Through the wet windshield there’s a blur of an
image of a man hunched on a cycle covered in plastic carrying a crucial cargo,
tightly wrapped. While he gets soaked, the cargo doesn’t. He stops in front of
a tiled cottage from where a lady emerges with an umbrella, takes her bread –
the precious cargo – smiles at the podder
and rushes back. A little ahead, near a small rivulet, there’s a football in a
puddle and two boys around it. But they don’t go for the football; they stomp
the puddle instead.
We were ambling along on our regular weekend
potter, this time headed for what could be a diminishing national treasure – the
countryside tavern. For long we missed this; the banter at the bar, the best
eats, and feni drunk in quarters and halves; pegs are for the sissies. However,
to get to the bars of Curtorim, you must undertake the journey of listening to the
stories that lie in each field and home. Much of Curtorim’s history has been
shaped in its taverns and its Church square with a football field and a lake.
And on summer afternoons, just a tad before sunset, there’s a divinity frozen
each day when the reflection of the Church and the field with a football game
falls in the water of the lake. Goa as it once was. Goa as we hope it always
will be.
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The road from Raia is full of stories. Rumour has
it that on some rainy and wintry nights, just after a little cross on the field
on the village road to Curtorim, there’s a “spirit” who waits. Many in
their seventies and eighties have “confirmed” that the tale is not
without basis and the “lady” has been seen in white on occasions. A
similar tale hangs on the Raia-Margao road just before where the Sonsoddo dump
is. In the late fifties, walking and cycling that road was common in the
absence of any other transport. Often at night, walkers used to see a man bent
over with a heavy load, trudging alone. There is a tale that for close to
twenty years, the man was seen walking exactly in the same manner on the same
road in the same clothes. Ask the learned in those parts and the story shall be
“confirmed”.
On drives to Curtorim, these stories are always
repeated and when you pass these places, you sometimes duck, in mock
trepidation that the lady at the cross or the hunchback of Raia, like the
hunchback of Notre Dame, will emerge. (Well, let’s confess, sometimes the fear
is real.)
But here’s to happier times, at a bar called
Lenny’s in the heart of Curtorim. Milagres and his wife Bhushaan decided to
extend their parents’ (Leonilda and Nicolau) passion of cooking and
feeding by converting a portion of their outhouse into a comfort zone of
friendship and chatter with easily – and we say this with the responsibility of
the nation in mind – the best Goan food in miles. The piece de resistance is a
dish called Ozri – a portion of the stomach spiced to perfection
that melts. A big hot pao is perfect
with it. We demolished four plates of beef ozri (the pork version was over for
the day). The squid chilly fry was fresh and so was tongue chilly. The feni,
needless to add, was the freshest and yours truly had it his way. Add a dash of
soda and limca, smear salt around the rim and dip a slit chilly for exactly six
seconds and out. And then sit back and fix all the problems of Goa and the
world as the evening wears on. Everything from Modi’s governance till 2019, the
accent of the Brits who have joined the ISIS and become Britain’s most deadly
export and other issues of greater international interest in Curtorim like the
latest gram sabha resolution are deliberated with due seriousness.
In the middle of it all, you’ll find a regular
fighting with another regular after two feni shots, till banter becomes anger and
they leave, only to miss each other by next evening and converge and fight and
leave again.
As we drove back in the inky night and the rain and
bravely passed that cross – and we didn’t see the lady, we realised yet again
that the Lord up there liked a few of us and made us be born, bred or sent in
mid-life to be in a place chosen by HIM. In times of
anger, greed, frustration, let’s step back and absorb this. Let’s never lose
this.
As my most beloved and favourite writer, Bill
Bryson, says about patches of the British country side, “And this isn’t even famous,
it’s just another magical corner of Britain. Because you’ve had this for a very
long time, there’s a tendency to regard it as permanent and fixed, but it’s
not. You don’t want it to get diminished in any way.” Goa is the same.
