Monsoon in the mind

It’s the second time I met the man with the Anton Selmer tenor sax in less than a year. The last time we met he was soothing the crowds with his brass band at the annual feast-day of the San Sebastian chapel. It was raining colour in the tiny ward of Fontainhas in Panjim, gleaming off rainbow walls and festive dresses. The man with the tenor sax had made the colours his own, injected life into still life.

Here he was again, now respectful to the rain. He wound down, urging his colleagues to cut the weather some slack. He couldn’t be bothered when an overweight leader of the people walked in at the Sunday lunch hosted by an on-the-make lawyer at Merces village near Panjim. The man with the tenor sax put it down and sat resolutely back to watch the sky raining pearls and making the land so green. He would not fete the political thug. The man with the tenor sax is a monsoon rebel. A good man.

He didn’t have a choice. It’s that time of the year in Goa when people shed skin like the land, become what they want to be.

Maybe the colours too are responsible. Have you seen the green? Really seen it? Greener than the green in the mind’s eye. It’s that kind of green. The colours, and the music coming down in sheets.

“Look at the rain,” said the jolly Goan man called Joseph to my left.

“Yes,” I said, lazily waving a glass of wine. “Lovely. It’s so green, so quiet. Even when the rain is loud it’s so quiet.”

“Yes,” he agreed, joining me in stating the obvious, in that act making what is given freely our own. “Beautiful, no? What do you do?” he asked me.

“A lot before, not so much now. But it feels like a lot. A sense of freedom, you know…”

“Ah, a gypsy,” he gently cut into my babble. “May be I am too. Are you Bengali? I speak Bengali. I grew up in Calcutta. I compere programmes, but I love to teach karate.”

Lulled by the rain, a few minutes later I had agreed to be his student. Nobody laughed, not even my daughter. The monsoon makes her more forgiving.

My family and I drove off to visit friends at Moira village to the north, deliberately taking a longer but prettier route upriver, trading in the man with the tenor sax for Buena Vista Social Club. We drank beer, ate a Burmese lunch (somehow, it tastes better than a Myanmarese lunch), gently made fun of the world for not being there. We admired the cutting of purple frangipani, the lovely temple champa that had taken root over the urgent attention of the German Shepherd and Irish Setter pups. Our children played with cats.

We were at peace. It was a good thing to do: who could tell what tomorrow would bring?

It brought more rain. It obliterated the view of the Mandovi River from my balcony. The gulmohar tree shed the last of its orange crown jewels. My neighbour the kingfisher, a pack of warblers, and a tomcat took shelter in the porch, too much in awe of the wet to do what they often do, chase one another through the plantain and basil, chillies and lemon grass. They didn’t mind my joining them.

They left a little later when the rain broke. It was twilight. It was so quiet you could almost hear a lotus bloom. Almost.

Goa, Aparanta of Old, the land at the horizon during the times of the ancients, gets this way in the rains. There are fewer that visit. The children of the Dead Sea have gone away home for some months, along with their confusion and anger. Other exchange-rate royalty, ever present in season-summer from October to February, too are absent: planeloads of charter tourists from Middle-Europe and the gut of Britain, and new Tsars. Voluble India is largely away, and with them the tides of Chatter-ji and Chatter-jain, and those that arrive with the world for a high net worth taste of Goa’s trance madness, from Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Hyderabad.

When the tide of pay-per-use humanity begins to recede in April, resident Goans and Goans at heart take to life like happy crabs, potter about empty beaches, and prepare for the rains. There’s a minor orgy of seafood, as the rains will banish that for the months the sea needs to replenish itself, if bottom-trawlers will let it. Produce, both fruits de la mer and of the land are procured, cured, pickled and stored. Rice is cleaned, spices made ready to warm the body. Dried neem leaves and newspapers are employed to soak up future wet from clothes, books and spaces.

When the rains come, living-giving—and life-taking to the careless and the unfortunate—it changes people, fuels eccentricities, makes poets of ordinary people, engenders conviviality, makes large and small thugs—politicians, taxi drivers—into gentlemen and gentlewomen. The fisherwoman at the municipal market doesn’t yell at me; she burbles and croons. Young cashew feni, the potent second-distillate of cashew fruit that will cheer both life and death through the rains, arrives (it is narrowly presaged by its delicate first distillate, urrack, that my friends and I call “Goan Beaujolais” in audacious moments). This creaky paradise brought by hippies and happenstance to helter-skelter bloom, a transplanted banana republic without a dictator, plays out its tricks to any Marquez-in-the-mind. Three months of cleansing rain. One hundred days of solitude.

“It is or is it better to be blessed than to be clever?” my animator friend Sonny, who has moved from Southern California to Goa, texted me. I was watching the rain at a no-name restaurant by the paddies, soothed by flambéed cashew feni and jovial chatter about soccer, a Goan passion play. It seemed Sonny was watching the rain too—it was that sort of SMS.

“Por qué?” I texted back, a polite way of asking ‘what in the sixth letter of the alphabet do you mean?’

“No sé,” he replied, “una pregunta para hoy. Nada mas.” Loosely translated, it means ‘Take it easy. Just a question for today, that’s all.’

Then he decided I merited a better explanation. After all, we had agreed to meet for dinner.

“Sorry, don’t feel like leaving home,” he messaged. “Just opened this excellent, melancholic bottle of red.”

It has to be the rain.


(This piece was published in Mint, a newspaper and Internet venture of Hindustan Times and Dow Jones & Co. It can also be accessed here)