[Goa]

​

“I’m sorry,” he said, with his eyes downcast. “You’ve got to go.”

​

So I went, because there is nothing I wouldn’t do for Issa.

 

So, there I am, the place is Goa, India, and I am stirring on a beach from a light breeze tickling my face and arms. After a good yawn and stretch, there I think, I am Goan Girl – I like my joke, I laugh inside – and I don’t miss him.

 

The ground beneath me is stiff and grainy, and it’s still dark out. I can only just identify two burnt-red bodies next to me, one tough and heavily tattooed, another a lot more slight, pudgy in places, wrapped awkwardly in a stiff rattan mat. We have been sleeping in a way that is not turning on alarm bells in my head.

 

I turn over as quietly as possible in search of my bag. It is under my hoodie, which I’ve rolled up to use as a pillow, and I am seeing now that we are high off the ground – no longer just in the chemical sense.

 

Fully roused now, I remember the three of us being too drunk and stoned to get back on our mopeds and find our ways home. So we rented one of the dirty carpeted, open-air beach shacks on stilts for the night. It was joyously cheap – we actually howled with exaltation in the moonlight at knowing we could accumulate just enough rupees to make it happen.

 

It is Wednesday, my last Wednesday, and the only day Anjuna’s massive hippie flea market takes place. I can’t miss it. Because if Issa won’t, then hippie holistic stuff – dreamcatchers and gems, earthy oils and heady incense – just might be able to tell me where I’m going next.

 

I wouldn’t know where to find my moped now though. I leave a note telling the guys that I’ve headed to Curlies a short walk away – a constant touristic reference point for its bamboo vibe with reggae music, fast food and faster tattoos offered out of a backroom – for breakfast, and will be there reading until 9am. I could use their company out of here and into town; but I am aware that if they don’t wake in time, I must carry on regardless. It’s just one of those trips, I’m Goan Girl.

 

I have eggs, scrambled spicy and guzzled down with a freshly chopped coconut, and at this hour, the tastefully ramshackle venue is just me, a scabby dog, its fleas and an old, speckled German couple in faded swimwear on the balcony sharing a small wet joint.

 

He is gazing out into the Arabian Sea, she is reading a German translation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and they are dusty to look at, but also kind of nice to look at, like this is us and we’re here while others are there and we’re fine with all that. I have to refrain myself from snapping a photo. I have to refrain myself from a lot of things.

 

I have my collected short stories by Hanif Kureishi with me. I am reading about a couple’s struggle to get four blue chairs they just bought back to their apartment, and am finding that they are struggling with something else quite entirely. I have read this story many times before – I even wrote an essay on it at university – but maybe I never understood it because here I am, as far as Goa with it, amazed all over again at the weight simple words can carry, of the surprising thickness of life’s little snapshots.

 

I don’t want to read the last page just yet, so I order a beer.

 

On first arrival to Goa, I had rested my rucksacked self in the best hostel I could find in the area last minute, on 31 de Janeiro Street (Portuguese for January 31), and was stunned to also find that I had checked in on that date itself. Clearly, the world was mine, this was where I was meant to go.

 

Panjim – nicknamed Asia’s only Latin Quarter – was romantically overrun with old Portuguese colonial architecture and long, curly, heavily-accented street names, and I stayed there rather than with all the tourists on the other side of the bridge because I thought it might feel like being in two places at once; gazing at two points in history.

 

Taking a day or two to cry, remain close to the common room wi-fi, familiarize myself with exactly how many rupees were expected of me for one large Kingfisher beer at the corner shop (or three), I finally mopped myself up to ask the girl at the front desk to find me a place crazy enough to let me rent a moped even if I didn’t know how to ride one. Barely even looking up from her computer, she pointed at two young men heading out the door, and said: “Go with them.”

 

I do not know if it was my sad eyes and ‘afterthought-ish’ attire that made her assume I would be the type to just walk off with some strange men, or if it was just the friendly Goan way to do so, but she cocked her head to further her point, and so I shrugged and went after them – tattooed Tom and hilarious Hobbit Charlie.

 

Tom had an actual fully functioning compass on him, and in return I had no direction. Together we never got lost, unless we intentionally wanted to.

 

It didn’t take nearly long enough to tourist our way through every snaking jungle path to every tucked-away teahouse and vegetarian café, to every gracefully decaying temple, to every roadside market where lanky, chain-smoking Russians bargained way too hard over handwoven or plant-dyed goods. Eventually, it was just a matter of picking one of many shady spots near any body of water to share a spliff and drifting conversation in peace.

 

Tom, picking at his many scabs, said backpacking Thailand was next – naturally, he had found a way to exchange casual labour for room and board at various hostels and homestays along the way; this is what he did, he was a ‘Goer’ – and I had nothing to say for myself back. For the first time, though, that realisation did not frighten me; maybe I could be a ‘Goer’ too.

​

Freshly high for the umpteenth time many hot, hazy evenings later – and after joining a small crowd on the sand in lighting tea candles, whispering wishes into overpriced paper lanterns to be released into the stars – we three hugged in a circle with the tops of our heads touching and agreed it was the most magical moment of our lives.

 

We waved goodbye to our dancing souls puffing up and out over the ocean, all the time laughing, never stopping being light and buoyant like the lanterns as we skipped over to the nearest late-night club to dance until the music stopped and I had to be rested on a sofa.

 

When I eventually started losing height, Tom, from Manchester, rested my head on his lap, played with my hair while sitting very still on the beach, and allowed me the longest pleasure of giggling as I muttered the word Mancunian over and over into his pockets.

 

A part of me said a prayer to Issa too, asking, begging, if this was what he meant, what he wanted. Is this far enough? Am I warmer, colder? How far, how high, how much longer? I fell asleep on salty limbs to these whispers, while an imaginary hand wiped them from escaping too far past my mouth, like they were strings of spit about to dribble down my chin. Luckily, most of this ganja-babble was tuned out by the steady crash of waves and the sh-shhh from Tom floating above me.

 

But now Tom is a no-show, a no-go, at Curlies, even after past 9 I take all the time in the world in stretching to signal a waiter for the bill.

 

As it’s coming, a soggy paper lantern from last night’s festivities washes up on shore, like a dead jellyfish, and reminds me of the wishes we released into the stars. For the life of me I don’t know what I wished for. Even now, if offered a second wish, I have no clue what it’d be. The fact is the flea market is about to open, and Goan Girl must find a way back out through the brush to the road side, flag down another stranger to help her find her way, and all before it gets too hot because as a rule she seems to never walk with hats, sunglasses or sunscreen. Or maps or compasses.

 

It’s what was intended and therefore it’s what I have to do. Tom would be proud, of my ‘Going’. Maybe even Issa would be, too.

 

I walk over to the washed-up paper lantern. I go ahead and assume that this particular one is the very same I launched last night with my eyes closed. I pick it up, scrunch it into a soggy ball and, again with eyes shut, ceremoniously throw it in the nearest thing resembling a garbage bin behind Curlies’ outdoor bathroom shack.

 

Then I look up to the unrealness of Tom strolling towards me with his trouser legs rolled up, kissing the shore with his pinky toes.

 

“Found you!” he yells, and I really do hear it.