Week 01

Leaving (00:00 - 4th March)

I close my suitcase and stretch out on the couch for a smoke. In excess: black pens; in deficit: socks and a paper to present. A sentence lingers in my ear as I look around and absorb all the familiar things in my living room…

“I wish I’d met you at a different time”

After a while I go to bed. I wake up at 5.30 dreaming that the alarm on my cell had gone off. It vibrated, oozed a tune and a strange image of bees hovering around a cane plantation appeared on the screen. My cell doesn’t do that at all. I go back to sleep and wake up a couple of hours later to the regular alarm routine.

Nothing remarkable during the Porto-London trip. At Heathrow, waiting in the lounge, I wish I had welded back together and brought with me my lucky Ganesh.

The flight to Delhi is packed with British teenagers in some kind of an excursion. The girl behind me keeps banging on the electronic devices behind my chair including the touch-screen technology screen. All of them are very excited and they keep harassing the plane’s crew with trivial matters…

I start up a chat with my neighbours, a middle-aged Indian couple: “So, are you going for holidays or coming from holidays?” The talk is relaxed and courteous. The British teenagers are boisterous and rude throughout the whole flight.

Eventually, we cross the Pamir range…like a tense feline being, striped in white and sandstone, it awaits the moment to spring forth and attack.

JNU - Delhi (5th -7th March)

We stay at the Nehru Institute for Advanced Studies but it might as well be called the Nehru Institute for Lost Studies. There is nothing advanced about the place…The forlorn building lies in one of the remotest areas of the JNU jungle-campus. The nearest spot to buy a water bottle and make an ISD phone call is a 15 minute walk through shortcut paths. The building itself has an antique and almost abandoned ambience…but on the good side: since few people ever come here, there are a lot of peacocks around. At night, as I lay awake in bed, their exotic callings naturally bring flying in images of Mughal gardens and courtyards.

7 or 8 Portuguese come together for this academic happening. At night, when conversation gets more informal, most of them share their experiences and hardships regarding their stay. Ancient clichés are recycled in forever novel and exotic ways. I imagine the captains or fidalgos of the 16th century complaining about mosquitoes, spicy foods / loose motions, the caste system and the overall unhygienic sphere of India. One notable comment by one of the party: “Até os pretos em Moçamique consideravam os Indianos porcos”.

The closing dinner (18:30 - 22:30, 7th March)

I inform PVG that there is beer under the table. As an eternal sceptical, he doesn’t believe me. The closing dinner is held in a tent structure just outside the Advanced Studies Institute. Now, these noble academic functions, if they happen to include more than one or two Europeans, are a good excuse for the Indian side to build up an alcohol providing infrastructure, i.e. bar. With a sparkle in their eyes, the staff and waiters mount the drinks table, taking out the kingfishers from their cardboard boxes (which I had sensed earlier on); exposing, with a proud and mischievous smile, a few whisky, vodka and gin bottles; producing three or four types of glasses and, yes, managing some drinkable ice.

Our hosts make it a point to guide us to the bar one by one, not noticing that most of us already have a glass in our hands. The three hours or so of open bar witnessed the peak in attendance of the whole seminar affair. A whole entourage of university staff, students and staff and students’ relatives crowd in the tent outside the Advance Studies Institute.

By ten o’clock, the alcohol is finished and naturally, a minority of eager Indian academicians gulped down the hard stuff…

Delhi-Goa flight (8th March)

The plane has many empty seats and our stop in Mumbai provides for a spectacular view of the slums all around Andheri.

Behind me are a young couple with a son of about 5 and also one of the parents’ brothers or sisters with partner. It is strange how they all four of them adulate the boy, giggling and praising every single silliness or misdeed the boy proudly does. This adulation makes me nauseous, especially when the boy climbs up from the back of my seat and starts stepping on my shoulders. The parents do nothing but giggle and praise his climbing abilities.

I don’t get it. What is the use of all this? Will these same parents pressure the kid to do well in college? If so, will he succeed after so many years of pampering? Will there be a rupture point through which the parents switch from pampering into scolding and pressuring?

One thing is for sure: this boy will be as sure of himself as…India’s economy.

Arriving in Goa

Arriving in Goa was, as expected, an emotional occasion.

Arriving at Ernesto’s

Arriving at Ernesto’s was delightful. I came around 8:30 and he was sitting in a huge couch, at one end of the room, playing videogames in a big plasma screen. Ivo’s painting on the wall, a couple of tables occupied by Goan gents, the overall shabby appearance of wire and fans and informal management…and oh, but the ice-cold beer! Ernesto is moving in to Fontainhas, where he has bought a big house to be converted into a restaurant.

VM arrives for dinner – soon afterwards he goes back to work.

Arriving in Old Goa (9th March)

Arriving at Old Goa was strange…after the Augustinian convent, I went to Our Lady of the Mount and then to Sé and then just drove around in the Kinetic. I am very pessimistic about the future of this place. So I decide that, when I meet the ASI family, I will speak my mind no matter of the consequences.