Goan Girl
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Two hundred and fifty metres straight out my door, and another 250 right is Galaxy Photo Studio, which has taken care of all passport and visa photos we have shot over several years, and where a week ago I blew up a portrait of my parents at the finally-opened Abu Dhabi Louvre for a framed Christmas gift following their visit – one of many moments captured and printed here. Two-fifty by 250, the walk there to me is second nature and comes as regularly now as every other month.
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My usual guy is there – Indian, young, handsome, always curious about my hair. I realise he must know so much about my life at this point.
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If he likes me as much as his eager eyes regularly suggest, if there is still somewhere some folder on that blinking retro desktop of past albums I have print and shed here, then one might find a history of Issa and me:
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A tangle of dusty knees as a raw self portrait of us outside the very first stoop we ever rented together (with the help of our adoring mums); me mockingly pinching my nose while hovering over a bed of glistening prawns one early morning at the Mina Fish Market; Issa schlepping a gigantic, glossy, spotted hamour over his comparatively clean, clear, effortlessly-bronzed shoulder to take to the cashier, then to the tiny counter where you can have it curried and cooked for nothing money; our joint birthday party spent in bed with a warm bottle of Moet and Californication on DVD (one of the few non-Action English shows I could put him religiously on to]; us slathered head to toe in dark, Dead Sea mud, high as kites on a beach at the lowest point on Earth in Jordan, our first-ever vacation; Issa as bare-backed chef flexing his biceps and cooking skills in our tiny kitchen, in which, perfectly, only two people could shuffle through, kissing hipbones every time; nothing but frosty Corona bottles lined up like some type of High School Stonehenge in the mini fridge-freezer…
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…Six years of this stuff, just a general poorness that would’ve read well on Instagram if it was around at the time. I want to ask Galaxy Photo guy outright if he has the whole thing in archives – “be honest” – and offer to pay him for it. Once there I manage not to.
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He acknowledges me with bright, wide eyes – he wants to know about Goa, I can tell, and if I took him up on his recommendations – but those eyes flutter away when a pair of Emirati men follows me through the door. There is a queue but they have expressed their entitlement by leaving the Nissan Patrol running outside. The now lax queue also includes a Pakistani man laden with manila folders with lots of other faces and names pinned to them, and an Indian couple and their newborn in a stroller.
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"Passport photos?" I blurt out, just to make sure I am known amongst the group, then sit. But the storekeeper nods me over to the backroom and says he'll be a minute. He huddles with the family to whisper a conversation in native tongue, while other people outside start talking – I hear a translated version of the word African somewhere from someone – and I re-tie my long braids in a way that discreetly hides my severely shaved undercut. What can I tell him about Goa? I think.
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“I’m sorry, you’ve just got to go,” was all it took, all Issa said in the end, to get me to go. I don’t know how I chose where I went, I just went, because this, this breakup nonsense, to me, could only be temporary; that’s how unaware, in denial, of our slow but gradual decline I was.
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I drift back to Week Two in Goa when, with no word from Issa, reality finally hits. 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It is Wednesday, my last Wednesday, and the only day Anjuna’s massive hippie flea market takes place. I can’t miss it.
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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 Galaxy Photo guy recommendation for reggae music and fast tattoos – 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.
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The photo studio guy returns with his camera, but just says "uhh...” while the family man, rocking his baby in his arms, peers into the room.
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I wave them in. "Oh! Yes, yes, of course." We switch places.
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"Because she is about to fall asleep."
"I thought they were done and waiting, no worries at all."
The father nods thanks and stands with baby under the lights. Studio guy becomes photographer guy and slips off his sandals, hops on a stool, leverages himself with one hand on father's shoulder as he zooms the lens straight down into baby's smushed, sleepy face.
She can barely keep her eyes open and I realise I've got my camera out too. It takes several minutes for us to capture her actually looking into his lens, with irises deep and dark, like galaxies.
Father nods at me again and leaves.
I sit on the random purple velvet chaise lounge in front of a draped white cloth and focus intensely on reining in an imaginary double chin. For my turn, it all takes seconds; the studio guy is so flustered with the Emiratis waiting. "Sorry, sorry, sorry," he whispers, squinting behind the camera, but I am in no rush.
There is a small tea shop next door that Issa and I were once familiar with on extra-hungry days, so when he begs me to wait 10 minutes, I go there. "You want chai?" I say, breezing out the door.
"No no, no thank you. Ek minute, uh?"
I wave a hand not caring. It is the first day of March, the pressure that new years bring is gone – I have failed – and so all I have to do, all I have left, is to get on that plane. That's all, that's all, easy breezy.
Spotlessly-dressed Indian execs and labourers in dusty, blue jumpsuits clear the widest possible path for me to approach the tea counter.
"One chai?"
Immediately a hand slides steaming milky tea in a tiny cup forward through a face-sized square in a glass booth. All the shelves around it are stocked with retro tea thermoses, Lipton and Chips Omani boxes, and colourful pictures of several dozen types of blended fruit drinks you can order, each one layered in their smoothie glasses, fruit by fruit, like a contained rainbow.
One display has a plate of hard-boiled eggs, and a hand inside grabs one to slice and prepare a simple Indian breakfast for, presumably, the man rolling up his shirt sleeves and adjusting his tight trousers to practically squat at a table out front, tie over his shoulder. It’s almost hard to tell here and now where Abu Dhabi ends and India begins.
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Back on the beach at Curlies I have eggs too, but scrambled spicy and guzzled down with a freshly chopped coconut, and at this hour, the shack-like 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 from snapping a photo. I have to refrain from a lot of things.
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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.
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I don’t want to read the last page just yet, so I order a beer.
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…
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In Abu Dhabi I am palming the teaboy one dirham coin, and he bends to see what my arm continues up to.
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"Ethiopia?" he asks with a somehow toothy and toothless grin.
"No. West Indies. Cricket? Brian Lara?"
So practised is this response – I even had to use it in Goa, where they called me Michelle Obama; to a few Nigerian prostitutes who mistakenly plopped themselves down at my table the other night at a bar – that I forget that I've even said it until he responds: "Yessss. Chris Gayle... Ohhhh, such a funny guy, this Gayle. A fun cricket team, wallah."
I smile.
"Ohh, thank you, thank you,” sings the teaboy. “Have a nice day, sister."
I like the sister so I wish him a “the best day”, and the sea parts again and I sip outside, enjoying the warmth and the swaying winter breeze, a clinging breeze that keeps blowing me back…
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…
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 (even though I think there is a laminate from Galaxy Photo that says, or did for many years say, otherwise).
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 dribbling 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.
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My photos are ready, I assume, with the studio guy popping his head out the door and waving me away, awake. The Emirati men are back in their car and one raises a palm asking after his pictures, which will be brought to his window stat.
"Sorry, sorry, sorry,” prattles on the studio guy under his breath again as he presents to me (rather than hands to me) my packet, ceremoniously adding: “Please come again.” With the transaction he smiles, as if to also say sorry babe, busy day, next time it's a date.
I immediately open it up and slide the eight sharply-cut frames into my palm. It is me but it isn’t. My eyes are pools, are galaxies, too, like the baby’s; they’re far, far away.
I think it is thoughtful that he has Photo-Shopped out my septum piercing, and I’m not surprised that he has lightened my skin and matted it of any imbalances. He wants to make perfectly sure that, wherever I am going, I have no trouble at all in being approved for the visa.