We were lucky to be staying at the Goa Port Trust Guest House – for the view alone. Our rooms overlooked the entire harbor at Vasco. Every evening, when we were done with sightseeing and excellent dinner at the Guest House’s dining room, I would settle into a bucket-shaped swing chair in the balcony and sketch the view in the balmy sea breeze. When it got dark, the lights would come on, and you could fool yourself as being in a fantastic movie. I pretended we were an alien spaceship that had landed on this tropical paradise that was strung with fairy lights, and promised many treasures in the form of fauna and flora. It was the anticipation itself that made this thought exciting. At least, that was what I liked to imagine then.
The modern ivory colored Guest House bungalow, with its tinted windows and wide lawns, stood atop a hill and I could look for miles into the horizon, and point out the various shades of blue the waters took. The bay I gazed over was curved, like a ‘c’, and beyond this there was a similar ‘c’ that peeped out. And beyond that, another one. It seemed as though someone had munched around a gigantic cookie, and then set it adrift in the ocean. But Goa is not an island.
The state of Goa is a tiny triangle cutting into the larger state of Maharashtra, that is globally known for its film industry ‘Bollywood’, and by its state capital Bombay, now Mumbai. The ‘islands’ of Goa are really bits of mainland intricately traversed by the Zoari and Mandovi rivers, that flow past Panaji, Goa’s state capital. The Terekhol river separates Goa in the north from Maharashtra. To its east lie a range of mountains called the Western Ghats that ensure Goa’s coastal climate by blocking the Southwest Monsoon. To its west lies the Arabian Sea that brings the monsoon to Goa.
With an area of 3,702 sq. km., Goa is the smallest state in India, and it lies on the western coast of the Indian Peninsula. Its size, and reputation for romance (‘The Golden Beaches of Goa!’, ‘Come to Golden Goa!’, ‘Sunshine and Song!’, cried its tourist brochures) made it seem bewitching.
Perched safely upon the Guest House verandah in my cane chair, out of reach of the pounding surf below, it was tempting to get lulled to sleep. The rhythmic crash of the waves and the warm sea breezes felt like a balm. The wind was strong up here, and it carried snatches of Goan songs and guitars from the houses built on the lower ledges of the hill. A few employees of the Goa Port Trust lived there. In the mornings, they would climb up the steps cut into the hill and make their way to the road above, in their dark pants and knee length dresses and cheerful sarees, carrying their lunches in shoulder bags. They seemed happy and content. If they didn’t have a smile on their faces, the shadow of one lingered near their lips. Their radios played on in the evenings, occasionally broken by the sound of high busy beeps from tiny fishing boats and pint-sized trawlers and the low bass hoots of the big giants. On my second night in the verandah, I noted that it was 9 p.m. and the ships were still working at transferring loads.
I wasn’t always by myself on the verandah. My sister amused me a great deal, unconsciously, and she enjoyed the view and the sound of the waving coconut palms as much as I did. Fresh from a school skit, at 13, dialogues came easily to her.
“Goa harbor…what an entrancing sight!” she exclaimed dramatically, one hand up in the air and another upon her heart. Her audible and long-drawn sigh at the end of this statement made me smile widely.
I couldn’t resist her sunny nature and good humor, and I used to look forward to unwinding on the verandah together. She would count the ships every morning and evening and make her observations about their movements. She noticed that the one we’d spotted yesterday had moved out to drop anchor just outside the harbor precincts.
My handbook told me that after tourism, Goa’s next strength is trade. Iron ore is slushed in gigantic pipes from Kudremukh (so called because the mountain there seemed like a horse’s face) in South Canara district (Karnataka state, south of Goa), to Mangalore (also in Karnataka) by the sheer force of gravity alone. It is thereafter pumped to Vasco where it is loaded on ships to Japan and elsewhere.
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