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Penguin Books Ltd - Katarina Kakar

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113 pages

English

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Many people dream of escaping the stresses and strains of urban life and moving to Goa. Katharina Kakar and her husband, the psychoanalyst and writer Sudhir Kakar, followed their dream and boldly took that plunge buying a charming old house in a tranquil south Goa village, where they hoped to find a whole new way of living and working. Ten years later, they are still there, living the idyll and the reality of life in Goa. So which is the real Goa? Is it all about sun and sand, beaches and bikinis, feni and vindaloo? This book captures the allure of all these, as well as the festivals and rituals that punctuate the rhythm of village life. It portrays fascinating local characters, ranging from ageing hippies, beach boys and elusive workmen to the aristocratic residents of Goa s grand old mansions. But it also reveals lesser-known aspects of Goa: the hidden often shocking histories of its colonial past; and the debates and fissures that engage and divide Goan society today. In part personal memoir and travelogue, in part an insightful look at Goan history and society, this book portrays Goa with all its paradoxes and problems, its seductive pleasures and, above all, its unique and enduring charm.

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Memoir

India

Informations

Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	15 décembre 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789351185710
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0750€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Katharina Kakar

MOVING TO GOA
Contents
Introduction
1. Moving to Goa
2. Corner of Paradise
3. Sex on the Beach
4. My Village
5. Where the Arrow Struck
6. Houses of Chandor, Houses of Loutolim
7. Village Rituals
8. The Stoned Pig-Hippies and Neo-hippies
9. Nustiyachi Koddi: Fish Curry and Rice
10. Moving towards Christmas
11. Sacred Groves in Secret Forests
12. The Curse of the Red Gold Rush
13. Visiting the Migrant Gods
14. Horses, Slaves and Women
15. Monsoon Raga
16. How Foreign Is Foreign?
Footnotes
Introduction
1. Moving to Goa
2. Corner of Paradise
3. Sex on the Beach
4. My Village
5. Where the Arrow Struck
6. Houses of Chandor, Houses of Loutolim
7. Village Rituals
8. The Stoned Pig-Hippies and Neo-hippies
9. Nustiyachi Koddi: Fish Curry and Rice
10. Moving towards Christmas
11. Sacred Groves in Secret Forests
12. The Curse of the Red Gold Rush
13. Visiting the Migrant Gods
14. Horses, Slaves and Women
15. Monsoon Raga
16. How Foreign Is Foreign?
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright Page
GOA
Introduction
I have always had a passion for stories, legends and travelogues that shed light on a specific culture, its people and their ways of living and thinking. I am more interested in the petites histoires , as the French call them, stories that revolve around anecdotes, experiences and observations, in contrast to the grand r cit , which tackles a theme in its historical complexity, order and totality. In my experience, it is the petites histoires that allow us to see the colours and shades of a culture, giving a sharper insight into the layers, patterns and unique characteristics of a place. As my husband Sudhir Kakar once wrote, The concreteness of the story, with its metaphoric richness, is perhaps a better path into the depths of emotion and imagination, into the core of man s spirit the melodic and scenic nature of inner life, the Proustian nature of memory and mind . 1
Looking into petites histoires does not mean losing sight of the bigger picture . Otherwise the story to be told is in danger of remaining a mystifying jumble of trees without the pattern of the forest . 2
My account of Goa, where I have settled down and lived for the past ten years, is very personal. It is nurtured by my limitless curiosity to explore; and my love for the other , which has led me to travel around the world. It is reflected, too, in my deciding to study Asian religions and anthropology at university. Mine is the gaze of the outsider-the bhaile , as Goans call us-which at times also becomes that of an insider. It is a gaze of heartfelt love, but one that does not shy away from looking into the darker sides of Goan history and life. This book is my tribute to the people of this beautiful land, with its gleaming white churches, enchanting houses and its close-knit village communities; it is my quest to understand how they live, and the forces that shape their identity.
1
Moving to Goa
The train entered Margao railway station with an ear-splitting screech of brakes. After a twenty-seven-hour journey from New Delhi, we had finally arrived. Exhilaration trumped tiredness as Sudhir and I, our housekeeper, Kailash, his wife and two sons, and our dog piled into two taxis for our new home in the village of Benaulim, a few kilometres away. The house had been under renovation for many months and we did not expect to move into a finished home with every screw in place. But to find it at the same stage as I had last seen it four months earlier came as a shock. The floors were yet to be laid and the electric wiring was still to be done. Toilet fittings, still in their original packing, were stacked in what was to be the living room but was at this moment a totally unlivable room. There we stood, with boxes of personal belongings, pieces of luggage and a confused dog in a dusty, messy house unfit for human habitation, surrounded by a handful of construction workers who were looking at us as if we had arrived from Mars. We had no clue what to do next.
Exhausted after weeks of work, travelling and packing up two households-our flat in Berlin and the one in Delhi-I looked wordlessly at Sudhir before finally blurting out, Let s just get out of here for a few days. I needed to recharge my batteries in order to deal with this situation. So that s what we did. Kailash offered to stay back with our belongings, while we moved for three days into a nearby beach hotel to swim, eat highly spiced seafood and go for long walks on the beach-the stuff of a Goa dream vacation for middle-class India. After this relaxing break, we returned to the house, rolled up our sleeves and, with the help of Eric, our construction supervisor, hired thirty construction workers, who camped, cooked and converted our garden into a public toilet for the next three months.
In 2002, when the idea of moving back to India took shape, we were both living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We had no desire to move back to one of the polluted Indian metropolises with their traffic snarls, aggressive drivers and an infrastructure constantly teetering on the brink of collapse. Sudhir wanted good Internet connectivity and, because he travels a great deal, a place that was well connected by air. I was dreaming of the ocean and a wild garden. Goa seemed our best bet. Besides its bonus of natural beauty, it met both our minimum demands as a place in which to finally settle down. We decided to spend our ten-day spring break from Harvard on the sandy beaches of north Goa to figure out if we would actually like living here. We had no idea what to expect. I had not been to Goa for more than ten years, and Sudhir for more than twenty. Since our Easter vacation was short, I had contacted a real-estate broker through the Internet. In 2002, it was still possible to find an old Portuguese-style house in Goa that we could afford. As is the wont of real-estate brokers, for the first four days, our man mostly showed us houses which were ruins he had not been able to get rid of for many years, even to innocents like us. In the last three days of our stay, the places he showed us became more interesting. We had come with the intention of getting a feel of Goa, to drive around its villages and explore the area beyond its famed beaches, but we certainly did not expect to leave with a signed contract to buy a house. The very last house we saw is the one we are living in today.
For several years, we had spent our winters in Delhi and summers in Berlin. As Sudhir wrote in his recently published memoir, We were both tired of the nomadic life with its European summers that had appeared so attractive at first glance. One never knew which books or clothes were where. More important, the regular move from one country to another distanced us from friends in both Berlin and Delhi. Since we were away for months, we could not become completely absorbed in their concerns and day-to-day lives that had continued in our absence. The gaze of the anthropologist was forcing itself into our eyes that only wished to be those of close friends. 1 We were now ready to plunge into a different life, grow new roots, redefine our priorities, and exchange the buzz of city life for the tranquillity of village life, lulled by the soothing sound of swaying coconut palms.
The suddenness of our decision took my friends by surprise. Their responses ranged from enthusiasm to doubts about my sanity. Friends who had known me as a night owl and city girl, expressed amazement that I was voluntarily giving up my academic career and the stimulation of city life with its restaurants, concerts and other lively cultural offerings for a village where only the disappearance of a pig or the petty fights of the neighbours would make up our day s headlines. To cut a long story short, yes, of course I do miss the buzz at times. But surrounding yourself with books and living a creative life, attracting people you want to spend time with, can be done anywhere in this global world- especially in a place like Goa, where we are never short of friends and interesting visitors dropping in. And, anyway, I get out often enough to India s metropolises or abroad to refuel the part of me that is hungry for well-conceptualized art exhibitions and stimulating discussions. So neither my husband nor I have ever regretted the step we have taken, to live in a village among people whose lives are so different from ours and whose concerns we do not necessarily share. If we had found, over time, that Goa was not the place we imagined, we would simply have turned around and moved in a different direction. We share an attitude, which Sudhir once defined very succinctly when he said, I d rather regret what I have done, than regret what I have not done. Luckily we have nothing to regret. We simply love being here.
In May 2003, at the peak of the heat when one needs a couple of cold showers to survive the day, we settled into the half-renovated rooms of our 100-year-old farmhouse. It took a long and trying three months, in the middle of our first Goan monsoon, for our house to be finally ready. And this did not happen without daily battles, when I tried to make our workers reverse their usual daily routine of extended breaks with short periods of work in between. I could easily have been lecturing them on how to land on the moon or how to bake a thin-crust pizza for all the difference it made to their work routines. They had already made up their mind that I was an odd kind of white memsahib and should thus be ignored.
I got this reputation within the first week, when I decided that the garbage and construction debris strewn around the acre of ground surrounding the house needed to be cleared away. None of the workers was willing to do this. They pretended they had no idea of what I was trying to say. My Hindi is fairly poor, but this was not a language problem. It was their way of getti