Some villages are different

Panjim: This city by the awe-inspiring Mandovi River is probably the nicest capital city in India. Laid back but alert; somewhat sleepy but wide awake in terms of its splendid roads and its tasteful buildings, decked up in lights at night and by day resplendent with gorgeous colours, Panjim is unrivaled in its big city pretensions and its small town ways.

It feels like an India that should have been but got lost somewhere in the transition to modernity. If all Indian cities even came close to the languorous beauty of Panjim, our country would be a blessed place.

And just imagine: to many Goans, this restful capital is the big, bad and stressful place. So in what havens do they live? For one thing there’s Uccasaim, a small village that is less than 10 minutes away from the National Highway 17 that crosses nearly 150 miles of Goa from north to south on its way from Bombay to Kerala. It’s a bustling road but just a couple of kilometres away, past the white majesty of St Jerome’s Church, close to where we live, you may as well be in the capital of quiet.

I know this for a fact because some of our friends driving to our place one evening simply followed the music that emanated from our house. And it wasn’t played at an elevated volume either. At its medium setting, our friends heard our Beatles CD all the way at the turnoff near the church, a few minutes drive from The Uccasaim House, which is what we have christened our home in the village.

Our village is so small, nestled between paddy fields and a picturesque hill that it does not show up even on a local map of the Goa. And yet, we can drive from our house to the outskirts of Bombay in eight hours. St Jerome’s Church is the centre of our village.

Of an evening, just outside the church, residents gather at the plaza, which has a sweeping view of the paddy fields and the unnamed river in the distance. There they while away the evening with a snifter or two of feni, the deadly local brew that’s made from the cashew fruit, as they watch young people play volleyball in the church
compound and talk about things that I would dearly like to know about.

For us, as we flit in and out of the village perhaps half a dozen times a year, it is a bucolic tableau. We don’t participate in it but simply in observing it and waving to the people as we drive past the plaza in and out of our house, we feel part of it. In a vicarious sort of way, we feel we belong there. That is the attraction of Goa. True, its beaches and hills and rivers are breathtakingly beautiful; but then I’m sure there are similar landscapes elsewhere in India.

The difference is Goa gives you a sense of belonging. It’s my village; my gorgeous church; my small but tasteful temple that plays bhajans in classical form each morning. And the residents of the village keep the village clean; run good schools and take good roads, water and sanitation for granted. Most can read and write and above all, regardless of their socioeconomic status, live their lives with dignity.

It’s been six years since we moved into The Uccasaim House. One of these days, I say to myself, I will also walk down to the plaza of an evening and there share experiences with my neighbours. I feel I belong and I must get the village to accept me. I don’t want to be an absentee landlord but a member of the community, who also has a house in Delhi.

One of these days, I say to myself, I will come to The Uccasaim House and there, away from the hustle and bustle of the newly energetic India, I could write novels and poetry and read books and listen to music with only the church bell, the temple’s ragas, the birdsongs and the hoot of the bread man’s bicycle horn at dawn and at dusk to distract me.

This is the dream that every urban Indian has... the back to nature dream. Except that in most parts of India, the village experience is filth, disease, violence and oppression. Not in Goa. Here the villages are truly communities, where the communidades (panchayats) are a positive force. In Uccasaim, we have no festering garbage dumps or open sewers. Water is no problem. There is a home for the aged. There is no police force because there’s no crime.

The Uccasaim House is our retreat from the exciting new world of India. It is many ways like Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, where “I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature.”

Email: rdesai@comma.in