The artist couple arrived on the dot of nine as they promised they would. It didn’t matter that it was Diwali eve or that it was pouring or they were on a two-wheeler. The irritating plangent of the hotel room bell suddenly took on a dulcet charm as I imagined Mira to be pressing it. Her partner, the famous mural painter Tutti, always walked a step or two behind her languidly, his gaze shiftless over the sky and the sea but settling with fixation on her shapely buttocks. She walked on oblivious, almost with conation, as if the sea was always her destination. From under the shack where I sat I watched her too.
‘Do you guys swing?’ She had sent me a text after we exchanged numbers. Tutti had gone to get port wine and my friend was floating, blissfully inebriated.
***
Welcome to the shack life
We were on our third beach during our Goa road trip and passed through the restaurant access where some of the staff sat in various stages of wakefulness. Probably the hard year that had gone by there was an indifference to their facial contours – our smiles were replied with nods dripping with aporia. After a hearty breakfast of eggs, bacon and sausages, something which will never go wrong in Goa or anywhere else for that matter, a spread you can trust more than the indigenous Xacuti or Cafreal preparations for being uniformly tasteful, we trundled with our day bags across the sand towards our shack. The slippery foam mattresses were placed over the wooden frames and I tilted mine up to continue with the Bruce Chatwin: Francisco Manoel, the child, was caught in the fierce drought where ‘the sun quivered in a blue metal sky and the mud cracked’ which was to shape his own destiny. The trinket sellers with dried skin and chapped lips, with their own tales of woeful survival, just seemed to walk out of a different landscape of Sertao, the dry cattle country of northeast Brazil.
From Anita, who spoke faltering English with swag, we bought chunky lapis lazuli neck pieces, anklets with metallic dragonflies and a leather bracelet. She wanted us to buy more, of course, as times were bad. Then I have never heard these seaside entrepreneurs say otherwise which is alright too. My banker friend gracefully desisted from exercising her innate bargaining skills; I have seen her make shopkeepers plead tearfully for some profit as they had a family to feed.
Anita with her newfound brother
“You are my brother,” Anita declared, a joyful anagnorisis, before sauntering with her wares towards the next shack. My friend sniggered, proclaiming it was a pre-empting of sorts. “I will come for you tomorrow with new things,” she continued, fading with the waves which became louder with approaching noon. “Till then don’t buy from anybody else, ok my brother?”
Flags marked empty equidistant points which were supposed to be manned by lifeguards. Instead an old red jeep, a retired beauty but still a terraqueous marvel, with a speaker system fitted on the hood, sputtered across the sand with a sole driver whose eyes roved vigilant over the water. Along a stretch of the beach removed from tourists a clump of fishermen stood hovering over a modest library of catch, low voices signalling resignation. So much labour come to nought – I remembered going out to sea with some fisher folk I had befriended in Kerala some years ago. We headed out at night, parked our boats across each other, lit up the area to boggle the fish into believing the sun was up. A practice with lasting consequences but they were understandably desperate.
The pocket flask of whiskey I had polished off a while ago might have created some spatial misrepresentations – the rock formations jutting out of the water like a pair of conjoined sea leprechauns towards which I was making a beeline for seemed to be slipping further away with every bend of the beach. The drunkenness, instead of dragging me, lent me a legerity. Or it might have been the sea air. I saw some logs on which boats were parked, long sturdy ones darkened by oil spill from the engine. I picked one and did bicep curls. Joggers and dog walkers, ball players and hungover tourists went by without a second glance; after all, Goa was a living trance and every eccentricity came with its own haecceity. Days were devised to go by in a daze, nights designed to make you never die.
All you need
My friend impatiently awaited my return, reading, dozing and reading again. She wanted to go for a swim. It was my turn to keep an eye on the belongings and wait now. I opened my book. Francisco’s bitter and recently-widowed mother was being serviced by a wandering half-breed Indian on a hammock. I poured myself some wine left from our lunch of barbecued chicken and fish and potato wedges and lit up. That was when I saw Mira in the adjacent shack and Tutti’s lanky legs gadding away. I offered her a cigarette which she took.
She stood in a funky sky blue bikini with frills that fell like hastily pulled curtains over her shapely breasts, smooth curves strung at the hip, a walking, breathing chapter off a grimoire. After lighting up, Mira walked around the shack with a terpsichorean gait brushing off the sand from the cot with a tee shirt. Her upward slanting glasses magnified the duende that fiercely shone from her eyes, nodding her head sometimes to convey registration or impression. She fiddled with her phone noting my number. I reeled off my accomplishments till date and passed off some dreams as on the verge of realisation.
The only red
They were artists on work cum holiday. Tutti got commissions because he was famous; Mira was apprentice, she filled the colours to his outlines. She was in awe of Tutti whom I spoke with later. A warm guy with a laugh ready for all kind of jokes. Once a year he would shave his head as well as his beard, the rest of the time it grew unhindered, unkempt, the saltwater only serving to frazzle it further. An irenic mien, he spoke in staccato bursts of just-found inspiration and then resumed laughing. I introduced my friend to the couple, a boisterous bonhomie ensued. At dusk, we parted promising to catch up again; they would be around for some months.
At the hotel, I saw that she had texted me already. When I replied that I wasn’t sure about my friend, Mira said they were alright if it was just me.
***
Citizen Shack
I opened the door and they walked in. Tutti rolled joints with practised ease, the laughter gurgling always somewhere inside his throat. My friend poured everyone rum and cola. Mira stood with me as we watched lightning slash the sky in zigzag patterns just like in the comic books. Thunder rolled sounding like drumbeats. Diwali was next day and Narkasurs stood unrelenting, flexing muscles. They stuck their tongues out at the virtuous puny men who held their fate in store, like they knew what was coming.
The night looked eventful.
