Journal: The elsewhere rains

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever become a) less absent-minded b) more practical and when I put this question out to the Universe, all I get back is a belly laugh. Unlike almost everyone who’s in Delhi this summer, I haven’t minded the heat, because I was absent-mindedly waiting for the monsoons to roll in from the Arabian Sea. That would be the Arabian Sea off Goa, where I moved for three months in 2012 and then again for ten months in 2014, not the Arabian Sea off Delhi (because there isn’t a Sea off Delhi, as we who are roasting here this week are fully aware).

I grew very attached to the monsoons, unlike real Goans, who grumble quite rightly about the humidity and the fungus that grows on everything and the constant splashing around in raincoats and rubber chappals. But it was quiet and peaceful in Calvim and Bastora during the monsoon months, and everything was stained in emerald green or malachite green. There was time to meet old friends, the restaurants that were open in off-season were placid and not crowded, and one beautiful day, my neighbour gladdened my heart by calling across, “So nice it is when it’s only us, no tourists?”

At the end of ten absurdly happy months in Bastora, we decided with some regret not to move to Goa after all for mostly practical reasons. And that word, ‘practical’, reminds me of another thing. There’s so much talk of how hard it is to make a living from fiction writing and how you should save what you get when it comes in for a rainy day, and of course I meant to put my advances and royalties from The Wildings into practical things. Like Fixed Deposits or Bonds or at the very least, Bank Accounts. On reflection, though, there’s practical spending and there’s magical spending.

The Goa years were magic. We’d visited and holidayed in the state on and off for several years, but it was only when Margaret Mascarenhas (dazzling poet, writer, curator of the Prison Art project among many other things) offered me a writing retreat in Calvim that I found out what it was like to live there. I had wonderfully kind neighbours, visiting egrets, a stunning view across the paddy fields down to the river, and remarkably friendly kitchen frogs — and in 2012, Calvim could only be approached by ferry. Crossing the river took just ten minutes, but in that crossing, you placed a wide margin between yourself and the wider world. Every time I got on that ferryboat, I felt as though I’d dropped most of my fears and anxieties about writing on one bank, and picked up a small backpack of ideas and inspiration on the other side. Most of The Hundred Names of Darkness took shape in those three months.

A year or so later, the advances for Hundred Names gave me the courage to do something as impractical as rent a house for almost a year in the village of Bastora, from Anjali Puri, who, like Margaret, turned out to be one of the world’s nicest landladies. The thing about practical spending is that it’s excellent for buying you practical stuff. But magical spending is what you want to do if you’re interested in the accumulation of magical experiences.

There are a lot of goals I’ve ticked off my bucket list over the decades, including driving on the world’s highest road, meeting baby (and grown) elephants, and watching the King of Bhutan score big in an archery tournament. Spending two monsoons in Goa is fairly high on that bucket list.

These are photos from 2012, when I reached Calvim just in time to see the monsoons come in, and spent weeks out on the river on the ferry and other boats, getting to know Goa in the rains.

Magical spending may be massively impractical, but it’s priceless. Meanwhile, I guess we’ll have to head off to the hills soon, seeing as the Arabian Sea and the monsoons are just the tiniest bit of a distance from Delhi.