Part 1: Written – 09 March 2012, sitting on the
pavement near a street café in Panjim
Sitting on the sidewalk,
reading my newspaper and slowly watching the city come to life is like watching
it wake up from a dream.
Goa has colorful people; at
least they seem so as they go about their daily, regular lives. Their
regularity today is my irregularity. This is a place I have never known before,
simply because I’ve never been here, in all these thirty years that I have been
alive. I was half expecting to see ‘different’ people in this ‘different’ place
– as the picture that I had conjured up in my head. Now as I sit and observe
these people, sitting on the steps in front of a shop door on the pavement, I
see that my Friday is somewhat different from all my other Fridays. I see old
gentlemen, old dogs, young people and aliens. I was dazed when I crawled out of
my bus in the morning. Smoking a cigarette, I walked about in the streets; watching
a different morning in a different place.
I was thinking Goa like the
way I had been conditioned to think Goa. And as I sit here, scribbling in my
notebook, I can see the glances that a few curious passersby are turning on me.
Some writer, perhaps…seeking himself,
or something they wouldn’t know, or perhaps wouldn’t want to know. I have been
comfortably sitting on these steps for over an hour now, reading through my
paper. Over the course of time, one young boy borrowed two sheets from my
notebook, a young man asked me for the ‘classifieds’ page and just now another
guy joined me on the steps with a newspaper of his own. To my side is the café
where I had had my breakfast, about an hour back. Its doorway serves as
somewhat of a discussion center – old chaps discussing things animatedly, and
then moving on to their daily lives.
It all sometimes seems strange
– how so many things seem to change when regular life situations change. In
Bangalore, my mornings are frenetic and confusing; and then they segue into a
routine work day. But today, it isn't…
Picture perfect: QT Luong/ www.terragalleria.com
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