Prawn Curry For The Soul

If you are any of the following, dont stop here: a) your faith in humanity has hit recession time, b) your arteries are clogged with cynicism and sarcasm, c) you are jumpy as a springloaded knife ever ready to bite off strange peoples heads, d) are stressed out beyond belief, or e) have made a booking at one of those diabolical health farms. Instead, cancel the last immediately, and go to Goa.

The great unwritten miracle cure for sicknesses of the soul has just been written you fix that week in Goa, and the soul doctor guarantees youll be sound and mellow as the great Golden Bell atop the Se Cathedral. The bell is a reassuring metaphor if there ever was one it once heralded Goas infamous Acts of Faith during the Inquisition, but today tolls for far more benign reasons.

 

And today, Goa itself once also infamous for crime, prostitution and drunkenness is equally benign, with an Alice in Wonderland quality about it. If you still need convincing, consider the following: Only here can you chat up an ex-detective from Scotland Yards homicide squad, who now lives here for several months in the year. Only in Goa will a property developer sip the water from the swimming pool of a housing project three times a day just to check on its purity. In Goa you can make friends with a gigantic Rottweiler who plays with a teddybear and lives with a pussycat. And only here will your hotel proprietor send you parcels of prawn wafers (ironically made in Bangalore) by courier, remembering your insatiable appetite for them?

The drive into Goa from Sawantwadi in Maharashtra is the first eye-opener. You pass through shady whitewashed villages that appear all but deserted. Of course, in the afternoon the streets are absolutely empty as the legendary siesta gets under way, but at any other time too, you wont really find people swarming about like so many manic ants. And then when you do meet people, you suddenly find your big city attitude all aggro, suspicion and sandpaper completely out of place. For no one here is interested in ripping you off (except perhaps the souvenir sellers who anyway are not Goan, but Kashmiri, Tibetan, Rajasthani). It may take you a day or two to completely drop your fists, so to speak, but you will soon find that the good sea air, delicious sea food and sublime Goan temperament has worked its magic. You can relax utterly, drop those defences against any invaders of your peace such as burglars or mosquitoes, and sleep at night with the doors and windows wide open.

But first, when is the best time to visit Goa anyway? A Goan would promptly say anytime, but what usually happens is that Indians do Goa in summer, foreigners flock there in winter (October to March) and no one goes there in the monsoons when it rains by the cloudfull and it is said to be at its most beautiful. The summers are warm, the monsoons verdant and extremely wet; the winters, balmy and most expensive.

Ever since the hippies discovered it, Goa has been a tourist hotspot. They came here to get stoned and drunk on the beaches and everyone else came to see them and be deliciously scandalised. The Tourist, these days is universally acknowledged as part of an abhorrent tribe; so how can you do all the things that tourists do in Goa (which you have to) without feeling like a stick insect?

The solution is simple and difficult. First, get up and go out early. If you are lucky, an insomniac magpie robin will warble ornitho-Mozart piercingly at five oclock in the morning. At this hour, the air is deliciously cool and you can drive around looking more at the lovely countryside than the road. There are discoveries to be made, all the more exciting because you are the only soul around at the time. If for example, you are in the vicinity of Anjuna or Vagator, or even Calangute, (hippie hotspots at one time), its well worth climbing up the steep gravelly slope to the battlements of the Chapora fort to watch the sunrise. The squat, low-walled fort has nothing much to offer per se, except for the view: the sea, iron-grey in the early light; curving rock-guarded beaches (Vagator and Anjuna to the south, Morgim and Mandarem to the north), vast forested valleys and coconut groves, a shadowy green; and the wide mouth of the Chapora river, glimmering like aluminium foil as the sun peers weakly through a

veil of silver-grey cloud. The fort was built by the Portugese in 1617 on the location of a Muslim structure, and was abandoned by them in 1892 after they conquered more territories (the Nova Conquistas) further north.

Of course, you will want to do the beaches too; thats the main reason why most people go to Goa. I found that theres really nothing to beat an early morning walk on the beach. I used to go to Baga before sunrise quite frequently. Here, while enterprising tourists slept in the shadow of fishing boats, packs of stray dogs would be freaking it out in the shallows: watch them for a while to learn a thing or two about how to enjoy life. As the sun comes up, a few fishing boats return from the nights expedition, and freshly netted black pomfret is sold from the boat, to solemn buyers who take their fish seriously. Apart from a few early morning joggers and walkers, you will have the beach to yourself.

Beach bumming too, is an interesting way to spend a morning lie back on a lounger, a chilled beer at your elbow, and watch life pass by. Apart from the swimmers whooping it up amongst the breakers, there are the children, screaming with excitement and fear as the waves thump down onto the sand.

Hawkers, bearing pineapples, coconuts and mangoes, will drift past, casting a canny and practised eye over you. Also a clean-cut young policeman, complete with boots and truncheon who patrols the beach to ensure that no one has taken off all their clothes. But on the loungers curvaceous and uncaring women sunbathe blissfully, as stunned gawping middleclass families file stiffly past, their expressions a priceless mixture of curiosity, shock and revulsion.

But definitely avoid going to the beaches at, and just after, lunchtime, for this is when tour operators with busloads of semi-drunk louts land up en masse, and make a nuisance of themselves.

The other must do destination on every visitors agenda, is Old Goa or Velha Goa. Once known as Goa Dorada Golden Goa it was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Portugese capital, and allegedly, the largest, richest and most magnificent city in Asia. Today, all that remains are some famous churches, the most renowned being the gaunt Basilica of Bom Jesus, housing the body of St Francis Xavier. Across the road sprawls the elegant Se Cathedral, with its single surviving Golden Bell, the Church of St Francis of Assisi, and the Chapel of St Catherine set in the spacious lawns where, during the Inquisition, heretics were brought to the gallows. The altars of the churches are magnificent, but just outside, the hordes of trinket sellers, soft drink stalls and hooting tourist buses dispel the serenity. For that, again, youll have to come very early, and walk about the devastated ruins of the tower of St Augustine, just down the road.

But more than the awesome churches, the fabulous beaches, the lovely hills, the forts, the torrid history, it is the attitude to life which is Goas most alluring facet. And that of course, includes the attitude to food and drink. Here, I can only pay tribute to the gastronomic orgies recently enjoyed, and hope it makes your mouth water: tiger prawns and crab at Cavala (Baga), shark ambatic at O Coqueiro, salmon steak at Souza Lobos, lemon chicken and apple pie from Infanteria Pastelaria (both Calangute), fried fish at the Mandovi (Panjim) and innumerable fish, prawns and mussel curries and glasses of wine, en route! (We kept off the famous pork dishes for fear of that nasty pork parasite which allegedly drills holes in your brain.) At any rate, Goans seem to take as much pleasure in serving you a good meal as you do in eating it.

But Goa too is in peril. The amount of construction work in Calangute, Baga and Arpora, and the outskirts of Panjim, is frightening: Dumper trucks bomb up and down the narrow roads all day. Water shortages are chronic in Anjuna in winter, and developers have been accused of violating environmental laws and browbeating the local population. And God knows what hordes will descend once the Konkan railway gets fully operational. Tourism has always been a double-edged sword: in this wonderland, it now seems poised to come down on its own neck. But still, as the T-shirts on the pavements proclaim, Its better in Goa!