Go Goa

Monday reminded me of the time I started off as a reporter for a financial daily. Those were the days; I was trying to make myself tougher. The time was harsh and treacherous, the perfect surface for my 22-year-old self to sling my backpack, getting briefly lost before I faced the icy inclines of a workspace. I rode in the back seat of my friend’s Avenger bike as it crept across lush green, rutted surface en route the Konkan region to Goa. We rode, away from the present, where a dark world slipped past, life concentrating only on the 20 yards of road glowing ahead of us.

We drove around certain Goan creek to unwind. Sunlight fell through tall coconut plantations and mangroves and lay in puddles along the logging roads that wound past the Western Ghats packed with perennial waterfalls where butterflies tried to flee from us. It had been raining, incessantly, so the wild flowers, and the grass and the pine needles regained their colour, fresh and green as daisies, crackling beneath my shoes when the road we followed petered out into nothing and I stepped off the bike. In this heavenly stillness, it seemed you could hear every totem within a square acre rustling through the shrubs, and when the breeze rose into a cold wind, the area became a giant whisper.

We dumped our baggage in a hotel around north Goa and my friend said, “Let’s go, explore,” holding his bike keys. We both dressed as soldiers, armed with our umbrellas and raincoats. We started again, working our way down to south Goa through the lush green forest, through a cypress thicket. We chanced upon a lonely, white woman sipping some exotic drink in Mango Tree Café and we stopped by and gave her company for sometime.

Night had come on and our visions blurred with the mild drizzle, grayly darkening our way as somewhere an owl hooted, its noise barely noticeable over the chorus of other insects. I was not any tougher when I came back, but, I finally found my voice.

Meghna Maiti