Goa

I should write about our recent trip to India before the colors fade and I start to forget. What can I remember: Bookstores alive and well. People reading books, not tablets, in the corners. Squeezing 7 people (bottom layer of 2 adults + Luke, top layer of Maeve, Olive, and 2 cousins) into a rickshaw in Mumbai to go to the cinema. Watching Life of Pi in 3-D. The suitcase with Christmas presents going AWOL for 2 days. 16 hours of self-induced semi-hibernation on the bus ride to Goa to cope with car sickness. Very tall and stately trees. Happily eating paneer every day for 12 days (on my own volition). Milk coffee and porridge at the Tibetan Café. Nursing masala chai and avocado lassi at Sunitas slowly enough to read (but not reply to) my emails on my phone with their free WiFi. The vast amounts of time one finds in a day when you don't have easy access to the internet. The little Hindi and Christian shrines scattered all about.

 Needing a motorbike to get beyond Vagator. Having no interest in learning to ride one. Riding behind Ross with the girls (one girl at a time) through the Goan countryside (all over India, if you ask Olive). Cows on the beach. Cows on the road. A baby cow stealing a mango from my beach bag. The gigantic Banyan tree, so majestic that surely there were legends about it. (It’s more likely people just got high there, according to Ross.) How black the soles of the kids’ feet were when they fell asleep. Mornings reading on sunbeds at the beach. The toxic, over-chlorinated pool where the kids splashed away for hours in the afternoon. Wishing I knew more about Hindu mythology. The Rainbow Secondhand Bookshop in Chapora. St. Francis Xavier’s remains in the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Old Goa. The face of Shiva carved on a rock on the beach. Wanting to buy Ross a Nataraja for Christmas but not finding one. Buying Ross Rabindranath Tagore’s collected works for Christmas and wondering whether he’ll ever read it. Hating haggling for prices. Trying to find the midnight Mass on Christmas Eve and getting lost. The colors and scents of the Wednesday Anjuna Market. Ross and I being accosted by ear-cleaners. Both of us utterly convinced that we could hear so much better afterwards! The 23-year old Delhi rape victim succumbing to her injuries on 28 December. The editorials and TV news coverage of this case. Falling asleep while reading random passages from the Bible (placed by the Gideons) most nights, and the vivid dreams they gave me. How two and a half weeks can be so long and so short at the same time. Watching the countryside zoom past on the train from Goa back to Mumbai. Wishing I had more than my iPhone camera to take pictures with. The young men who graciously swapped seats so that all 14 of our group could sit together. Wondering where my Indian sister-in-law finds the energy and patience to take care of everyone all the time. The train breaking down in the middle of nowhere and the panic about missing our flights home. Ross so desperate to get his mind off our flights that he takes the book I’m in the middle of (William Darymple's book "Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India") and starts reading. Ross liking a book I like (a first). Hundreds of homeless people sleeping in the train station. Making it to the airport by the skin of our teeth. How clean, orderly, and sterile Zürich seems after the exotic chaos of India.

Maeve and cow on the beach

St Francis Xavier

best seat in the house (wonderful!)