The boatman knew his life’s score
all right as he draped his hero’s t-shirt on his torso. At the edge of the
Nerul river sat Rajesh and yours truly, friends for a decade who meet intermittently
to jointly soak in Goa, the way we all used to. Agenda-less conversations
centred around the largesse of the land we chose to live in, still not jaded of
seeing the glory of nature each day, reaching out to get that little bit more
out of it each day.
Greed? That’s right, sheer greed. Speaking
of which, twenty years ago, on the bank of this very river, Sabita and Joe set
up their very Spanish sounding shack restaurant, Amigos, with a very simple
business process. Joe would set off on his boat each day to the backwaters of
the Nerul river, sometimes venturing into the sea, and come back with a boatful
of crabs and fish, on which Sabita would work her wonder. Butter, garlic,
rechado and rawa would do the tango and the foxtrot, tossing the seafood delicacies
around, even as the smaller star cast of fries, mash and salads would assemble
to complete the ensemble. And voila! The squid and mussels and prawn with peri
peri would be the stuff Sabita would make, feeding this insatiable greed, from
the time many of us were in our late teens. I went back to Amigos after three
years and it was in a freeze frame. Sabita has never looked different as she
stood, smiling with a “where were you” look, tossing something into her cooking
pan. A little later, Joe ambled along with a shrug, grunt and smile. And like
the boatman, behind them was the river, the falling rain, the hills and the
Church.
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Sabita, without exchanging any words, was
in the midst of dressing up my crab masala (there are no menus here because
life isn’t a menu card) which appeared shortly. The beauty of the crabs Joe
catches and Sabita cooks lies in the nimbleness that lies beneath their tough
shells. If you know how to work at it, the shell cracker that Sabita gives need
not be touched. Always check for one inevitable soft point near the joint,
press hard to compromise that point, prise the shell off like the top of a
Tuborg beer pint bottle; the treasure that lies under is flawless. Soft,
succulent crab meat with the masala tantalisingly close. For the very hard
parts, do a quick sink of the teeth to create an opening and use that as a
wedge to peel. Don’t do the sledgehammer on the crab. It crushes the meat and
your aspirations of a good meal; might as well have the boring and the
adventure-less minced crab cakes.
Enjoying the crab appreciation course,
Rajesh Khanna, my buddy, grinned. He was on the verge of yet another adventure,
having done with running a food court. After cycling for most of the past three
years, he has turned hobby into work, having picked up 15 mountain bikes and
five kayaks to take tourists and locals around the river and up the Aguada
trail for a walk in the woods, through jungle routes he too is discovering.
Rajesh has blurred the lines between weekdays and weekends, making a Tuesday
afternoon as exciting as a Saturday night, another of the growing tribe, who
have just let go, say more hellos to life in Goa.
At this point, the temptation to present
Bill Bryson is overpowering because who else would say this better than he does
in his book A Walk in the Woods. Bryson describes what he calls “the world on
foot”: “You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no
special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist
in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, ‘far removed
from the seats of strife,’ as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram
put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.”
Well Rajesh, all the best. With Sabita’s
crab, and the river and the pouring rain, all that trudged were my thoughts,
till sleep took me into a nether world of glorious nothingness.
