“Gokarna? That’s in Karnataka isn’t it? South of here. In India. This is Goa – it’s not really India.”
I had asked a Swede who had been coming to Agonda Beach in Goa for eight years about the beaches to the south in the state of Karnataka. He preferred Agonda. “Gokarna? More young people. More crowded. It’s Indian you know.”
Curious – because Goa is also an Indian state. But then I too have a sense that somehow Goa feels unlike any of the India we have visited, yet another of the many Indias.
The evidence is in the everyday. In downtown Panjim, the capital, we walked our first real Indian sidewalks: tiled, wide, mostly intact, clean by India standards and more or less unobstructed by the usual clutter of parked cars, motorbikes and shop goods.
Street signs (we have rarely seen street signs elsewhere in India) carry names like Avnda Pe Angelo and Avda Dom Joao Castro. The Panjim obituary columns mourn the deaths of Minguel Filipe Pereira, Violeta Bernardeta Roriguesa and Maria Conceicao Mascarenhas.
Although Panjim is little more than a large town, there is also little of the usual traffic frenzy and pollution. Some drivers actually slow down as we stand at street crosswalks, one or two actually stopped, unprecedented in the India we’ve travelled.
There is also far less of the usual garbage tossing (wrappers, plastic chai cups, water bottles), at least in the central downtown. Piles of garbage there were, but we also saw signs of it being swept in piles and taken away in garbage trucks. When we unwrapped packaged ice creams in a small shop on Agonda beach, the shop owner pointed to his small refuse bin – a first in two months.
People somehow look different here as well, the result in part of 450 years of Portuguese occupation and its slave-running. Amid these faces and voices, hearing the swooshing palms and surf, passing under flame tree blossoms and among pink, red and white bougainvillea, I recollect walks and conversations in the West Indies or along the northeast coast of South America. It is easy to feel that you are seeing Africans, Indians, Portuguese, Arabs, Malaccans, Indonesians and peoples from other lands mingled for centuries in every possibility in these Arabian Sea port towns.
Voices are noticeably softer and quieter here, the smiles seemingly quicker, easier, somehow more trusting. It is a small place, as a state, in its villages and even in its modest-sized capital. There is little of what so often feels like the aggressive manner of so many Indian shop keepers, tuk-tuk drivers and touts. Life on the street feels more patient, confident.
Of course the cuisine is also different – pork, mutton, and plenty of fish, including prawns, cooked with coconut , palm vinegar, peanuts and cashews in a local mélange of hot, sweet and sour sauces.
About half the population is Catholic Christian. Large glistening white churches tower over the towns, crosses are everywhere. On a Sunday bus ride we pass several of these churches, the congregations overflowing into outer courtyards under the scorching sun, their singing voices – the unIndian sound of Christian hymns – passing into our bus windows.
Goa – like the Mexican Yucatan or the north Cuba beaches – is also home to fly-in tourists arriving for a couple weeks from Europe and East Asia. This means restaurants with Indian pizzas and India German apple pie, which we also enjoy along the way.
Of course there are also reminders of the surrounding Indian world. Well-dressed tourists from nearby Mumbai piling out of tour buses and private SUVS with bulldozer bumpers. Small herds of cows plodding up and down the beach looking lost, shitting along the way, along with wandering dogs and pigs.
But overall? Yes, I can see why a person might say that Goa isn’t really India.
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