The collection
Konkan coast · Four hundred and fifty years of somewhere else
The tide goes out a hundred metres and leaves sand hard enough to cycle on. The boats sit down on their sides, a man walks up from them with a bucket of what he caught before light and will have sold by nine, and by noon the heat has stopped everything — which here is a discipline rather than a lapse. Then the bells at six, then the feni, then the sea again.
Goa spent four and a half centuries not being India, and it has not entirely finished. The Portuguese arrived in 1510 and left in 1961, and what they left is not a monument quarter but a way the whole place is put together: whitewashed churches at the top of every rise, houses painted indigo and ochre with oyster-shell windows and a chapel in the front room, a language of the kitchen in which vinegar and chilli and pork all belong together. The coast is a hundred kilometres of it. The north is the loud half and has been since the sixties. The south is the other one — Salcete, where the rice paddies run to within a field of the sand, the Sal river comes down through the mangroves to meet the Arabian Sea at Mobor, and the beach in front of you is long enough that the next person on it is a rumour.
The one great church here left unplastered — bare laterite going red-brown in the rain while everything around it stays white. Inside, high on the right, a silver casket on marble, brought down for public view about once a decade.
Laterite walls on the headland where the Mandovi meets the sea, built around a spring that watered the Portuguese fleet. The lighthouse above still turns, and the bastion holds the whole northern beach line in one look.
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Mobor, Cavelossim
The end of the peninsula, all 49 acres of it, with the sea on one side and the river on the other.
In the Ponda hills, where the deities were carried inland to escape the Inquisition and never went back. A white seven-tiered lamp tower stands in the courtyard and the temple tank sits below it in the trees.
The Mandovi comes off the edge of the Ghats in white stages, and a railway line crosses the rock face halfway down. In the weeks after the monsoon you hear it a long time before the trees open.
The southern headland, fortified long before the Portuguese took it and half-ruined ever since. Through the gate there is grass, a chapel still in use, and a drop straight into open sea.
One crescent in Canacona, closed at both ends by wooded headlands, with a rock island you can walk to when the tide is out. The water is shallow enough that the boats sit still on it.
Calwaddo, Benaulim
A beachfront resort at Benaulim, South Goa, on 56 acres between the Arabian Sea and a village of garden villas — 19 room grades, 5 restaurants and a helipad on its own stretch of sand.
A short list of extraordinary places to stay.
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