The village hasn’t quite woken up, the heavy mist a snuggy blanket over the coconut trees and the homes. Even the dogs aren’t barking, because they have no one to bark at. Not even the pesky monkeys who haven’t begun their daily business of breaking tiles.
A Goan morn, in Loutolim, could be in circa 1940 and is no hurry to change. In a little while you see a group of ladies walking up to the village spring, with a song in their hearts to wash clothes and get the morning going. The dogs get excited at the first sign of activity. The podder has come and gone grumbling that the bag in which he drops bread doesn’t have the customary number slip which indicates how many he has to drop, a far bigger national crisis than you would imagine.
The Church goers are dressed and walking to the square, and Menino the hero of so many of these columns begins another day in
office, his first samosa rolled and dipped in oil, an activity as holy as a dip in the Ganges. Clearly the only piece of Goa ever left are the villages of South Goa, touched by time but at a pace which so slow that the slowness of the past ages preserves the land and its people. It’s a Goa which isn’t changing and it’s a Goa which has survived. Clearly the survival of the slowest is a movement which we should all back and piggy back on. We need a land where cell phones don’t reach, where telephones are erratic, where the streets are full of animals, birds,
monkeys, squirrels and crickets your children grow up watching and playing with, where the homes are large and hearts are larger, where
music is played and songs are sung and dining tables used less for eating but for long languid chats, where town and country, the village
and the Vatican, Priests and politicians are subjects, at the end of which reputations are made or marred, but all in good spirit felt and
consumed in equal measure.
It is in the villages, where Goa maintains its courtesies, where birthdays are remembered even without Face book updates and everything is an occasion. The drive from Loutolim to Cortalim through the old route which hugs the river through Rassaim and Quelossim and Cortalim,
takes you past the same images of Loutolim. Two women in front of a home laughing, school children in uniform trudging and
kicking a little stone and at Rasssaim there is a “traffic jam” because the coconut plucker who is asked to come about two months ago
has decided to turn up- unannounced of course- and no one has the heart to turn him back. This is a micro gram sabha of sorts,
held on the road side to allocate time slots for different homes who need the service of the plucker.
For folks like us who were merely passing by, we have no option but to get off and figure why the road isblocked. And rather than ask what is going on, it is best to figure
and participate in the grand exercise of work
allocation for the coconut plucker in the
middle of the road.
In a bit all is well. It is getting to that time
when Jogesh Café at Cortalim would open, my
regular Monday morning pit stop. Jogesh’s tea
café has been refurbished with more space,
swankier tables, but thankfully the same hot
and sweet halwa with currants to be washed
down with special chai. Fundamentally, stuff
like this makes the world so much a better
place.
There are so many such journeys, mainly
in South Goa with the same vignettes and the
same characters that is the essence of this
land. Here it is not “kenna fast, kenna slow”
as the Goa tourism tagline says. Here it is
always, always slow. This is the heart of the
slow movement, where time is a friend. This
is where children grow up in the old fashioned
way, brought up by the village and its beings.
For me every journey to Loutolim and back
is like pressing pause and rewind button back
to a time, we never lived in, and yet so many
of us do so in the villages of South Goa.
