8.30 am: A middle-aged girl parks her yellow scooter and unlocks the door. Her hair is a tangled mess and her shorts are thread-worn. This messy girl is me and though I may look like I have been dragged through a hurricane, I am happy as a lark because I am in my beloved Goa.  

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Feeling sprightly after my yoga class, I bang on various doors and wake up my mother, my sister and all our children who have come to spend a few days with me, wait for everyone to get ready and set off for breakfast at our favourite place. 

10 am: The owner, a bespectacled gentleman that I have known for over two decades, comes over with crispy poi. When I tell him how glad I am to be back, away from concretised Bombay, he says, ‘Goa is changing, soon you will only see buildings and factories and not trees, because now no need to get permission from forest department to cut coconut trees down.’  

He is right. The coconut tree is no longer defined as a tree because the government claims that a tree is a plant with a trunk and branches  —  a coconut palm does not fit into this criteria as it has no branches.  

A piece of logic that can cause severe concussion if you think about it for more than 10 seconds.  

I wonder if Goa — a place where the coconut tree is so integral to its culture that there are 50 words to describe it in Konkani — can ever be the same without its green, swaying palms.  

10.30 am: As we are about to wrap up our meal, a bickering match starts; because which family can sit together for a whole hour without a few Diwali crackers exploding sporadically? This argument is about our plan-of-action for the day. 

My sister wants to drive all the way to Ashvem beach, but I want to go somewhere close by. 

In my opinion, distance does not make the heart fonder; it just makes people cramped in a stuffy car want to stab each other in the heart instead. So we finally decide that we should go to Vagator beach, just a few kilometers away. 

11 am: The last time we came to this beach, we ignored a pile of clothes lying in a heap next to us, settled down and were in the midst of building a sandcastle when we looked at the ocean in front of us. A bunch of men, like beached walruses, emerged from the water and started walking straight towards us. 

We realised that the heaped clothes belonged to this group of rotund gentlemen who had been swimming in their rather skimpy underwear. After hemming and hawing around their belongings and generously splattering the beach with their saliva repeatedly, they decided to play a game of vigorous flesh-smacking flesh kabaddi.  

By which point, all the women sitting on the beach desperately tried to blind themselves by throwing sand in their eyes in order to protect their minds from a lifetime of recalling this abominable sight.  

Nothing as memorable happens today and we just bake in the sun for a few hours. 

2 pm: We meet an old friend for lunch and as I am gorging on the fish thali, I gaze across the table at a rather odd girl accompanying our friend. This girl has eaten three bowls of crab xacuti and mountains of French fries, but has a stomach flatter than Baba Ramdev’s. I immediately ask her how she manages to eat like a rakshas and still look like  an apsara.  

She replies with a Southern twang, ‘I like, you know, rave.’ My new raver friend generously discloses that the reason behind her racing metabolism lies in the fact that she dances for eight hours a night at least four times a week.  

When my sister starts complimenting her for putting as much effort into her body as Olympic champions and asks her if she takes any supplements to help with her stamina, I knock her on the head and whisper, ‘It’s probably drugs, you fool. And not the kind you buy at the pharmacy.’ And with a mortified expression, sister dear shuts up and focuses on counting the fish bones on her plate. 

Our old friend, on the other hand, who after winning a bout with a terrible disease moved to Goa, is looking splendid and on questioning, she says that the leisurely pace here and all the green tranquility has saved her sanity. 

6 pm: As I float on my back, the water fills my ears and muffles all the ambient sound and I look up at the cloudy sky, at my tiled roof with a monkey perched at one end and at the three coconut trees that grow just outside my fence and which may not exist the next time I come home. 

I think about the laid-back life here where everyone has the time to spare and a story to tell, where the only time I really look at my reflection is when I am adjusting the rear-view mirror on my scooter, a place where I feel completely at peace and I never want to leave. 

Because that’s what Goa does, it entangles you and makes you match its own deliberate pace. There is a drumbeat playing at some deep primeval level here that brings a serene clarity to your mind and slows down your racing heart. 

Even if you just come for a visit and then head back home, if you have let Goa do what it is truly meant to do, to alter you, just a tiny bit — then, at times, when you are stifled by the frenzied pace of your regular mundane life, you will recall the days of trapping golden sunlight in the pores of your skin, the salt in your hair from the hazy blue sea, the burning red of the recheado mackerel blazing in your mouth, of the colors and flavours of your sojourn down dusty Goan lanes lined with swaying coconut trees; and your cantering heart will slow down once again as you hear that ancient, unhurried drumbeat anew.