Chapter 9: Goa Road Trip — 1982

The road trip to Goa was Elina's idea, because the best ideas and the worst ideas often come from the same person, and Elina was the person from whom both categories of idea emerged with equal confidence and zero warning.

"Spring break," she said. "Four days. My cousin has a house in Panjim. It's empty. We drive down, we paint, we read, we come back. Nobody needs to know."

"Nobody" meant: our families, the college administration, and the particular network of aunties and uncles and family friends who constituted the unofficial surveillance system that monitored the behaviour of unmarried Indian college students with the particular zeal of intelligence agencies monitoring foreign operatives. In 1982, a man and a woman travelling together to Goa without a chaperone was not an adventure. It was a scandal. A scandal that, if discovered, would produce consequences that ranged from disapproval (Elina's liberal-but-not-that-liberal family) to devastation (the Oberoi household, where Bauji would process the information as a personal betrayal of the family's honour and Amma would process it as proof that Pune had destroyed her son, exactly as she'd feared).

"Prakash can come," Elina said, reading my hesitation with the particular accuracy of a woman who had learned to distinguish between my want-to-but-can't face and my want-to-and-might face. "As a chaperone. A male third party. It makes everything respectable."

"Prakash will spend the entire trip talking about Indian federalism."

"Indian federalism is a perfectly respectable topic for a Goa road trip. Better than whatever you were planning to talk about."

"I was planning to talk about painting."

"See? Federalism is better."

Prakash agreed. Prakash agreed to everything Elina proposed, because Prakash was — though he would never admit this, and I would never embarrass him by pointing it out — slightly in love with Elina in the quiet, hopeless way that intelligent men sometimes fall in love with women who are clearly in love with someone else. He loved her the way Vikram had loved Esha: as an audience member loves a performer, with admiration and no expectation of reciprocity.

We borrowed a car — Prakash's uncle's Ambassador, a vehicle that had been manufactured in 1974 and had aged with the particular dignity of Indian automotive engineering: nothing worked properly, everything worked eventually, and the car progressed through the world not with speed but with the inevitable forward momentum of a thing that had decided to move and would not be deterred by minor considerations like hills, potholes, or the laws of physics.

The drive from Pune to Goa through the Amboli ghat was — and I say this having made the same drive forty years later with Balli to rescue Madan — the most beautiful road in India. The Western Ghats rose around us like the walls of a cathedral built by geology rather than faith, the laterite cliffs red against the green of the jungle, the waterfalls — it was late March, the tail end of the dry season, but the ghats held water the way they held secrets: in pockets, in crevices, in the particular places where the rock had memory — catching the light and turning it into movement.

Elina sat in the front seat. She navigated — not with a map, because maps of the Amboli ghat were works of fiction rather than cartography, but with the particular instinct of a Goan woman who had driven this road with her family every summer and whose body knew the curves the way a dancer's body knew the steps.

"Left here," she said.

"There is no left here. There is a cliff."

"Before the cliff. The turning before the cliff. The one with the temple."

The temple — a small shrine to Ganesh, painted orange, the size of a large cupboard, attended by nobody and visited by everyone — marked the turn toward the descent into the Konkan plain, where the ghats gave way to the coast and the landscape changed from dramatic to tropical with the particular shift that happened when altitude surrendered to latitude.

Goa arrived. Not the Goa of beaches and tourists and the particular brand of hedonism that the state would become famous for in later decades. The Goa of 1982 was quieter — a place still shaped by its Portuguese past, the architecture a hybrid of European ambition and tropical practicality, the buildings colour-washed in the particular palette that made every Goan street look like a painting that had been left in the sun: faded but vivid, the colours muted by weather but not defeated by it.

Elina's cousin's house was in Fontainhas — the old Latin Quarter of Panjim, where the streets were narrow and the houses had balconies with wrought-iron railings and the particular beauty of a neighbourhood that had been built for strolling rather than driving. The house was — "house" is generous — a flat on the second floor of a building painted in what had once been blue and was now a colour that existed somewhere between blue and memory. Two rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom with a tap that delivered water at unpredictable intervals and temperatures, and a balcony that overlooked the street and provided the particular vantage point of a person observing life from a comfortable height.

"The bedroom is yours and Prakash's," Elina said. "I'll take the living room. Before you argue: the living room has the balcony, and I want the balcony more than I want privacy."

Prakash, who had been carrying bags with the particular dutiful energy of a man who was pretending that the sleeping arrangements were not awkward, set up his bedroll in the bedroom and opened a book with the speed of a person seeking refuge in text.

The four days that followed were — I will say this simply, because sometimes simple is the only truthful option — the happiest days of my life up to that point. Not because anything extraordinary happened. The opposite. Because nothing extraordinary happened. The days were ordinary. Ordinary in the particular way that happiness is ordinary: it arrives without announcement, it stays without demanding attention, and it leaves without warning, and you only recognize it as happiness afterward, when the ordinariness is gone and you would give anything to have it back.

We painted. Elina and I, on the balcony, our easels side by side, painting the street below — the tiled rooftops, the colour-washed walls, the particular theatre of Fontainhas life: the old woman who swept her doorstep every morning at exactly seven-fifteen with the precision of a person for whom sweeping was not housework but ritual, the baker who delivered pão de casa on a bicycle whose basket was larger than the bicycle, the cat — orange, enormous, the undisputed monarch of the street — who slept in a doorway and moved only when the sun moved, following the warmth with the particular commitment of a creature who had mastered the art of comfort.

Prakash sat inside, reading, occasionally emerging to offer opinions on our paintings that were informed entirely by political theory and had no relationship to visual art. "The composition privileges the colonial architecture," he told Elina, studying her watercolour of the rooftops. "You're centring the Portuguese aesthetic. Where are the Indian elements? Where is the subaltern?"

"The subaltern is sweeping the doorstep, Prakash. She's right there. You just can't see her because you're looking for ideology instead of people."

We ate. God, we ate. Goan food in 1982 — before the tourist economy standardized it into butter-garlic-everything — was the food of a community that had been perfecting its cuisine for centuries and saw no reason to stop: fish curry made with kokum and coconut, the sourness and the sweetness in perfect tension; prawn balchão that was so spicy my eyes watered and so delicious I kept eating; pork vindaloo — real vindaloo, not the British restaurant version, but the original: meat marinated in vinegar and garlic and the particular Goan masala that was a family recipe and a family secret — that dissolved in the mouth with a heat that was not punishment but invitation, the spice saying more, have more, this is what food is supposed to be.

Elina cooked. She cooked the way she read — with intensity, with precision, with the particular focus of a person who treated every activity as worthy of full attention. She chopped garlic with a knife that she'd brought from Fergusson — a small, sharp knife that lived in her bag with her books and her paints, a knife she'd inherited from her grandmother Avó Teresa, who had used it to prepare feasts for twenty and had maintained it with the particular care of a woman who understood that a good knife was a form of power.

"Avó Teresa always said: the knife does the cooking. The cook just decides what to cut." She sliced a kokum fruit — the dark red skin splitting to reveal the tartness inside, the smell sharp and tropical, the particular scent of Goan kitchens that I would forever associate with Elina. "And she said: never marry a man who can't sharpen a knife. A man who can't maintain his tools can't maintain anything."

"Can you sharpen a knife?" Prakash asked me, from behind his book.

"I can barely hold a knife."

"Then by Avó Teresa's standards, you are an unsuitable marriage prospect." Prakash turned a page. "I, however, can sharpen a knife. I learned from my mother. Just putting that information out there."

Elina laughed. The laugh was — I am comparing it to Esha's, because I cannot help comparing, because the two women occupied the same category in my life (women I loved) but different genres (Esha was poetry; Elina was prose): Elina's laugh was not a force of nature. It was a choice. She chose to laugh the way she chose everything — with awareness, with pleasure, with the particular joy of a person who had decided that joy was a practice and not a feeling.

On the third night, we walked to the Mandovi River. The three of us — Prakash slightly ahead, giving us the particular privacy that a good chaperone provides: close enough to be present, far enough to be absent. The river was wide and dark and the lights of the casinos — new, controversial, the first signs of the tourism economy that would transform Goa — reflected on the water in broken columns of gold and red.

Elina took my hand. Not secretly — Prakash could see, and Prakash had long since processed the information and filed it under "accepted reality" — but quietly, the way you take someone's hand when you want to communicate something that words would over-explain.

"I want to live here," she said. "Not in Panjim. In Goa. After college. I want to come back. I want to paint and teach and eat my grandmother's recipes and raise children who speak Konkani and eat fish curry and know that their mother was a whole person, not a locked cupboard."

"Where do I fit in this plan?"

"You paint next to me. On the balcony. With the morning light." She squeezed my hand. The squeeze was — unlike Esha's fierce grip — gentle. Firm but gentle. The grip of a person who was holding something she valued and did not want to damage. "That's the plan. It's simple."

"Simple plans have a way of becoming complicated."

"Only if you let them. The complication is always the letting. The people you let in. The expectations you let accumulate. The compromises you let erode the original shape." She turned to face me. The Mandovi's light played on her face — gold and red, the casino lights, the river's particular alchemy of turning commerce into beauty. "Don't let anything erode this, Farhan. Whatever happens — don't let it become something it's not."

I kissed her. By the river, with Prakash's back turned and the casinos glittering and the particular smell of the Mandovi — salt and fish and the diesel of the ferry boats and the sweetness of the jasmine that grew along the riverbank — surrounding us like a permission.

"I won't," I said.

It was a promise. Like most promises made by the Mandovi at night, it was sincere and it was broken.