew up in Delhi; in the past six years she has lived, you’d think she’d always lived there.

And she ain’t never coming back, that’s for sure. That somewhat sad re-alization for us is tempered by the knowledge that she has a “Sholay” poster on her dining room wall. And that she went to the Independence Day parade and stood in line to have kulfi.

What a difference a generation makes!