Goa Shmoa

It’s been four days since I returned from Goa and I’ve been waiting to pine for it, to crave for its sizzling sands and expensive coconut juice but the feeling is yet to come. I woke up around 3 pm on Sunday aching all over. The room was just as I’d left it a week ago, bed sheets kissing the floor and curtains half open.  By the time I got down to some grub, the magnanimity of the situation still hadn’t hit me – I’d just been on my first week-long Goa trip with my best friends! (like Vegas is to Americans) It’s a vairrrry big deal. I should be moping around with glazed eyes and no appetite. I should be texting my companions non-stop to see if they’re awake and indulging in group mourning and reminiscing.

A couple of hours later, a really close family friend lost his battle with cancer. As the cliché goes, the old man had lived a clean life, you couldn’t point a finger at that upstanding citizen and you’d have to dig real deep to find any chinks in his character. He’d lived as honest a lifetime as is possible and yet had been struck down by cancer. Sure, he was diagnosed pretty late, when he was beyond saving and yes he’d been reduced to a piteous skeletal hermit in the past few months but no one expected him to go on a peaceful Sunday evening. I can’t say I was exactly close to him, he was never much of a talker. Selfish as I sound, the passing away of that old man took away whatever little was left of the post-vacation blues. I am in no way belittling the grief his family is now in, just putting into context his demise with my existence since that is the only perspective on offer to you here.

In the meantime my friend Radhika Mohandas got around to uploading our Goa pictures http://www.facebook.com/media/set/fbx/?set=a.10150557058455274.652117.568270273, but the whole thing seems too distant now, like I’d worn a permanently happy mask for the week that I was there. Goa was a drug, it was the perfect vacation, the getaway I needed and had earned after an exhausting graduation year. Even as the train left Mumbai behind, the rose-tinted glasses were coming into place. Goa surpassed all expectations; it was exactly how everyone had said it would be. You aren’t just in another land, but another state of mind. Something about the geography of that place soothes you and quietly packs away all your worries to some distant corner of your brain where they’ll stay until you’re back home. It doesn’t matter how uptight you are, in Goa you’ll be trippy to say the least, going with the flow and letting loose, the place will compel you to concentrate on one thing – having fun.

For me, the only relics of Goa are the Facebook album and a sore back that came from colliding with sand too hard. My back isn’t tomato red anymore, but healing slowly and peeling away at snail’s pace, it’s like my shoulders are slowly exfoliating and I can’t help picking away at the dead skin just to know what it feels like to be an onion.     

I’m going to remember Goa as one of my best vacations ever, it’s going to difficult do any better, not for lack of trying though. I just wish there was time to gloss over it, to laugh over our shenanigans there, to respond to a life-changing experience as normal people do. The welcome back has just been too harsh.