Benemma

Part I: The Party of the North

The train from Mangalore stopped six hours later in Margao, the second city of the tiny coastal state of Goa. Goa, not really India, the old stronghold of the Portugese and their Catholicism. Good old Goa, party capital of India, beach capital of India, booze capital, tourist hot-spot, richest of all the states; not really India yet still inescapably Indian. Our final stop after five months on the lam. Avoiding Goa’s famously expensive cabs, we asked a rickshaw driver to take us from Margao station to our friend Pubali’s house in Anjuna. We had to steal ourselves to accept the shocking price of 600 rupees (about seven quid) for the hour-and-a-half rickshaw ride, although a cab would have been outrageous at about 800 Rs, such was the level of pedantry we had reached. What’s more, taking the slow way across Goa gave us a deeper view of its beauty than we had got the first time we were there, back in November. Being a Sunday, Christian weddings were blooming everywhere and our driver insisted on stopping at several of them so we could peek through their gateways, into festival gardens full of lights and the energy of celebration and family.

Fumbling through clouded memories of our last visit, we guessed our way to the path leading to Pubali and Matt’s house, buried deep in the palms, on the edge of impassable jungle. The night air was heavy with cicadas and sweat. Far back in the loaming we could see the light from the living room. Then, closer, an explosion of fur as the two familiar bundles of Pubali’s pet spaniels, Sherlock and Diva, burst onto the veranda to snuffle at our ankles and welcome us back, back to the tropical coast of India.

We spent four days in Anjuna, mostly doing what visitors to Goa mostly do, sitting in beachside bars watching the sun arc over and fall into the ocean, watching the people pass by on the beach: the freaks, egoists, hippies, holidaymakers and market stall sellers. On the first day we took a look at Morgim beach, a short drive north of Anjuna. We baked ourselves on loungers on the sand amidst dozens of young tourists, almost all of them with Russian accents. The nickname “Morgimsky” has evolved to illustrate the recent influx of Russians to Goa, particularly focused around Morgim. It used to be Brits, following with their suitcases and football shirts on the heels of the trendsetting hippy settlers. Now shifts in the global economy have laid a path for the growing classes of wealthy Russians. A local cab driver described how dire the reputation of these newcomers is. I was apologising to him on behalf of my country-folk for the hordes of sunburnt lager swillers from my homeland, up on the nearby beaches of Baga and Calangute. He protested, “No, no, you English very good behave. You dress is shirt, nice shorts, you say thank-you, you pay money good. It is Russians, they are very bad. They are rude, they wear old shorts, no T-shirt. They speak English no problem but I ask for money for taxi, they say ‘No speak English, only Russian’. Russian women the worst, they say bad things in Russian about me, they think I no understand,” and so it went. That’s our lot finally off the hook then.

That night Emma, Pubali and I struck out in search of the elusive Party, walking a long way through the darkness on the beach to a club called Blue Waves. En route we swigged at a bottle containing a mixture of one part lime soda, one part Feni. Feni is Goan moonshine, typically distilled from cashew or coconut. Branded bottles of the spirit can be bought for around 80Rs (about a quid), usually clocking-in at between 20 and40% ABV. But we had got our hands on an unlabelled bottle of liquid that the shopkeeper claimed to have made herself. It cost 30 rupees. Thirty! We had to add two parts of water to it just to get it down to a strength at which it could be mixed with a soft drink. Well, anyway, that’s the excuse I’m sticking to for what happened on the beach before we entered the club. In spite of Emma and Pubali drinking from the same bottle, some reaction went off in my head like a grenade, sucking the world away and jellifying my legs. Emma tried to communicate with me, telling me to lie down but I couldn’t connect will to action. She had to explain the process in detail: “Bend your legs. That’s it. Now put your hand down. Well done…” Consciousness rolled out of me like a falling curtain, then partially returned and hovered nearby without drifting close enough to grasp. Coaxed by the girls I slowly rallied the focus to stand and follow them into the club, somehow passing the door staff without trouble. I then sat out the whole event at a table, picking gingerly at an omelette and a glass of water. Emma had bought me the snack in the realisation that I hadn’t eaten for most of the day. Going without food, for me, is like sneaking kryptonite into Superman’s underpants. I soon came round, gathered my wits and realised that I hadn’t missed anything at all – the party had been rubbish. Then the staff closed the club at ten o’clock on the spurious claim that the police had ordered them to.

That disappointing party illustrated an aspect of Goa’s personality I alluded to after our first visit. It seems that some epic thirty-year festival of freedom and experimentation had raged along Goa’s coast until the recent years through which it began to collapse under its own weight. There seems to be a community of revellers constantly circulating and updating the rumour of where the next big night will be. Then they flock like vultures down to the Party when it rears its head. Thus we chased the Goan Experience on successive nights. But the Party is an elusive beast. It never quite performed with such magnificent form as all the hype had promoted. Some said we had missed it by a few years, some said it was still there but not on the nights we had seen it. But I think there is a little more to it than that. It seems that the very concept of this mind-blowing party is more like a big club night, founded on a very narrow range of music (primarily Goan Trance), it just happens to be in a grand setting. It’s not quite our scene. Or maybe we’re just getting old and boring, who knows?

I don’t mean to suggest that those nights were no fun, they were fantastic. They just didn’t quite fit the picture drawn by those people who live under Goa’s spell. The daytimes, however, were up to the standards of the best kind of holiday. We were joined by two friends of Matt (who was stuck in England the whole time, to everyone’s annoyance) and his former girlfriend Claire, who comes into this tale a few days before the end. The two newcomers, Gary and Rachel, became firm friends in no time. On their first few precious days it was a treat to watch them discover some of the quirks we had become used to over the months. Gary got shamelessly ripped-off on his first purchase of jewellery at the market, before hardening-up and getting a handle on haggling; both of them were in disbelief at the prices of food and booze; they marvelled at the chaos and colour of India. All these things we had almost taken for granted but now saw again as we had in September. Matt’s mum and step-dad, Val and Stace, were also there. It was inspirational to watch the pair of them revel in the Goan scene. I hope we too will travel the world after our kids have grown into adults.

Late one night, walking home from the beach, Emma and I were stopped at the junction of two streets by a pair of men in official shirts. One of them had a rifle slung from his shoulder. He asked questions in an aggressive tone: where had we been, where were we going, where were we staying, were we carrying drugs, why were we out so late… In a duet we had learned well, Emma played friendly and I played dumb. It was like Good-Cop-Thick-Cop. The policeman soon ran out of questions and just kept repeating, “So you have nothing for me?” To which we politely refused. I didn’t even realise what he was after but Emma knew well. Clearly he wanted a bribe. In any case, he eventually gave up and let us continue.

The next morning, waking with Feni-beaten brains, the night’s revelry came back in fuzzy pieces. How many bars had been in? Had we really gone skinny-dipping? That would explain why our clothes were covered in sand. Then Emma came upon the dark realisation that only her clothes had returned with her, not her sacred money belt. One rule of backpacking is never to be separated from that one essential accessory in which you keep your cash and passport but we had encountered unexpected circumstances on account of the unclothed swimming palaver. Now we were in big trouble.

Pubali took me immediately to a nearby garage, where we had hired scooters back in November. I asked the forecourt manager if he had any available now but he didn’t. I insisted, “Are you sure? No scooters? You have nothing? This is important”.

A daunting expression of uncertainty overcame the man. He said, “Well, we have that!”

He gestured to a small pile of scrap metal on one side of the yard. I examined it. More or less, it was bicycle-shaped. At some point in recent decades it may have served as a form of transport but substantial doubt surrounded even that idea. Somewhere in that half-eaten chassis there must have been a contraption vaguely resembling an engine and, after some frantic working of the pedals, it growled into life. I negotiated about 80Rs a day for it and pulled away into the street with my knees flapping around my ears, looking like the sort of clown that has court injunctions against him. Cutting short the tale of a painful few hours of sweating, pleading and dwindling hope, a young English lad we’d befriended the night before emerged from the crowd holding Emma’s belt in his hand. Needless to say, I bought him a beer… with Emma’s money.

Then suddenly it was Friday 12 February and the final appointment of our honeymoon had rolled round and caught us by surprise in a way unique to Goa. Time doesn’t run at any kind of sensible pace there, it just disappears into the first drink and hides from sight until, unexpectedly, it leaps out and smacks you on the back of your pickled brain. Our old friend Claire and her boyfriend Dan had told us that they would arrive in Goa on 12 February and wait for us outside Paradise Bar on Palolem beach around sunset. But Friday had come along and it felt like we were just getting started in Anjuna. We very nearly didn’t leave. But a glimmer of clarity came to Emma and I at lunchtime that day and we resolved to get going. We found Gary and Rachel on the beach and put it straight to them: we were either leaving right away or we weren’t going to make it in time for that long-promised sunset. I’ve believed for a long time that it is generally better to move on in the hope of new adventures than stay put in the hope of continuing the current ones. That theory found a whole new justification that day.

Part II: The Sunset South

Though Catholicism is prevalent in Goa, nowhere in India is Hinduism far from hand. The day we moved south to Palolem was an auspicious one for Hindus, as it was Lord Shiva’s birthday, “Shivaratri”. Halfway to Palolem our cabby was happy to take us on a detour to a remote Shiva temple so we could pay our respects. He also stopped by the roadside nearby to show us a sacred tree in the shape of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god. By the time we reached Palolem the sun was turning-in, the light was sharpening, Golden Hour was beginning. Whereas Anjuna’s buildings are mainly solid, permanent structures, Palolem stretches inland from the coast in long rows of colourful bamboo shop-fronts, resembling the market stalls at a large festival. In this respect, Palolem felt more commercial and tourist-oriented. Then we saw the beach.

Access from the shops to the beach is made through a dense strip of palm trees, from which we emerged onto the sand in that perfect light. The beach is laid down in a shallow arc with considerable headlands at both of the distant ends. The southern headland is a pair of low bulges with a Mohican crown of silhouetted palm trees, bursting into the sky like fireworks. The northern headland is craggier and more prominent, with a slim channel separating the terminus of the beach from the adventurously entitled Monkey Island. Along the entire length of the beach is a continuous line of palm trees, leaning over in a towering green fringe. Jutting from the base of those trees is a staggering number of bar shacks, literally hundreds of them. The shacks could have stolen some of the charm that such a postcard beach inherently has but they don’t denigrate it in the slightest, they strengthen it. Something in the organic appearance of those wooden structures, and the notion of indulgence with which they are associated, only serves to improve the view. As we were taking it all in, our dear friends Claire and Dan spotted us from their deck chairs outside Paradise, bolted to their feet and charged us down, delivering hugs and screams of happiness.

We sat out the sunset with beers, laughing at the unbeatable pleasure of being in exotic places in the company of old friends. Besides ducking away for a few minutes to reserve a pair of shacks to sleep in, which were right next to the bar, we hardly moved from that spot for three days. That may seem lazy, although we could be forgiven for kicking back for the final days of our honeymoon, but there’s more to it than that. It was simply the best place to be. The unstoppable freight train of gregariousness that is Claire and Dan had obviously passed through this part of the world before and willing passengers were all around.

Paradise is run by a group of friends, some of whom we had met through Matt and Pubali earlier on our trip. They treated us as if the whole venue was putting on a party in celebration of our presence. They started a tab for us when we ordered our first drinks and we soon forgot all about what little money we had left. Then, sitting at those seats in the sand that evening, our old chums’ magnetism drew an audience that swelled through the night. Six of us slowly grew into 15 or so and guitars sprung up from nowhere. We sat in a circle, singing songs until the small hours. The similarity to a music festival was really digging in. It was blissful.

The next day we only moved from the bar for a quick shopping trip into Chaudi, two kilometres away. So nonchalant had we all become that we drifted apart and lost Claire on the way off the beach. Fortunately that was just what we needed, in order to get her some surprises for her imminent birthday. What’s more, as only Dan and I were left together we realised that we needn’t travel by any conventional means, we could arrange our own transport. We haggled with a shopkeeper over one of his scooters and promised to bring it back in a few hours, then scudded off onto the main road out of town. At one point Dan was at the handlebars, a cargo lorry was approaching in the opposite lane while being overtaken by a motorbike, then a rickshaw swung into view, overtaking the motorbike and stealing what was left of the road. We braked, wiggled, swerved, bounced narrowly past our slaughter, then accelerated, swerved and wiggled back into our lane and soared on. I leaned into Dan’s ear and shouted, “My mouth has completely dried out but I can’t stop smiling!”

On Sunday morning we convened, all with hangovers, back at our spot outside Paradise, awaiting the boat we had ordered the day before. The two main shack boys, Raj and Amun, had offered us some breakfast before our voyage but it only turned out to be some white toast, then there was a long, hungry wait while nothing happened. This was our second-last full day abroad, it had to get better. Then Raj took me to his scooter and drove me to the market in Chaudi. I stumbled brainlessly behind him as he darted between tradesmen, fixing deals. We bought tiger prawns, squid and mutton, then hacked huge chunks off a wall of ice blocks, filling two sacks with large rocks of the stuff. Something magical gripped me in that moment, as I felt closer to India than perhaps at any time before. We weren’t getting ripped-off, we weren’t engaging in some silly tourist activity, we were just doing what all the other locals do when they have families or customers to feed. The market was manic but Raj’s energy easily matched it so I could enjoy passively observing.

When we returned to the beach a painted wooden outrigger was resting in the shallows with a few passengers aboard. I could discern the profile of Emma, hiding under her parasol with her sunglasses on, looking elegant in an old imperial kind of way. I helped the boys gather further supplies from Paradise’s kitchen: dried spices, fresh herbs and limes, a box-load of potatoes, dozens of bottles of beer, gin, whisky, brandy and mixers. At the capable hands of our dear shack-boy friends the day was improving around us. The fishermen tending the boat finally cast us off and hopped aboard. Besides Emma and I, there was Claire and Dan, Gary and Rachel, Raj, Amun and his girlfriend Sophie. We motored steadily through a glassy sea. The out-rig bounced softly on the water, shedding a slight wake behind us. Looking back, Palolem was laid-out for us, basking under that tireless furnace in the sky. The sweep of high palms resembled a cliff, from the foot of which the shacks seemed to jut like natural rock features. From just a few metres offshore the beach looked somehow distant and surreally beautiful.

Rounding Monkey Island and swinging into the shore, we soon landed at Honeymoon Beach. It is a tiny rectangle of sand just big enough to throw a frisbee across, nestling amongst several house-sized rocks that sit stubbornly in shallow waters. Here was a classic vision of romantic paradise and not another soul was there to spoil it for us. Here was Honeymoon Beach, at the end of our extraordinary honeymoon, on Sunday 14th – Valentine’s Day.

Dan and I waded out to one of the smaller rocks, scaled it and leapt off its back into deeper water. I felt the cool liquid engulf me, heard its roar in my ears, waited to float back to hot sky above. I emerged to the sound of Dan laughing even more joyously than in all our previous moments of disbelief at our fortune; great hoarse peels of guffaws that were inescapably contagious. Thus breathless with elation we swam round to the other side of the rock, scrambled up it and jumped again and again. The others were floating neck-deep just out from the beach, chatting and laughing in their own world, equally contented. We played together, we drank booze, we lounged, swam, we learned to do handstands and cartwheels, and that sunny, perfect day rolled on. Raj and Amun built a small fire in a rocky nook and gathered volunteers to prepare the food. Claire and Dan taught us the fascinating process of how to gut and clean squid, then we cut the potatoes down to a pile of narrow fries. We cooked rounds of mutton, squid, prawn and chips, each one gaining ever more intense flavour from the spices and lime in the pan. We picked the hot morcels from the pan, devoured them and licked the spice from our fingers.

Raj, Dan and I set ourselves a mission to prove our manhood. A larger rock, further out in the water, had to be climbed at any cost. I tried to cling to tiny finger-holds but couldn’t lift my full weight from the water. Raj, however, scaled the sheer face like a spider monkey. Clinging to the summit, Raj lowered his leg and called to me to grab it. He is half my size but held fast as I lifted myself by his ankle, such is his surprising strength. I grabbed the sharp top edge of the rock with my fingertips and pulled as hard as I could. Panic started to pull back at me, adrenaline enshrouded me like a shrinking robe, tingling my skin and stealing my breath. Nearly there, just get your toes into that gap. That’s it. Now one more haul and… victory! I left one leg behind and invited Dan to climb me in the same way as I had climbed Raj, until all three of us were standing as champions on the back of our vanquished rock. We were untouchable in that moment. We could feel every molecule of the gentle breeze brushing our wet, grazed skin. The clarity of the light was intensified by the buzz of our defeated fear; the sun bounced off the water stretching beneath us like a silver cloth. We counted ourselves down, bent our knees, raised our heads and launched into weightlessness for a brief, rushing moment. Then splash! Embraced by cool liquid arms and pulled down, down, then up, up, finally bursting back into the air and finally there it was again, that laughter, shared between friends. We immediately swam to another part of the rock and worked out an equally challenging ascent for a few more jumps.

Before our maritime taxi returned to collect us, Raj had one trial left. On previous years he had scaled the largest of all the rocks and scratched his name into it with chalk. The rock looked insurmountable but the spider monkey made short work of it. His name will sit there, looking out with pride across the ocean until the monsoon washes it off and Raj will have to wait until next summer to reclaim his rock.

We returned ruined. The sun had caught every one of us and beaten our energy away. Claire fell sick that evening and stayed in her hut while the rest of us retired to the bar and barely spoke. However, Claire’s misfortune did well for us, as we had her out of the way so we could make costumes and decorate the bar for her birthday the next day. The theme was to be pirates. We fashioned swords and flags, inflated 100 balloons and draped them all over the place. Raj and Amun showed just how wonderful they are by making elaborate costumes for themselves, too. Then a couple of the other shack boys collected hats and swords to make up a decent pirate crew.

We spent the next day steadily regaining our vitality under the influence of alcohol. We dug out a pirate ship on the sand using an old-fashioned Indian spade. Dan etched a design around it, showing the ship pulling a net in which the Kraken had been captured. We added a plank to be walked, in the layout of a hopscotch game. We ARRRR’d and staged elaborate swordfights, slowly finding ourselves again as the day wore on. But soon it was late and we were growing quiet once more. Emma and I knew this would be the last time we said goodnight to each other as honeymooners, five months and two days after leaving home.

The tides of joy and wonder turned the next day, as we packed our bags for the last time in India. Our landlady asked for extra money for checking-out late but we refused on account of her having screwed us around for a day or more when we had arrived. She stood her ground and we were dragged into a row that ran on and off for hours. We finally gave up on negotiating and walked away. She screamed after us, “F***ing bastards! I call the police now!”

“Okay”, we called back, “We’ll be waiting in the bar just over here, send them over”.

Of course no police were called, although that may have rounded things off in a suitably amusing way. Instead, we just sat with our friends, thinking of little to say, until the sun started to redden for another perfect sunset. This time we weren’t going to stay to watch it. We shouldered our ruck-sacks, hugged our friends one last time and walked in silence to a cab.

The rest, I mean the journey back to London, doesn’t deserve much telling. There was the experience of watching Mumbai wake to the morning commuter rush from the window of a taxi but there was little else to write of. Suddenly we were sitting in clean, spacious aeroplane seats, flicking through the options on the digital screens in the seatbacks in front of us. We didn’t feel any sentimentality for where we had been or pay any consideration to where we would be in eight hours. I couldn’t find the desire to write in my journal, I just watched one film after another. England finally popped out from under a layer of cloud, showing itself blue with fog and the last light of a sun that had already set. Here was our homeland sweeping underneath us on the heels of the most snowbound winter in memory. And there, in the arrivals lounge, were the smiles and kisses of our family, familiar, unchanged and happy to see us safely home.

Mum drove us back to her place in Colchester. We stopped en-route at our old London house for a drink with our friends. Their company was delightful but it didn’t feel like we were completely present, distracted by a slight sense of confusion or displacement. Back in the car, driving through the motorway lights, the outside temperature gauge dipped to zero degrees. Then later, on the shadowed back roads, nearly home, the gauge fell to minus-three and my eyelids started to roll.