It's not often that you find your wife yelling at you for getting into a 6 ft deep ditch to look for one of your slippers, especially when the truth is that merely a second ago, your head hit the ground and you have just started coming to terms with the fact that you have fallen in a ditch perfectly camouflaged with some shrubbery on your way to answer the nature's call.
Your efforts at finding that elusive slipper are only representative of the defense mechanism that has kicked in upon realization of the free fall and not knowing what to do next. You have no clue as to how to explain that though, not to your yelling yet concerned wife, and definitely not to her brother (and his fiance, for extra comfort) who can't make up his mind about what to do first...try to help you out of the ditch or feel amused about the entire situation.
It is also not often that you spend the new year's eve at one of the coolest hangouts in town, an open air club on a hill playing some absolutely fantastic music to an absolutely awesome crowd in a setting that's replete with fireworks, drunk people dancing in the swimming pool (and everywhere else), and absolute strangers wishing you a happy new year (and getting a back-handed push and shove in return).
So yes, you may come back to me and say that you have been there and done that but I am sure you won't have too much to say when I tell you that post this party, you may stand to lose keys to your little rented villa where you had planned to continue the celebrations with some good old Punjabi music and Maggi. Your tongue is likely to be tied even more as you realize that at 4 AM on January 1st, there is hardly any chance of encountering the stray key-maker roaming on the streets or expecting help from the otherwise lovely, nail-clawing, and suspiciously paranoid facilities manager of the villa society.
And God help your chances of speaking ever again as I tell you that not only were we not fortuitous enough for all this, we had to spend six hours sleeping on the villa's tiny little gym's floor, all dressed in our new year party finery...and oh yes, with the Villa's entirely unhelpful guard commenting on our bad luck on the first day of the year, if only to help us see the much obfuscated obvious.
I can almost smile benignly at your slow nodding of the head when you hear of the little spats we had with the local taxi mafia...I know, happens everywhere right, all these tourist places have gone to the dogs, you say! That they have, and spats we did have...some mildly irritating and others almost life-threatening but all part of the game.
It's just that these little spats assume those gigantic proportions in your mind, inching towards top of the mental billboard when they follow something even more interesting that happened just a couple of hours ago. What can be more interesting than a few North Indians getting potentially beaten up by locals, you ask? Well, not much...just that half of the shack we were sitting in got engulfed in fire within minutes and the doped staff and perennially semi-naked firang hut-dwellers started throwing water on open electric wires jutting out from all corners (thankfully, after the fire was doused by some by-standers throwing sand over it).
Well, that's Goa for you!
And oh, we had fun on the beaches too, the complete Christmas-New Year-Goa treatment with foot massages on sun beds, sun sets...one more bewitching than the other, waiting for hours for food, watching waves crash against your table laid out at the beach, guitar next to the roaring sea under the moon, and the occasional hijacking of the DJ at a beach shack party.
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